By Robert Chaney, Montana Free Press/Mountain Journal; Amy Alonzo, The Nevada Independent; Rachel Becker, CalMatters; Mike Koshmrl, WyoFile; Brooke Larsen, The Salt Lake Tribune; Olivia Prentzel, The Colorado Sun
Four firefighters, two helicopter pilots and a contractor bulldozing a fireline have died in Colorado, Utah and Oregon this year.
Wildfires have burned millions of acres and destroyed hundreds of homes and buildings in the West. California, which is having an unusually quiet fire summer, has deployed engines and crews to fight fires raging in Colorado and the Pacific Northwest — but even this well-resourced state continues to feel vulnerable.
The U.S. has been at Preparedness Level 5 since July 18, a status meaning the federal government is committing the highest possible level of crews, aircraft and firefighting resources to wildfires across the country. And yet requests for help or equipment are going unanswered.
This dangerous fire season hit as the Trump administration has reshaped how America fights wildfire — consolidating crews from across Interior Department agencies into a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service. The new agency and the U.S. Forest Service are pursuing “full suppression” of every new blaze.
U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz argues full suppression is essential for this hazardous summer. And Brian Fennessy, director of the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, defends a policy shift it’s made: Federal officials who want to promote forest health can no longer make the final call about whether to let a fire burn.
Public land managers have toggled back and forth about a full-suppression strategy over the past decades. Many believe that the full suppression strategy both overextends limited firefighting resources and ignores basic science about how fire affects forests.
“We don’t think wildfire should be divorced from the land,” said Bill Avey, president of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees. “That’s been a policy failure.” Decades of extinguishing wildfires and climate change-induced drought have left Western forests full of dry fuels, contributing to conditions that can produce catastrophic fires. Making full suppression the default response, they argue, could perpetuate that problem while demanding more firefighting resources than the government has available.
A coalition of nonprofit newsrooms in six Western states conducted roughly two dozen interviews with federal and state officials, former agency leaders and firefighters, experts and advocates. Reporting from CalMatters, The Colorado Sun, Montana Free Press/Mountain Journal, The Nevada Independent, The Salt Lake Tribune, and WyoFile shows how on-the-ground changes made by the Trump administration have affected our ability to fight fires amid increasingly destructive conditions.
Federal officials dispute that the federal reorganization played any role in the deaths of firefighters this year. And while officials in several Western states say the new fire service has so far caused few disruptions on the ground, interviews with former government officials, firefighters and researchers show there are concerns about what the administration’s broader changes could mean for how the country lives with fire over the long term.
The 10 a.m. Rule
Wildfires once ran on deadlines.
After a series of catastrophic blazes in the early 20th century, the U.S. Forest Service sought to show it was able to control and protect forests under its care. In 1933, the agency mandated the “10 a.m. Rule,” declaring that any wildland fire should be extinguished by 10 a.m. the day after it was reported.
Snuffing all fires quickly, the agency reasoned, would prevent disasters like the Big Burn of 1910. That incident scorched more than 3 million acres along the Montana-Idaho border during a 36-hour rampage, killing at least 85 people and destroying five towns.
Unlike earthquakes or tornadoes, wildfires have weaknesses. We can suppress flames with water or retardant chemicals. Wildland fire crews remove fuels with hand tools and bulldozers. Sometimes they use tactical burnouts — literally fighting fire with fire.
These tools can obscure crucial facts about wildfire and reinforce strategies that can backfire.
Tales of heroism following the Big Burn established the Forest Service as a necessary government service. As New York Times reporter Tim Egan put it, “To this day, I think that agency owes its existence to this fire.”
But Egan also described the consequences of that successful effort to control wildfire: “Actively trying to put out every fire left a lot of standing dead timber. So some of the big fires we had in the latter 20th century, including the Yellowstone fires of 1988 and some of the Idaho fires of the late 1990s, and fires still to come, are the result of having timber that probably should have burned every now and then during the seasonal fires.”
Rocky Mountain Research Station scientist David Calkin described the phenomenon as the “Wildfire Paradox” in a 2013 article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Using wildfire suppression to eliminate large and damaging wildfires ensures the inevitable occurrence of these fires,” Calkin wrote. “Wildfire suppression, effective 95% to 98% of the time, inevitably leads to ecologically significant wildfires with higher intensities and rapid growth that are unable to be suppressed.”
Fire researchers began to notice the paradox in the 1960s, and began implementing “let burn” strategies in remote forests to reduce those fuel loads. The Forest Service modified the 10 a.m. Rule in 1971 to allow some fires to burn, and officially abandoned the policy in 1978.
“We’re getting international help. That’s just how severe the fire season is, and we’re only in August. We got another 8, 10, maybe 12 weeks to go.”
Tony demasters, incident commander, Great Basin Team 2
Over the following decades, wildfire managers adapted to a changing climate, shifting public opinion and funding challenges. A mid-century moist period began drying out toward the tail of the 20th century. The 1988 fires in and around Yellowstone National Park burned 1.4 million acres in one of America’s best-known landscapes. Colorado’s South Canyon fire in 1994 killed 14 wildland firefighters and prompted major federal fire policy reviews. One of the most consequential shifts was the growing focus on the wildland-urban interface, or WUI — the increasing overlap between private homes and fire-prone landscapes.
Several record-breaking fire seasons in the early 2000s made federal budget watchers aware that the Forest Service was spending more to fight fire than almost anything else in its mission, and frequently didn’t have enough funding to do so. In 2017, federal wildfire suppression costs topped $2 billion — six times as much as was spent in the 1990s.
The year 2018 produced one of the worst wildfire seasons in history and included the Camp Fire, which killed more than 80 people in and around Paradise, California.
More recently, political pressure for a more aggressive response to wildfire has renewed fire suppression.
Last June, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response,” which in its first sentence declared “The devastation of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires shocked the American people and highlighted the catastrophic consequences when State and local governments are unable to quickly respond to such disasters.”
Draft versions of the policy included a return to the 10 a.m. Rule, according to numerous sources in the wildfire community.
“No one was dumb enough to use 10 a.m. policy language, but there was fear of a fire getting away,” said Bobbie Scopa, a 45-year firefighting veteran who worked at the local, state and federal levels and now is vice president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. “Anytime you light a fire or purposefully don’t put out a fire, you own it and you own every bad thing that can happen. You’re taking a risk when you do that.”
Draft versions of the Fix Our Forests Act also included a call for full suppression of all wildfires.
Matt Weiner, CEO of the advocacy group Megafire Action, told Montana Free Press/Mountain Journal enacting full fire suppression into law would have had dangerous consequences.
“We were able to get that out of it,” Weiner said. “And long-term, we will push aggressively against the 10 a.m. Rule being included in statute anywhere. We don’t want to just create a suppression super-agency. We want a system that recognizes the need for a lot more beneficial fire on the landscape.”
Nevertheless, at a July 22 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Forestry and Horticulture, Forest Service Chief Schultz told members of Congress his agency remained committed to prioritizing aggressive initial attack on wildfire this year.
“Keeping fire small protects firefighters, communities and also saves funding,” Schultz said. “I assure you every fire has a full-suppression strategy.”
There is another reason many public land managers resist extinguishing all wildfires all the time. Most of the forests and grasslands in the West actually need fire to remain ecologically healthy. And allowing some fires to burn, whether they started naturally or by a prescribed burn, is a powerful tool for maintaining that health.
“Prescribed fire is never even going to scratch the surface of the number of acres that need to burn every year,” said Johanna Nosal, a forester who worked for the U.S. Forest Service in California, Colorado and Montana for 15 years before accepting a federal buyout in 2025.
“We’re putting these fires out, and sometimes we’re successful at it … but it’s just a year-to-year Band-Aid,” Nosal told The Nevada Independent. “And what eventually happens is you have a lack of resources and these weather periods that will create these huge blazes that no matter what you will do will keep spreading.”
It used to be different at the Interior Department, according to Fennessy with the Wildland Fire Service. “When it was a fire for resource benefit, fire [officials] may have had a say but they did not hold the final decision,” which was made by agency land managers, he told The Colorado Sun. “Now, we hold, on the fire side, that final decision.”
At the Forest Service, underlying policies still provide the authority to manage wildfire to benefit forests. But a proposal to move the Forest Service firefighting program from the Department of Agriculture into the U.S. Wildland Fire Service is stoking fears that could change.
This summer, Schultz said, the Forest Service has not revived the 10 a.m. rule: “We aren’t making any commitment to that time frame.”
But with the country at its highest level of preparedness, resource allocation will vary by fire, Schultz acknowledged.
“In terms of this time of the year, right now, we are not going to just sit back and let fire go and achieve other objectives,” he said. “We’re going to be aggressively suppressing.”
‘Fear of a fire’
When Bobbie Scopa began fighting fire in 1974, blazes were smaller, she said. “They weren’t ripping like they do now.”
The Forest Service shifted away from the 10 a.m. policy and began allowing some fires to burn for landscape health in 1971. But pressure from states has sometimes discouraged that federal policy, said Nosal, who now lives in Butte, Montana.
“Pretty much every administration I worked under,” she said, “there’s been at least one year when they’re like, ‘We’re not gonna let managed fires happen, we want to get everything under control as soon as possible.’”
Nosal spent her 15 years with the Forest Service removing and thinning trees and other vegetation that would have been cleared out by smaller fires, she said. In the sagebrush ecosystems that cover the Great Basin watershed, suppression has led to encroachment by pinyon-juniper woodlands and other trees.
“Even in those really dry forest types, you’re seeing denser forests and more continuous forests than would have been there,” she said. “That means when a fire does roll through … you just get these really intense fires that burn everything, which historically isn’t the natural fire regime.”
In other areas, such as the Sierra Nevada, Scopa said, the forests are just too dense. The spread of homes and other development into the wildland-urban interface also has changed firefighting.
“If a fire starts before there are houses, and firefighters show up, the hotshots cut lines, firefighters lay lines along the edge of the fire, they have a simple fire,” she said. “They’re going to come up with a strategy to anchor and flank the fire while it’s small.”
Add just a few homes, and “some of the firefighters are going to go to the houses and start prepping to protect the properties,” she said. “Now, you have fewer firefighters on the fire. It totally complicates work for the firefighters. And it requires more people.”
Scopa estimated federal agencies would need another 30,000 to 40,000 firefighters to be able to implement full suppression, “and you still wouldn’t be successful.”
Multiple requests for hand crews and engines went unfilled on the Widemouth 2 Fire, Tony DeMasters, incident commander of Great Basin Team 2, told The Salt Lake Tribune. The fire has burned nearly 130,000 acres in western Utah.
“We’re getting international help,” he said. “That’s just how severe the fire season is, and we’re only in August. We got another 8, 10, maybe 12 weeks to go.”
It’s common for resources to be this scarce, DeMasters added, when the Great Basin region and nation are at Preparedness Level 5. “When we go to those planning levels, that means everything is strapped.”
The Forest Service has roughly 14,000 employees who manage and respond to fires, including around 11,800 firefighters. The Wildland Fire Service employs fewer than 6,000 federal personnel and supports around 900 tribal personnel to cover more than 500 million acres of public and tribal lands across the country.
The teams are already showing stress, Avey, with the National Association of Forest Service Retirees, told Montana Free Press/Mountain Journal.
“They’re rostering Type 3 teams, which is what you use for a division-size fire after you lost an initial attack,” Avey said. “They hold it until a Type 1 or 2 team gets there. But they have big shortages in all the functions of those teams — planning, logistics, finance … We’re trying to manage fires with Type 3 teams, and then bringing in complex incident management teams too late. They simply don’t have enough teams available. Or they have teams on a fire, but don’t have any firefighters.”
A new fire service
To create the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, the Trump administration combined firefighters from four Department of the Interior agencies: Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
“The goal of this is to reduce internal redundancy,” Brock Uhlig, a chief at the new service, told Nevada lawmakers at a May interim committee meeting. “Members of the public will see the exact same product.”
By July in Nevada, it was “kind of business as usual and everyone’s still collaborating and responding to fires,” said Ryan Shane, State Forester Firewarden. But, he acknowledged, it was early in the season. “Time is going to tell what improvements we are going to see … or if there are any gaps.”
Utah officials have seen the transition go “very smoothly,” said Jamie Barnes, recently appointed as the director of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources. “We haven’t seen any issues with firefighters on the ground or financial resources.”
In California, for all the local, state and federal borders within the state, firefighters from different agencies often converge on the same wildland fires — such as the fast-moving Dove Fire near a Yosemite gateway town in July. As the fire burned, Emily Kilgore, a public information officer for Cal Fire’s Tuolumne-Calaveras Unit, said she hadn’t noticed changes to the deployment of federal resources.
“They were requested. They responded,” Kilgore told CalMatters on the phone, over the beat of a helicopter responding to another fire that had just ignited nearby. ”They worked in tandem as one of our cooperators to assist us to gain containment on the Dove Fire.”
Cal Fire headquarters agreed, saying there have been no changes to its fire suppression relationship with federal agencies.
In Wyoming, the migration of Interior firefighting crews and resources into the new federal agency hasn’t altered what goes down when a wildfire is sparked, said state Fire Management Officer Jarod DeLay, who works closely with the regional chief for the U.S. Wildland Fire Service. They share a goal, he said, of ensuring the transition does not impact on-the-ground firefighting operations.
“They’re working through everything,” DeLay told WyoFile, “but there really hasn’t been any real hiccups.”
The “field-level folks” who have spoken with Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, haven’t seen much negative impact, president Riva Duncan told Montana Free Press/Mountain Journal.
“But speaking to fire managers, they said it was pretty clunky for them,” Duncan said. “They’ve restructured decision-making authority, so there’s a lot of ‘Where do I go to now if I need something approved?’ There’s not as much communication as folks had hoped for.”
“Clunky” communication may be occurring at times, Fennessy said. “I mean, we’re talking about thousands of people. I’m sure that probably occurs. But that’s not the feedback I’m getting and it’s not from my people.”
Officials are still investigating whether the transition played any role in the late June deaths of three federal firefighters who were killed while battling the Knowles Fire in Colorado, and a fourth who died later from his injuries. Fennessy said he finds the suggestion that there may be a connection “offensive.”
“It is absolutely wrong,” he said. “It’s just ludicrous.”
There is “absolutely zero connection between the rollout, the unification and these fatalities,” he added. “I am close enough to the investigation that is still ongoing.”
The firefighters who died were part of a helitack crew that were trapped near the Colorado-Utah border when high winds drove small, lightning-started wildfires in Utah. Sydney Watson, 27, of Warrior, Alabama, worked for the Wildland Fire Service, as did a fourth firefighter, Nathan Matthews, 43, of Lincoln, Nebraska, who was injured in the burnover and died later.
Emily Barker, 38, of Clinton Township, Michigan, and Nick Hutcherson, 27, of Glendale, Arizona, worked for the Forest Service.
Duncan stressed that investigations remain ongoing and no conclusions are available. “But fatalities really affect the workforce,” she said. “There’s a lot of fire season left and people are fearful. The investigations take a long time to come out, and it’s frustrating if there are important lessons to learn.”
Colorado Democratic Senator John Hickenlooper put the Interior Department on notice in an August 5 letter to the departments of Interior and Agriculture, saying he would be watching the inquiry.
“We have confidence that your investigation will include a full analysis of decisions made on the day of the event, as well as higher-level direction that led to the Rifle Helitack Crew’s response that day,” Hickenlooper wrote.
“This should incorporate an analysis of management decisions and structures that informed on-the-ground operations that day — including the structure of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service itself, which has not been authorized by Congress,” Hickenlooper continued. “Additionally, the review should analyze the directive to presume a ‘full suppression strategy applied to every wildfire under DOI management,’ despite scientific evidence that a maximum suppression approach makes wildfires more severe over time.”
An uncertain future
Rep. Andrea Salinas, an Oregon Democrat, pointed out to Schultz in July that removing fire personnel from the four Interior agencies separates them from former colleagues responsible for restoring forests and reducing fuels.
“This proposal would fracture the critical communications link between land management and fire management,” Salinas said at a July 22 House Agriculture Committee hearing.
The disconnect could mean that decisions once made between colleagues will have to be negotiated among agencies, said Brad Washa, an assistant professor of Wildland Fire Science at Utah State University.
“Down the road, will [fire personnel] be sitting in a different office and not next to the folks that are managing the natural resource?” asked Washa, a former BLM firefighter.
“And that can become an impact when making decisions on how to manage a fire, to what they’re doing fuels work wise,” he said. “It could also impact just recruiting people from outside a fire to help support the fire effort.”
When working together, for example, a land manager could easily alert firefighters to not bulldoze lines in areas that could affect endangered species or cultural resources, he said. That may become more difficult now, he added. “The land management agency might lose some of its ability to exert its authority in managing the natural resource.”
Professor Larissa Yocom, director of USU’s Utah Forest Restoration Institute, said she also wonders how much input land managers will be able to provide during an active fire — particularly in giving guidance about future times when it would benefit an ecosystem to let a fire burn.
“We do have a lot of science showing that fire is beneficial in a lot of our ecosystems,” Yocom said. “For example, aspen is a tree that a lot of people love, and it thrives after fire. And the lack of fire during the 20th century may be part of the reason that we have been seeing a decline in aspen cover across the West.”
Fennessy argues there is no disconnect between firefighting and land management.
“We’ve not moved anybody on the Interior side out of where they are stationed. Offices that hold both land managers and executive firefighters, those offices haven’t changed,” he said. “They talk to each other every day … I question the motive or intent of those that want to make that argument.”
Fennessy said his agency recognizes that “land managers are the resource experts” and that they are “intimately involved and engaged.” Fire officials and land managers “need to be in lockstep,” he said, “when we’re doing prescribed fire or preparing for whatever treatment it may be.”
The Forest Service is undergoing its own reform right now. Its headquarters are moving west from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City and regional centers will be closed, with research consolidated in Fort Collins, Colorado. The Forest Service has lost 16 percent of its workforce since 2024, Salinas noted.
“This sweeping reorganization creates more questions than answers and the fact that it’s being implemented right as wildfire season is upon us is alarming,” Salinas told Schultz. “Doing so threatens the Forest Service overall — the loss of staff, and the institutional knowledge they have, should not be casualties in the Trump administration’s reorganization of the Forest Service. Each is too valuable to be lost.”
Scopa estimated federal agencies would need another 30,000 to 40,000 firefighters to be able to implement full suppression, “and you still wouldn’t be successful.”
Few states are better equipped to weather the federal firefighting changes than California.
The Golden State has invested billions of dollars in firefighting, a strategy that has carried through multiple administrations, with different emphases at different times. But it all amounts to this: California has its own people and equipment to rely on, including the world’s largest aerial firefighting fleet.
Cal Fire — officially the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection — is the largest state-run fire department. As California experienced some of its most destructive wildfires on record this year, Cal Fire’s staffing skyrocketed — climbing past more than 12,000 employees, according to the agency.
It now employs more wildland firefighters than any agency in the world besides the U.S. Forest Service, according to a 2025 white paper led by researchers with Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program.
The department is primarily responsible for rural, mostly privately owned wildlands that make up about one-third of the state’s acreage.
But federal agencies are tasked with protecting about half of the state, and California’s leadership is concerned about the Trump administration’s reorganization of the Forest Service, its staff cuts and its closure of research facilities.
“While I understand the intention to operate a more efficient federal agency, many of these changes could impact our state’s wildfire readiness and create added public safety risks,” California Secretary of Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot wrote in a May letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins.
Adequate investment and attention to federal lands in California, along with “strong collaboration” with state agencies, “is critical to protect California’s communities, economies, and natural resources from catastrophic fire,” Crowfoot wrote.
No simple answer
The Department of Agriculture’s 2027 budget proposes transferring the departments, which includes the Forest Service, wildland firefighting resources and responsibilities into the new Wildland Fire Service.
The department awarded a $1.16 million contract to study consolidating all federal wildland fire operations into the new agency, according to a statement on Aug. 4. The agency expects the report to be complete by Feb. 15, 2027, which means its results won’t be available for the fiscal 2027 budgeting that begins in September.
The idea of unifying the Forest Service with other agencies would challenge the “cultural difference in how we approach fires,” said Andy Norman, who retired from firefighting for the Bridger-Teton National Forest in 2023 after a 37-year career.
“Fire is considered a land-management activity. It’s addressed in the forest plans,” he said, which call for occasionally managing wildfires rather than immediately extinguishing them in designated wilderness and in some backcountry settings.
The Forest Service extinguishes more than 95 percent of the fires on its forests, according to Scopa, but pursuing full suppression permanently wouldn’t be realistic.
“There’s no simple answer. We’re not gonna put [out] all the fires,” she said. “We’re never going to be successful … The environment is not conducive to that, the fuels are not conducive to that, the staffing is not conducive to that.”
This story was part of a collaboration between Montana Free Press/Mountain Journal, The Salt Lake Tribune, CalMatters, Wyofile, The Colorado Sun, and The Nevada Independent.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of the story incorrectly attributed a quote about fire for resource benefit to Johanna Nosal. The quote has been corrected and is attributed to Brian Fennessy.