Trump administration stands up consolidated federal firefighting agency over bipartisan congressional reservations
The Trump administration has taken the first steps in standing up its new, consolidated federal firefighting agency, despite Congress declining to fund it and voicing bipartisan reservations about the plan.
‘Wildland Fire Service’ stalled pending further study
The U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of Agriculture unveiled plans for the formation of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service in September, with the goal of having the Service operational by the end of January. The formation of the new Service followed an executive order issued by President Donald Trump demanding the Service’s establishment.
Those efforts may never come to fruition after both Democratic and Republican lawmakers blocked that order and opted to maintain the current wildland firefighting structure in their new funding bills. The bill package continues funding allocations for wildland firefighting services to the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of the Interior.
Safeguarding fire-prone homes is a collective action problem
“It’s a community issue,” Ms. Berry, the Tahoe Fund chief executive, said. “If one house on the block doesn’t clean up their act, it doesn’t matter what the rest of the community does.”
Which city burns next?
Watching from afar, we still reflexively call these disasters “wildfires,” perhaps imagining that they ignite in some distant forest. But there may be little truly “wild” about such fires beyond the ferocity of the burn. Increasingly, disaster strikes almost entirely within an urban envelope, drawing on homes and landscaping for fuel rather than trees and wild brush. These are not forest fires encroaching on human settlement but rather human settlements burning like only forests used to. And stopping them will require something much harder, and more unpopular, than clearing out distant forests of dead wood.
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In a 2024 paper, she and her coauthors argued that it is rapid fire growth that matters most when it comes to risks to homes and neighborhoods.
“The modern era of megafires is often defined based on wildfire size, but it should be defined based on how fast fires grow and their consequent societal impacts,” the October 2024 Science publication opens. “Speed fundamentally dictates the deadly and destructive impact of megafires, rendering the prevailing paradigm that defines them by size inadequate.”
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“The community building I’ve seen and experienced because of FUSEE will send waves of positive change that will affect generations of public land managers. In attending these mindfulness retreats I’ve seen how profoundly it can touch someone, and give them tools to heal invisible scars many wildland firefighters carry.”
Hope—and Many Fears—Follow in the Wake of Trump’s Plan to Transform Wildland Firefighting
“The wildland fire community is freaked out beyond alarm … by all the defunding and downsizing and disruption caused by the DOGE dudes,” said Tim Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who is now executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (FUSEE). Over his career, he has worked in fire operations under both the USDA and the Interior Department.
One of FUSEE’s primary concerns about consolidation is the mission impact. Each agency under the Interior Department brings different approaches to wildfire—for good reasons. The National Park Service, for example, seeks to protect communities by maintaining ecological health, while the BLM’s top priority is securing public safety; its website lists fire suppression first among the ways it does so.
“If you’re going to consolidate all these different programs with their different missions … whose fire philosophy is going to prevail?” Ingalsbee asked. His worry is that suppression will win out.
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Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter and now wildland fire ecologist, is executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. He also emphasizes the harms of road building—often falsely characterized as necessary for effective wildland firefighting—agreeing that FOFA on the whole is a dangerous bill.
He does think that, in isolation, some of FOFA’s provisions around wildland firefighting are important, but he worries about the impacts of the law’s overall approach on firefighter morale. “There is a legitimate need for proactive fire fuels management,” Ingalsbee said, pointing to prescribed burning, Indigenous cultural burning, and community fire preparation. Fire is inevitable and necessary in fire-prone landscapes, he said, and the century-plus-long practice of total fire suppression needs to change. “The exclusion of fire is now coming back to haunt us.”
Building more roads in national forests won’t prevent wildfires
Revoking the Roadless Rule will do no favors for wildland firefighters, only increase their risks and burdens to keep bolstering the failing and ultimately futile fire exclusion policies of the past century.
Firefighters motivated by conservation values and dedicated to protecting America’s wildlands are not willing to trade away ecological integrity for dubious claims of improved firefighter efficiency—not in our name, you don’t!
OPINION: Building more roads in national forests won’t prevent wildfires
Building roads is one of the most devastating things you can do to backcountry native forests. Carved into steep mountain slopes, gravel roads are perpetual sources of sediment that pollute waterways, foul fish habitat, spread invasive weeds and invite unnatural wildfires.
Despite these risks, the Trump administration wants to revoke the Roadless Area Conservation Rule and bulldoze new roads into national forests, claiming that they are necessary for “wildfire prevention” and “fuels reduction” to improve firefighter efficiency.
This is a pants-on-fire false alarm that ignores scientific evidence and denies the last quarter-century of lived experience.
Building roads leads to the destruction of native forests. Roads are lifeless, linear clear-cuts that open doors for commercial logging that converts tree groves into slash-covered stump fields and tree farms, while logging roads become lined with thickets of shrubs and invasive weeds.
This kind of phony “fuels reduction” makes roads and logging sites much more flammable than the original native forest cover. Indeed, tree farms are like firebombs, and logging roads are their fuses. But the Trump administration wants the public to believe that road building and logging will help prevent wildfires because they seemingly aid firefighting.
Sabotage of public lands continues
By now it’s clear the Trump administration is far outside public opinion in its views of Western public lands.
Yet Trump’s staff continue to dismantle our system of federal lands in direct conflict with the wishes of most Americas according to numerous polls.
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Forest Service restarts effort to change decades-old Pacific Northwest forest policy
Initial efforts to amend the Northwest Forest Plan focused on getting input from tribes on how the federal government should manage their ancestral lands. Forest Service officials created an advisory committee made up of multiple tribal representatives, as well as people representing environmental and timber interests, to guide its policies. They also held forums with tribes to gather input ahead of drafting proposed changes.
“It was a tribal-centric effort,” said Ryan Reed, a former advisory committee representative and a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Northern California. “That was the headliner of our work. It’s disheartening that they felt that wasn’t enough.”
Bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act would bring big changes to national wildfire policy
Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (FUSEE) said that part of the bill “expands categorical exclusions and emergency authorities that weaken analysis, public engagement, and environmental safeguards” and “encourages logging-centric approaches that are not ecologically sound or fire-resilient.”
FUSEE supports other parts of FOFA, like those aiming to facilitate prescribed fire and make communities more resilient to blazes. The group encourages Congress to improve the bill through amendments, but does not endorse it in “its current form.”
“The Act, as drafted, prioritizes expedited logging over ecological fire management and lacks funding for the reforms wildland firefighters need,” the group wrote in a recent message to legislators.
12 hours in the smoke
Wildfire fighters nationwide are getting sick and dying at young ages, The New York Times has reported. The federal government acknowledges that the job is linked to lung disease, heart damage and more than a dozen kinds of cancer.
But the U.S. Forest Service, which employs thousands of firefighters, has for decades ignored recommendations from its own scientists to monitor the conditions at the fire line and limit shifts when the air becomes unsafe.
Some Oregon wildfire mitigation projects stalled by government shutdown
Terry Fairbanks, executive director of Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative, said Forest Service payments have been held up but are eventually being processed. "Delays, definitely. But a total stone wall — no," she said.
Dustin Rymph, coordinator with the Southern Willamette Forest Collaborative, said contractors are currently doing fuels reduction work in the area. Pile burning, although briefly delayed, is also moving forward.
"There definitely was some lost momentum during a really important burn window," Rymph.
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Washington state’s wildfire future: More volatile forests amid slashed budgets
As the number of fire ignitions continues to rise, each new fire represents a roll of the dice, said Michael Medler, a former wildland firefighter and pyrogeography researcher at Western Washington University. Chances of a major fire in Western Washington might be low in a given year but they’re growing.
The paradigm brings to mind Hurricane Katrina, Medler said. In the aftermath, then-President George W. Bush claimed that nobody anticipated New Orleans’ levees breaching in the storm surge.
Sure they did, Medler said. Anybody who thought about it for an hour anticipated the breach.
“That’s where we’re at. Who could anticipate a $5 billion west-side Cascades fire? Everyone who’s thought about it,” said Medler, referencing the potential cost of damages from such a blaze.