An Eastern Nevada Bureau of Land Management handcrew hikes out from order to put in indirect line at the Elkhorn Fire in Idaho, August 2023. Photo by Kari Greer
by Robert Chaney
The White House is considering a draft executive order proposing full suppression of all wildfires and a restructuring of the nation’s wildfire management teams, which has drawn harsh criticism from fire experts who have reviewed it.
The draft order, whose existence was confirmed by The Washington Post and Politico on April 11, was also obtained from multiple sources by Mountain Journal. It expands upon Senate Bill 441, cosponsored by Montana Senator Tim Sheehy, which would create a new national wildland firefighting service and consolidate firefighting resources.
“It’s clear that our wildland firefighting apparatus is not equipped for year-round response and we can do more for our communities threatened by wildfires at a lower cost for American taxpayers,” Sheehy said in an email to Mountain Journal. “We must overhaul our federal wildfire apparatus and start fighting fires better, faster, and cheaper by streamlining wildland firefighting efforts and removing outdated bureaucratic obstacles to getting the job done.”
A range of sources contacted by Mountain Journal, ranging from current and former wildland firefighters, to pilots, scientists and Forest Service executives, pointed out numerous problems with the suggested plans.
“They’re proposing we’re going to go toe-to-toe with these fires,” said Jerry Williams, retired Forest Service national director of fire and aviation. “So instead of more thinning and prescribed burning, we’re going to try to be suppression-centric. That’s going to go back to the 1930s ‘10 a.m. policy.’”
Fellow retired Forest Service national fire director Bill Avey used even stronger terms to describe how the proposed changes might affect wildfire personnel already engaged in a busy fire season.
“You are setting up a workforce to be distracted in an environment where you can’t be distracted – that kills people,” Avey said. He added that former Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth (appointed by President George W. Bush) told The Washington Postthe proposals wouldn’t stop disasters like the January fires in Los Angeles or improve public land management: “As Bosworth said, ‘I hope this goes away.’ I’m right there with him.”
Fire on the mountain: Firefighters watch the Roosevelt Fire at night near Bondurant, Wyoming in September 2018. Photo by Kari Greer
UNDER CONSIDERATION
Sheehy and cosponsor Senator Alex Padilla, D-California, introduced their 300-word “Fit for Purpose Wildfire Readiness Act” on February 6, shortly after a catastrophic wildfire destroyed at least 9,500 homes and caused an estimated $30 billion in damage to Los Angeles neighborhoods.
“We have to stop watching our cities burn to the ground,” Sheehy said in the email to Mountain Journal. “We were never going to have as much national focus on this issue and as much of a mandate to fix this problem as in the wake of that terrible disaster.”
In a joint statement announcing the legislation, Sheehy and Padilla said one problem the current system faces is a lack of coordinated leadership.
“Under the current system, wildland fire response is divided across multiple agencies with no clear lines of responsibility or authority,” they said. “This bill would change that by requiring the secretaries of Agriculture and Interior to consolidate wildland firefighting services under a new ‘National Wildland Firefighting Service.’”
Numerous members of the federal wildfire community also reported seeing variations of the proposal. On April 11, The Washington Post reported it had obtained a copy of a “draft executive order under consideration by the White House,” adding that “Sheehy’s office has discussed the proposal with state officials, according to a local official with knowledge of the outreach, and one of his aides is listed as an author on a copy of the draft order.”
"Instead of more thinning and prescribed burning, we’re going to try to be suppression-centric. That’s going to go back to the 1930s ‘10 a.m. policy.’” – Jerry Williams, former Forest Service National Director of Fire and Aviation
In response to questions from Mountain Journal, Sheehy spokesman Jack O’Brien did not directly acknowledge the draft order, saying “regarding ‘drafts,’ here’s what White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said: ‘No Executive Order is final until it is considered and signed by the President. The media should stop reporting on 'drafts' with unknown origins.’”
In addition to calling for a unified national wildfire command like Sheehy’s bill, it would dissolve the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, which has coordinated federal wildfire policy since 2002. The existing council includes the Defense Department, FEMA, Health and Human Services, state governors, tribal leaders, county commissioners, mayors, state foresters, and state emergency managers.
The order also streamlines rules for private wildfire contractors, reduces or eliminates safety standards for aerial firefighting activity, establishes a “fire environment center” and mandates 30-minute response times for “high fire danger” areas. Its overall purpose “will be the immediate suppressing of fires, and protecting our communities and critical infrastructure … so that by the summer of 2025, we are able to rapidly and aggressively respond to our national wildland fire threat.” It declares an end goal is a congressionally established national wildland fire agency by 2026.
Senate Bill 441 has received endorsements from the Western Fire Chiefs Association and the United Aerial Firefighters Association, according to Sheehy’s office.
BLM smokejumpers load a plane at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, as part of pre-fire season training, April 2021. Photo by Kari Greer
AN OLD PROBLEM
The idea of consolidating wildfire response isn’t new. President Trump mandated the creation of a Wildland Fire Management Policy Committee six days before the end of his first term in 2021. That order referred to another Trump order from 2018 that recommended “active management of America’s forests [to] reduce wildfire risk.”
Public frustration with the growing devastation wreaked by wildfire is also increasing as wildfires burn hotter and the season lengthens. The nonprofit Grassroots Wildland Firefighters has been calling for a unified wildfire agency since its inception in 2019.
“There’s always more work you can do to improve coordination amongst all the partners, to improve our preparedness in the offseason,” said Mary Erickson, former supervisor of the Custer Gallatin National Forest and one of several Forest Service sources who have seen the draft order. “You’re not going to create more efficiency by setting up a fire organization that’s completely separate from land management agencies. Fire suppression is integrated with all the other work you do on the forest.”
Erickson retired in 2024 after 40 years in the Forest Service, including 16 years leading the Custer Gallatin. She listed a range of problems with the draft order and Sheehy’s legislation, starting with the lack of any public process for developing a new wildfire organization while the existing one is heading into its busiest time of the year. She also questioned why the proposal separated short-term wildfire duties from long-term land management responsibilities.
“There’s fuels management work, risk mitigation, supporting wildfire response,” Erickson said. “Pull it into a separate agency, and you still have to meet requirements for protection of critical habitat and protect water supplies for municipal watersheds. Plus you really sever that connection from people at the local level, who know the ranchers, who know everybody out there.”
A hand crew digs line construction and douses hot spots on the 2017 Rice Ridge Fire in Montana. Photo by Kari Greer
FIGHTING THE WRONG BATTLE
The changes offered in the two proposals appear to ignore decades of fire research, according to wildfire experts. In particular, they pointed to problems with the full-suppression mandate’s similarity to the 10 a.m. policy, the Forest Service’s 1935 edict that any wildfire spotted should be controlled by 10 a.m. the next day.
The unintended consequence of the 10 a.m. policy was what scientists call the “Fire Paradox,” the massive buildup of unburned fuels in forests that rely on fire to remain healthy. That has led to where firefighters successfully stop 98 percent of the blazes, but the remaining 2 percent explode into unstoppable catastrophes and do 90 percent of annual damage.
“In the mid-1970s, the Forest Service and other agencies left behind their fire-control models for a fire-management model,” said Williams, the retired Forest Service national fire director. “That meant broad recognition that what we were doing by continually suppressing fire was costly, too dangerous and misaligned with the fire ecology of many systems. The evolving fire management idea was to begin using fire more, with more thinning and prescribed burning.”
Ironically, it also meant that the scientifically backed strategy clashed with the nation’s 1970s-era environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, Williams said. Those laws had exceptions for smoke and damage from “act-of-God” wildfires. But they imposed regulatory roadblocks to agencies’ deliberate use of fire for landscape benefit.
“The Forest Service has about 11,500 firefighters and does 70 percent of the contracting for food service, showers, transportation, equipment.” – Bill Avey, formerNational Fire Director, U.S. Forest Service
“You find yourself in a situation where trying to reduce high-intensity wildfire impacts by using low-severity, low-intensity fire gets discouraged,” Williams said. “So high-intensity impacts dominate the story. The environmental laws didn’t take a balance-of-harms approach.”
The fires themselves, especially the 2 percent that do the most damage, have outstripped the best technological innovations placed in their way. Williams said reliance on the “air show” — firefighting planes and helicopters dropping water and retardant — has built a false sense of security. For example, criticisms that the Los Angeles fires could have been stopped by better use of aircraft ignored the fact that the high winds driving the flames often made it impossible for aircraft to fly.
“Look at the fire behavior charts that show the rate of spread versus line construction — by hand, by dozer, by air tankers,” Williams said, referring to the removal of vegetation to bare dirt or retardant dropped to block fire spread. “The rate of spread far exceeds the rate of line production. Fires are spotting miles ahead of themselves.”
The Tatanka Hotshots, a crew based put of the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota, fills up on water and supplies during the Rice Ridge Fire in Montana's Lolo National Forest in 2017. Photo by Kari Greer
MORE WITH LESS
Then there are questions about who will do all this work. Critics say it matters on two levels: How would restructuring fire management impact readiness for the 2025 fire season, and are there enough personnel to carry it out?
Arguably, the 2025 fire season started on January 7, when a series of 14 wildfires propelled by hurricane-force Santa Ana winds engulfed the Los Angeles metropolitan area. From January 1 to April 13, 17,400 wildfires have affected 822,951 acres, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
National fire weather forecasts show “above normal potential for significant wildfires” in Arizona and New Mexico through June. California, Oregon and Idaho typically hit peak activity in June or July. Montana’s wildfires used to start like clockwork in the first week of August but have crept back into July over the past decade. They are now burning into the end of October, as season-ending weather events often come late into otherwise dry autumn months.
That could mean tasking the nation’s wildfire leadership with building a new organizational chart when they are needed to make real-time fire strategy decisions, according to said Avey, whose 45-year career in the U.S. Forest Service also included serving as Helena-Lewis and Clark National Forest supervisor.
“Who are they going to get to plan on this task force?” Avey said. “It’s just putting huge amounts of chaos and disruption into the system …The timing of this is awful.”
And he hasn’t seen any evidence that the new system would be better than the existing one. Both the draft order and Sheehy’s bill envision centralizing the new national wildland agency in the Interior Department. The Forest Service is part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
“The Forest Service has about 11,500 firefighters and does 70 percent of the contracting for food service, showers, transportation, equipment,” Avey said. “Interior has about 6,000 firefighters and does about 15 percent of the contracting.Why move resources that have a majority of the experience with fire?”
A wildland firefighter leans on his drip torch on a fence post as he takes a breather during Wyoming's Roosevelt Fire in 2018. Photo by Kari Greer
GROUND POUNDING
When President Trump ordered a federal hiring freeze in January, he exempted public safety workers. That has resulted in most federal firefighting crews reaching full staff, according to several wildland fire leaders contacted by Mountain Journal who spoke anonymously due to concerns about being punished or fired for challenging agency policy. But other cuts to the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration and related agencies may cripple the weather forecasting services they rely on to strategize their firefighting efforts.
Then there’s the challenge of keeping those workers in the field. The basic unit of wildland firefighting is known as the hand crew, which numbers around 20 people. These range from inexperienced ground crews to elite hotshot teams with special qualifications to handle chainsaws, operate heavy equipment or direct air operations. If any member gets sick or injured, they must be replaced with someone equally qualified in order to safely perform in the field.
To handle this problem, the Forest Service relies on what agency staffers call the “militia” — the rest of the Forest Service trail crews, GIS mappers, policy advisors, recreation specialists and other employees who have a “red card” qualifying them to fight wildfire. And the ranks of those employees have been ravaged by governmentwide reductions-in-force, deferred resignations and early retirements. Avey estimated between 3,000 and 5,000 staff have left the Forest Service as of April.
The unintended consequence of the 10 a.m. policy was what scientists call the “Fire Paradox,” the massive buildup of unburned fuels in forests that rely on fire to remain healthy.
“When I was forest supervisor of the Helena-Lewis and Clark, 75 percent of my people were red-carded,” Avey said. “That’s the militia, the reserves. You send the prime crews and engines out on initial attack. Everybody else has a job on the fire, whether it’s reinforcement, mopping up or backing up the initial attack once the primary work was done.”
Federal law prohibits many former agency workers from immediately returning as a “single-resource contractor,” which includes seasonal firefighting jobs. So even red-carded employees who get fired or resign often can’t be rehired to fill holes in the firefighting force.
When he served as acting national fire director in 2021, Avey said, the season was almost always at Preparedness Level 4 or 5, the most extreme categories of response when large fires are active. Two numbers were burned into his memory. One was 11,500: the number of frontline wildland firefighters the Forest Service budgets to employ. The other was 27,000: the number of firefighters he actually deployed.
“The vast majority were Forest Service,” Avey said. “That wasn’t primary firefighters. That was the reserves.”
Avey said he received a phone call in early March from a staff member of Sheehy’s office, asking for input about the senator’s fire policy proposals. He told the staffer he considered the plan the “wrong approach,” that the landscape needed more prescribed burning rather than less and that aerial wildfire resources can buy time, but don’t put wildfires out. “The 30-minute response time was a solution looking for a problem,” he told the staffer.
“I told him that it’s change of fuel types or weather that usually puts big fires out,” Avey said. “He hung up on me at that point.”
Mountain Journalis a nonprofit, public-interest journalism organization dedicated to covering the wildlife and wild lands of Greater Yellowstone. We take pride in our work, yet to keep bold, independent journalism free, we need the support of readers like you. Thank you.
About Robert Chaney
Robert Chaney grew up in western Montana and has spent most of his journalism career writing about the Rocky Mountain West, its people, and their environment. His book The Grizzly in the Driveway earned a 2021 Society of Environmental Journalists Rachel Carson Award. In Montana, Chaney has written, photographed, edited and managed for the Hungry Horse News, Bozeman Daily Chronicle, Missoulian and Montana Free Press. He studied political science at Macalester College and has won numerous awards for his writing and photography, including fellowships at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University and the National Evolutionary Science Center at Duke University.
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