During its peak, DOGE cut about 5,000 public lands employees from federal agencies like the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and the National Park Service. Many consider this move — and others like it— an indication that the Trump administration is setting the stage to privatize America’s national parks. With a federal government determined to destroy as many public goods as possible, it’s clear we need an active resistance in Congress more than ever.
That’s why Sam Forstag, former smokejumper and union leader, is running for Congress in Montana’s first Congressional district. In his interview with Tim Dickinson, Forstag states his belief that housing, healthcare, and other necessities should be accessible for all working people. Moreover, Forstag reminders us that to build a large-tent coalition, we need to work with people who we do not 100% align with politically.
To learn more about Forstag’s campaign, click here.
Sam Forstag is running for U.S. Congress in Montana’s first Congressional district. Forstag is a smokejumper and union leader. He has been endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Tim Dickinson
I’m Tim Dickinson, a senior editor here at The Contrarian, and my guest today is Sam Forstag, a Democratic candidate for Montana’s 1st District for Congress. Sam, welcome.
Sam Forstag
Thank you for having me, Tim. Yeah, I appreciate you taking the time to have me on, yeah, here in western Montana, running for Montana’s 1st Congressional District, and excited to talk to you.
Tim Dickinson
Well, so introduce your district to us a little bit first, because you live in one of the world’s most spectacular places. You’ve got Kalispell, and Missoula, and Bozeman. Just tell us a little bit, for folks who aren’t familiar with that landscape, tell us a little bit about what makes it special.
Sam Forstag
Yeah, I’m in the most beautiful corner of the country here, in my humble opinion, Tim. It’s 150,000 square miles across western Montana. We’ve got Missoula, where I’m based here, Bozeman; Butte, the Gibraltar of Unionism, as some people might call it, Kalispell; and the Flathead Valley. We’ve got, you know, two sovereign nations here, the Blackfeet Nation and, the Flathead Reservation. And, yeah, it’s an incredible place to be driving around, it’s a lot of ground to cover in my old Toyota Camry, and it’s where I’ve been working for the last 8 years as a wildland firefighter or smokejumper.
Tim Dickinson
Yeah, and so your smoke jumping, I would imagine, gives you a really unique perspective on that landscape. Can you just tell us a little bit about your background and why this, you know, land of this district is special to you, for reasons that might not be obvious for most congressional candidates?
Sam Forstag
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, smokejumping has given me the opportunity to see a lot of this state from 3,000 feet. We, have a lot, you know, a lot of national forest land here, and I worked for the Forest Service until 4 months ago. So I did 4 years of wildland firefighting on engines, on hand crews across western Montana, across the western U.S. in the last 4 years. I’ve been working as a smokejumper. We parachute out airplanes to put out wildfires while they’re still small. And before you gotta bundle a whole lot of resources and personnel in there.
It’s the most incredible job I’ve ever had out of 20-some jobs, like a lot of millennials. I’ve had a whole lot of jobs just to get by, and it didn’t always pay the way it ought to, but what it did is it gave me the chance to see a whole lot of our public lands from an incredible vantage. And the chance to do something that… there are less and less job opportunities to do in this country right now, which is to work with your hands. in a way that you can really see the fruit of your labor, right? You can turn around after two weeks of swinging tools and running saws and say, well, that is our hand line, that’s the saw line we created, and that fire is done. It’s stopped. And I think the metaphors for what we’re dealing with right now in Washington are just endless.
Tim Dickinson
Well, so take me there. What is it about the moment that makes you want to leave behind a beautiful place like Missoula, Montana, and head to Washington, D.C?
Sam Forstag
Well, Tim, the last 2 years or so, I was serving as a vice president for my union’s local—so we’re the National Federation of Federal Employees. We cover about 800 Forest Service employees in Montana, and yeah, not news to you, I’m sure, with the DOGE cuts and all the rest, they just gutted a whole lot of our public land agencies. We lost just shy of a quarter of the Forest Service in Montana in one year, and the overwhelming majority of the people they fired in my agency, in our state, were people making less than $20 an hour.
I mean, we had, two Valentine’s Days ago, 360 Forest Service personnel fired in one day with no cause and no notice. 85% of them were GS-6s or below. That is $19.70 an hour or less, and there are lots of inefficiencies in the federal government. The inefficiencies are not the people, certainly not the people making 15 bucks an hour, swinging a tool in the woods to keep a trail clear, and when I reached out to Ryan Zinke, the Republican we’ve got sitting in the seat right now, over and over again, we got crickets, so I decided if they’re gonna come after my coworkers and my members’ jobs, I’m gonna come take his, and I think we got a pretty good chance of that.
Tim Dickinson
Montana politics and Montana in general, I found to be a really intriguing state, because it is a playground for billionaires, and you’ve got, you know, Gianforte and Steve Daines, who have tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to them. And then you’ve got working-class people who are really struggling to get by, and it’s a tale of contrast, and my understanding of your campaign is you’re hoping to lift up the working people in this district. So can you talk a little bit about the politics there, and what your progressive agenda, your populist agenda bring to the table?
Sam Forstag
Yeah, sure. I think a lot of what we are going through in western Montana is a microcosm of what’s going on across the West and really across the country. We are in the least affordable housing market in the country in Montana, and western Montana is the less affordable side of the state. This is where a lot of folks have discovered in the last 5 or 6 years, whether it was because of COVID or because of Yellowstone, people saw that there are beautiful landscapes and open areas that you can come in and buy land that used to be a whole lot cheaper than you could buy, you know, for prices in California or elsewhere.
And in places like Missoula, housing prices have doubled or more in 5 years. Places like Bozeman or the Flathead Valley, it’s tripled or quadrupled, depending where you are, in a period of 5 or 6 years. And meanwhile, wages just have not kept up. And that’s the story in a lot of this country. It’s just moving a whole lot faster here, and you could be over in Belgrade, just outside of Bozeman, here in the district, and you are within 50 miles of the Yellowstone Club, where every house there is worth multiple millions of dollars, and where you’re not even eligible for membership, unless you’re already a multi-millionaire. And you might still be making 15 bucks an hour building the damn houses that we are trying to build to keep up with this population boom.
That is not unique to us, it is just on overdrive, is what’s happening here. And so, when I looked around at the end of this last fire season. A lot of the people that I know, some of the folks I work with. They had stayed home the last election, or they’d swung to the right because they did not feel like their lives were getting any better, no matter who was running the show here. You know, at the end of 2024, I was making $19 an hour jumping out of airplanes for the Forest Service, and I’m 7 or 8 years in. I got people who are 20 years in to the same job, making the same wage, in a community here where you can’t find a house for less than a half million bucks.
The job of the governments here, in large part, is to make your life materially better when the market is not meeting a need, and government has been failing at that job, and so a lot of working people well, left the Democratic Party behind. And we now have schlubs in office who are tearing down what few public services and a lot of the systems that working people like me depended on, because they were able to harness that anger and then lie about all the things they do to actually fix the problems we’re all facing.
Tim Dickinson
You have the endorsement of Bernie Sanders and AOC, and that brings with it a certain cachet, but also a certain amount of… maybe preconception. I wonder, what can you tell me about your alignment with those politicians?
Sam Forstag
You know, I had the privilege of meeting these two way back in April of last year, at the peak of the DOGE cuts, when I had members like Kara down in the Bitterroot, who had lost their job 15 years into their federal service in one day, with no cause and no notice, because she just happened to have taken a lateral transfer so she could do more remote work while she’s going through chemotherapy, and nobody picking up the phone at the congressional level for us.
Well, those two flew out, and they had a tour stop here where they invited me to come speak on stage and talk about what it’s been like as a federal employee, while we are just being gutted by, quite literally, the richest man in the world. So I appreciate the hell out of their support, because they were willing to come stand with us when we were in need. But right now, the coalition I’m building, I would offer the coalition we should be building, if we want any hope of winning back the West, or rural America, it’s not just Bernie and AOC, it’s also over 30 Montana elected officials from both parties.
There’s 4 Republican legislators in this state, former Republican legislators endorsing this campaign. You know, some of them because they don’t see a lick of what they signed up for in the National Republican Party, or some of them because they have seen their lives get materially worse year over year, and they know the Republican Party at the National is not actually helping them right now. And, I think that’s what we need to get back to, because for all of the substantive, big policy changes we need, we also desperately need to remember how to talk past our differences as a country. And remember that, well, I actually hold a whole lot more in common with Michele Binkley, a Republican legislator in the Bitterroot Valley that I sat down with last week, than I do with Elon Musk, who’s the actual person making all of our lives worse right now.
Tim Dickinson
How do you then sort of… I mean, you’re going to need to win this Democratic primary, but you’re also going to need to appeal to the Ryan Zinke voter. And so, if you’re speaking, you know, and part of your getting through the Democratic ticket, right, is your sort of perception that you can communicate with that Republican swing voter, I guess. And so, can you talk to me a little bit about how you speak out to the people who are further to the right. When you’re sitting down with that person in the Bitterroot Valley, what are those conversations like, and where do you find common ground?
Sam Forstag
Yeah, when I sat down with Michele, what we talked about is that, well, she raised two sons and struggled to get by just 15 years ago, paying for them and paying their way and keeping a roof over their head, and Michele has worked as a waitress for a lot of the last 15 years in the Bitterroot Valley and watched her wages fall behind, and when she was at the legislature here in Montana, she was willing to stand up for things like Medicaid expansion in this state that a lot of poor and working people rely on, and just to get by, she was willing to stand up when I was working between fire seasons for a coalition of homeless shelters and vote for state support for those shelters when homelessness doubled or tripled in every city in this state, in large part because of our housing market.
And we were also able to talk about the fact that we do not agree on everything, and politics was never supposed to be a place where we have to agree on every single issue. If we’re gonna sit down and have a coffee or have a conversation, if that were the case, we would never get anything done. And right now, there’s a lot of people trying to make that the case, and now we’re not getting anything done at the federal level. And when nothing gets done, and we have these systems that are still broken, it’s actually working people that bear the brunt of that, because the wealthiest folks in this country and large corporations are able to fill every gap in that system and take advantage of it in ways that those of us who can’t afford a fancy accountant cannot.
Tim Dickinson
I hear that housing is sort of the primary issue, what is your policy prescription there?
Sam Forstag
I mean, we are in a full-blown crisis, at least here in western Montana, and if we’ve got a housing crisis, well, let’s deal with it like a damn crisis. And that means addressing it from both sides. We, I would offer, need to make federal investments that match the scale of what we’re facing here. We should be investing in programs like the Community Development Block Grant. These are programs that we used to build affordable housing with using federal funding, and that we have not significantly increased investments in in decades. And look at where we’re at now.
There are models out there, like community land trusts, where we can de-commodify housing in places like Bozeman, where the cost of a house has quadrupled in 5 years, and we still need people to be able to live there and work Whether you are working as a cashier or working as a carpenter and afford a place to live. That is a hell of a model where we could step in with federal subsidy, we can buy the land out from underneath that property, and make sure that that house is permanently affordable if we’re gonna spend federal dollars. So you buy that house, its equity can raise, but only at a certain rate, and you sell that, it’s still affordable, and you haven’t taken a loss. Like, that is part of the solution, and on the other side, we do need regulatory reform.
We need zoning reform across this country. We’re actually ahead of a lot of the country here in Montana with that, but if we’re going to invest federal dollars, let’s tie incentives to that to say, well, you’ve got to reform zoning to make sure that we are building dense infill housing in the places where people need it, if you want to have access to these funds. That’s how we approach this from both sides.
Tim Dickinson
And given your special experience with the Forest Service, I wanted to ask you, the administration has recently come up with a plan to totally overhaul the Forest Service and place the headquarters in Utah. Can you just give us a sense of what you might want to do as a congressman to address that issue.
Sam Forstag
Yeah, I want to see us reinvest in our public lands, and in public service more broadly. I mean, we are in 2026, and there are a lot of people in Congress who seem to have lost track of time. We have computers that are hurdling us towards a future where, well, these computers can write their own code, they can write legal briefs. They can even write songs, terrifyingly enough, they cannot stop around the woods with a chainsaw and a Pulaski and address a real and pressing wildfire crisis that we are all facing across the West here. They cannot do a lot of the manual labor and the land management tasks that we need, and that would create good jobs here in our communities.
And when we disinvest from places like the Forest Service, where the current plan is to drop us to one-third of what our staffing level was a year and a half ago, what ends up happening is we pay a whole lot more for less, and I see that on the ground, right? If I jump into a fire as a smokejumper, and there are no resources available, no ground personnel, well, we end up calling aerial resources in, and we end up spending $7,000 for every drop of retardant that comes out of an airplane, which just so happens to be contracted from Bridger Aerospace, that’s owned by one of our United States Senators, the third wealthiest man in the Senate who only makes his profits off of our tax dollars off of federal contracts, and you want to know where the inefficiencies are in the federal government? It is right there. It is when we spend so much more because we did not have leaders with the courage to invest up front and things like active forest management, and so we have to wait to address a fuels backlog on our national forests until those things are on fire. That’s the most expensive and least effective way to manage our forests.
Tim Dickinson
Well, Stan, thank you so much for your time. Do you have any closing thoughts you want to leave our viewers with?
Sam Forstag
Absolutely. I mean, it is a rare thing to get a working person to the halls of Congress. And in a country where the average congressperson is worth 15 times the average American, there’s a reason for that. It’s because a lot of the hoops you gotta jump through on the way there are hoops based on resources. And, if you are not already wealthy or raised in networks of wealthy people, it’s pretty damn hard to get there. That’s part of what I’m gonna fight to fix. When I get there, it’s campaign finance reform. But I need all the help I can get along the way, so if anyone listening is willing to help with a project like this, it’s samformontana.com. I need all the help I can get volunteering and donating, and we got less than a month until the June 2nd primary, so I appreciate you having me on to help spread the good word. Thank you, Tim.
Tim Dickinson
Well, it’s a pleasure to talk to you. Take it easy.
Sam Forstag
You too. Bye.
