Trump plan to unify wildfire work targets inefficiencies but former officials warn of chaos

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to merge the government’s wildland firefighting efforts into a single agency, a move some former federal officials warn could increase the risk of catastrophic blazes and ultimately cost billions of dollars.

Trump’s budget would centralize firefighting efforts now split among five agencies and two Cabinet departments into a single Federal Wildland Fire Service under the U.S. Interior Department.

That would mean shifting thousands of personnel from the U.S. Forest Service — where most federal firefighters now work — into the new agency with fire season already underway. Budget documents do not disclose how much the change could cost or save.

The Trump administration in its first months temporarily cut off money for wildfire mitigation work and sharply reduced the ranks of federal government firefighters through layoffs and retirement. That resulted in the loss of more than 1,600 qualified firefighters in the Forest Service — an arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture — and hundreds of people at Interior, according to the National Association of Forest Service Retirees and Democratic lawmakers.

The personnel declines and proposed agency reshuffling come as climate change makes fires more severe by warming and drying the landscape. More than 65,000 wildfires across the U.S. burned almost 9 million acres last year.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said Tuesday during testimony before the House Appropriations Committee that the new fire service would streamline work to stamp out blazes.

“We want more firefighters on the front lines and less people trying to make manual decisions on how to allocate resources and personnel,” Burgum said. “We’ve got duplicative and ineffective structures that could be improved.”

But organizations representing firefighters and former Forest Service officials say it would be costly to restructure firefighting efforts and cause major disruptions in the midst of fire season. Over the long term, they said, it would shift the focus from preventing fires through forest thinning and controlled burns, to extinguishing them even in cases where fire could have beneficial effects.

“You will not suppress your way to success in dealing with catastrophic fires. It’s going to create greater risk and it’s going to be particularly chaotic if you implement it going into fire season,” said Steve Ellis, chairman of the forest service retirees group.

The group, which includes numerous several former Forest Service chiefs, said in a letter to lawmakers that consolidation of firefighting work “could actually increase the likelihood of more large catastrophic fires, putting more communities, firefighters and resources at risk.”

Another destructive fire season is expected this year, driven by above normal temperatures across much of the nation through August, according to the most recent forecast by federal officials.

More than 1 million acres have burned nationwide so far in 2025, including in Arizona, Minnesota, California, Colorado, Nebraska, New Jersey and other states.

The Trump administration proposal has some bipartisan support, with California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla and Montana Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy sponsoring legislation similar to the administration’s proposal. Before his election as a senator last year, Sheehy founded an aerial firefighting company that relies heavily on federal contracts.

Burgum indicated Tuesday that the administration was not waiting for the bill to pass and he would work with Agriculture Sec. Brooke Rollins to begin coordinating operations for the current fire season.

The Forest Service workforce was initially cut in February during billionaire Elon Musk’s push to reduce federal spending, and at least 1,000 National Park Service workers also were let go. A court order to rehire fired workers along with a public outcry brought many workers back to their jobs but Democratic lawmakers have said it’s not enough.

The Forest Service had about 9,450 wildland firefighters as of May 3, with a goal to increase that to 11,300 people by mid-July.

The Interior Department employs about 6,700 wildland firefighters. It’s unclear how ongoing cutbacks are affecting that number. Interior’s firefighting force is spread between the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Land Management.

State officials in Washington and Oregon said this month that a loss of federal workers who help support wildland firefighting is making planning for the upcoming wildfire season a challenge. The administration has not released the exact number of fired and rehired workers.

In a separate action last month aimed at wildfires, the Trump administration issued an emergency action that rolled back environmental safeguards around future logging projects on more than half of U.S. national forests.

The emergency designation covers 176,000 square miles (455,000 square kilometers) of terrain primarily in the West but also in the South, around the Great Lakes and in New England. Combined, it is an area larger than California and amounts to 59% of Forest Service lands.

Most of those forests are considered to have high wildfire risk, and many are in decline because of insects and disease.

Former President Joe Biden’s administration also sought more logging in public forests to combat fires yet Forest Service timber sales in lands controlled by the Agriculture Department stayed relatively flat under his tenure.