CLIMATEWIRE | Lawmakers and officials from Western states are warning that President Donald Trump’s firings and funding freezes will leave the region woefully unprepared for the coming wildfire season, just two months after blazes ravaged Los Angeles.
The new administration’s moves to terminate nearly 10 percent of Forest Service personnel and pause grants intended to reduce the risk and intensity of fires have left states scrambling to make sure they don’t lose valuable preparation time. The uncertainty is coming during a period when the Forest Service and state governments would normally be doing crucial work such as creating fire breaks, carrying out controlled burns, thinning trees and clearing brush.
“These cuts are clobbering rural Oregon,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). “This is going to make it extraordinarily difficult to get a balanced approach on natural resources.”
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The pullbacks represent a major change from the Biden administration, which poured more than $3 billion into wildfire prevention. They are also notable given that Trump has repeatedly faulted Western officials for not doing enough on forest management dating back to his first term.
Record drought, heat waves and sluggish forest management in both state and federal forests have exacerbated fires in recent decades: An average of 3 million acres burned nationwide each year in the 1990s, but now, the average is nearly 7 million, according to data from the National Interagency Fire Center.
While the Agriculture Department, which oversees the Forest Service, now appears ready to unfreeze some wildfire mitigation funding, cuts have stalled active forest management projects, delayed wildfire training, and raised concerns that bipartisan legislation already passed this Congress could fail to help. And even though direct firefighters are exempt from the Forest Service cuts, many of the 3,400 workers fired at the agency supported in trail maintenance, fuels reduction and other forestry projects just as summer hirings would start in preparation for wildfire season.
“The threat of these changes is significant,” said Vicki Christiansen, who served as Forest Service chief during Trump’s first term. “$40 million in savings now just to have an additional $4 billion in wildfire expenses is crazy.”
The Forest Service is responsible for some 193 million acres of forests and grasslands — the majority of it in the West. Federal reductions could force states with large swaths of Forest Service land to do more to manage or respond to incidents.
State and local officials in Nevada, California, Utah and Washington state said they are now looking to their own state budgets to cobble together resources. Utah and Oregon already are working to expand state forest management funding. Other states, like Washington, are trimming their own budgets and have no surplus to use to make up for a gap in federal funding. Every state said there is no way they can fully patch the hole left by the federal government.
Nevada State Forester and Firewarden Kacey KC said a big worry is staffing emergency management teams with dispatchers, technicians and GIS workers, none of whom would likely qualify for the exemption for direct firefighters but are still a vital part of wildfire prevention and mitigation. KC, who was appointed by former Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval and works in a state where 86 percent of the land is federally owned, is already talking about a “Plan B” to exercise her agency’s authority to make emergency hires.
“Any reduction across any of those workforces, it just means we can do less, and at a time when we need to be doing more because the fires are bigger and they look different than the fires we had 20 years ago,” she said.
Washington Public Lands Commissioner Dave Upthegrove said the Forest Service overhauls are at odds with the Trump administration’s stated priorities.
“The impacts are disproportionately impacting public safety in rural conservative areas,” said Upthegrove. “He’s swinging for DEI but hitting public safety in rural, conservative areas.”
Utah’s legislature is considering a $20 million injection into the state’s forest management projects — a bill made possible by the success of federally funded projects, said Jamie Barnes, the state’s forestry, fire and lands director.
California, meanwhile, nearly doubled its firefighting workforce and budget since 2019 and may allocate more of a $10 billion climate bond passed by voters last November to wildfire preparedness and recovery. Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said California has spent $400 million of its own money doing wildfire prevention on federal lands in the last decade.
In the wake of the Los Angeles fires, Congress found the momentum to pass wildfire prevention legislation, some of which has been hitting roadblocks for years. The bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act — co-sponsored by House Natural Resources Chair Bruce Westerman (R-Ark.) and Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) — passed in the House in January with more Democratic votes than last year, and is now waiting on the Senate.
Despite partisan wrangling over some of the details surrounding permitting and funding, Republicans and Democrats agree on the big picture: Forest management work needs to increase across the West.
The cuts to funding and manpower, however, change the baseline. Most legislation under consideration to address the problem has been written with the expectation of pulling in Forest Service and Department of Agriculture resources that may no longer exist or may change significantly.
“It is deeply inconsistent to say you need to do more to clear brush or ‘rake the forest’ or whatever and then suspend the grants and the workforce that will be doing that kind of work,” said Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
Congressional Republicans who work on forestry policy say that while wildfire prevention work is definitely needed, Trump should be given room to pursue his agenda.
Sen. Jim Risch (R-Idaho) suggested that as the Forest Service shifts its priorities, it could move workers into firefighting work from other jobs like writing environmental impact statements. “Give them a chance to execute the way we want to see it executed.”
Risch’s view is one that seems to be shared among some voters in deep-red, heavily-forested rural areas. Rep. Val Hoyle (D-Ore.) said in an interview on Friday that dozens of USFS workers were laid off in her district — but that it didn’t shake support for Trump among conservatives there in part because the Forest Service still retains the blame for thousands of jobs lost by changes to timber policy in the 1990s.
“People who voted for Trump are saying ‘Trump is doing what he said he was going to do,’” Hoyle said. ‘“But what has the Forest Service done [for us]?’”
And Risch may be proven right: the Interior Department recently announced it will hire about 5,000 seasonal workers this summer to staff national parks — but Idaho Gov. Brad Little said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told him Saturday at a meeting of Western governors that those jobs would be for fighting wildfires, in addition to parks services. It’s a solution that focuses federal staffing on combating fires once they’ve begun, rather than reducing the risk that they break out at all.
The USDA will also be unfreezing the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek, a Democrat, said in an interview that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told governors at a meeting Friday that the grants would be coming back in a week or so.
Trump’s sweeping clawbacks have hit hard in the small northern California coastal community of Shelter Cove, which issued a stop-work order on a $6.2 million Community Wildfire Defense Grant it was awarded in 2023. The city was denied reimbursement for $120,000 from the Forest Service earlier this month, Fire Chief Nick Pape said in an interview.
Pape said the town was set to clear hazardous vegetation near 650 homes to bolster its ability to withstand wildfires, but is now at risk of delaying that timeline. The grant program is funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law and remains frozen for now, according to Pape, Barnes and Upthegrove.
“I’ve been hopeful from the beginning that this would be a temporary pause in funding, and if it gets reinstated, that that happens as soon as possible,” Pape said. “The next question is is the staffing adequate to process all the reimbursements and keep these projects going? And we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get there.”
Camille von Kaenel and Marcia Brown contributed to this report.
Reprinted from E&E News with permission from POLITICO, LLC. Copyright 2025. E&E News provides essential news for energy and environment professionals.
