Whither the Incident Management Teams
Federal cuts threaten all-risk incident management
As wildfires begin to spark across the West, the federal government is entering fire season not with a sharpened blade, but with a broken handle. The Trump administration’s sweeping personnel cuts and looming plan to consolidate wildland fire agencies threaten to undermine the very command infrastructure that manages our largest and most dangerous fires.
At the heart of that infrastructure are Type 1 and Type 2 Incident Management Teams (IMTs)—the top-tier command teams tasked with coordinating the most complex and resource-intensive wildfires in the country. These teams are not ad hoc like some crews. Instead, they are comprised of seasoned personnel, in some cases individuals who have trained and deployed together for years, building trust, synergy, and deep operational fluency. The strength of an IMT is not just in its qualifications, but in its cohesion.
Most of these team members hold “day jobs” across the Forest Service, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, and BLM. During fire season, they leave their home units and families, stepping into national command roles. They bring with them not just technical skill, but institutional memory and place-based knowledge. Unless, of course, they were among the hundreds of red-carded federal employees recently cut by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
IMTs work for two to three weeks at a time for the District, Forest, Park or Refuge where a large fire has outstripped local capacity to manage the fire. Beyond firefighter safety the primary concern of weakened IMTs with a rushed reorganization is that the unique ecological, cultural, and legal requirements of federal lands could be pushed aside in favor of a one-size-fits-all suppression response.
These aren’t just administrative losses. They are operational amputations. The DOGE cuts have gutted the experienced core of IMTs—particularly in critical roles like operations, logistics, planning, air attack, and finance. Some teams are now scrambling to replace long-standing members with temporary fill-ins, often from state and local agencies already overcommitted. That substitution is not always seamless. Many state and local agencies focus primarily on rapid suppression in the wildland-urban interface. By contrast, federal fires often burn in complex, sensitive, and remote landscapes—national parks, wilderness, tribal lands—where suppression isn’t always the only, or best, goal.
Without enough experienced team members to draw from the ranks of demoralized agency employees, national IMTs risk becoming piecemeal assemblies, lacking shared history, cohesive leadership, and critical knowledge of federal land-use mandates. Each geographic area around the United States commits to standing up a certain number of Type 1 and 2 IMTs each summer, maintaining team rosters and rotations, both National and statewide. When up on rotation team members have eight hours to respond to a team assignment. It will be difficult this coming summer to meet those commitments. IMTs will likely have many personnel gaps. Too many unfilled positions, and the team becomes unavailable. Fire outcomes will suffer. So will safety.
Both Oregon Senators, Jeff Merkley and Patty Murray have weighed in on their concerns about the upcoming summer. The new USFS Chief, Tom Shultz, recently addressed the USFS workforce in a letter outlining how the agency seeks to maintain “minimum mission viability” through the upcoming fire season. Not very reassuring.
In previous mega-fire seasons—like 2020’s Labor Day fires in Oregon or the 2021 Dixie Fire in California—it was experienced, cohesive IMTs that prevented even worse disaster. These teams coordinated evacuations, managed aircraft, tracked weather, protected cultural resources, and kept firefighters alive. They were only able to do that because they knew each other, trusted each other, and had years of shared operational tempo.
IMTs don’t just work on wildfires. They are available for “all-risk” assignments helping to lead a wide variety of natural disaster recovery efforts.
That is what is now at risk.
The American public may not see the internal collapse of our federal incident management structure until the smoke is already rising. By then, it may be too late to patch the holes in the line. Congress must act now to restore the budget and workforce needed to preserve our Incident Management Teams—and protect the public they serve.
Mike Beasley (posted to my Substack)
May 9, 2025