Over the past year, the federal wildfire system has entered a period of rapid and deeply consequential change.

At the Department of the Interior, the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service is already taking shape—consolidating fire personnel into a more centralized structure with an increasingly clear emphasis on suppression and chain-of-command.

At the same time, the U.S. Forest Service is undergoing a sweeping reorganization that threatens to dismantle much of its regional structure and scientific capacity. This erodes the very foundation of federal land stewardship.

These may appear to be separate developments. They are not. They are two sides of the same transformation.