A U.S. Forest Service employee in Henderson County has taken his age-bias fight to federal court, accusing the U.S. Department of Agriculture and USDA Secretary Rollins of rigging a 2025 retirement buyout so older workers were effectively shut out.
The complaint, filed pro se last Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Asheville, targets the agency’s rollout of a widely publicized “deferred resignation” program and the way some field positions were quietly marked off-limits.
Joel Smith, an Etowah resident who worked as a vocational development specialist at the Pisgah Forest Job Corps site, says he was effectively barred from even applying and that the agency’s actions amount to “intentional age discrimination,” according to the Mooresville Tribune. The suit says the Department of Agriculture rolled the program out in February 2025 and briefly reopened it in April, offering employees pay and benefits through Sept. 30, 2025.
What the complaint says happened
At the heart of the filing is an April 1 email from National Job Corps Director Jerry Ingersoll, which, according to the complaint, told Forest Service Job Corps center-based employees they were ineligible for the buyout because they were “mission critical.”…