As wildfires burned 1.4 million acres before the first day of spring this year, federal firefighters acknowledged the big consolidation plans they had last year remain over the horizon.
“We’re not looking at 2026 as the year we go in and make significant changes to policy,” Brad Shoemaker, U.S. Interior Department Wildland Fire Service fuels specialist, told the Montana Environmental Quality Council last week. “What you saw in 2024 and 2025 is how we’ll operate.”
In January, the Interior Department combined its multiple wildfire agencies into a single service. But that Wildland Fire Service only covers about one-third of the nation’s public lands firefighters. The Trump administration’s larger ambition of adding in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service firefighters had already faded under congressional opposition last fall. At the same EQC meeting, Forest Service Region 1 interim Forester Troy Heithecker said he didn’t foresee significant federal firefighting changes this year either.
“The Forest Service has the largest and most prepared firefighting force in the world,” Heithecker said. The agency would be cooperating with Interior to cut bureaucratic delays and standardize firefighting activities, he explained, but it would “maintain the strong coordination that already exists.”
The United States has a long list of federal agencies overseeing its 640 million acres of public lands. Although from a city sidewalk it might appear like the same landscape of trees and grass, those agencies have different missions and methods of managing their holdings. The Forest Service and Interior’s Bureau of Land Management each have slightly more than 170 million acres in the Lower 48 states (they own another 22 million and 71.3 million acres in Alaska, respectively). Those two agencies have somewhat similar responsibilities for producing timber, grazing livestock, and providing recreation among other open-space activities.
“[A consolidated federal firefighting service] is not just a suppression agency, but a holistic wildland fire management agency. Otherwise, we’re just trying to squeeze more blood out of the same stone.”
luke mayfield, former president, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters
But the Interior Department also includes the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs. Each of those has its own wildfire protection force, with significantly different priorities. For example, BIA might want to protect commercial timber stands from a forest fire on a Tribal reservation, while NPS might view a similar blaze in a national park as a necessary ecological service. FWS administers 12.6 million acres of wildlife refuges in the Lower 48, which have different habitat needs than either national parks or reservation timberlands.
Despite the stalled consolidation, both Forest Service and Interior leadership claim they’re ready for smoke season. The Forest Service has 28,000 responders ready to mobilize in 2026, including 11,364 wildland firefighters backed up by a combination of full-time and seasonal staff. That number was 101 percent of the target hiring goal, according to the agency.
“Our preparations for the 2026 fire season are on track or ahead of schedule,” a USDA spokesman wrote in an email to Mountain Journal. “The Forest Service is working with the Department of the Interior to reduce administrative barriers, streamline the overall function of the interagency wildfire response system and advance the policies set forth in the President’s Executive Order 14308. With our significant wildland fire response capabilities, we stand ready to support the Department of the Interior as it establishes the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service.”
Meanwhile, Interior officials announced they had put about 4,000 firefighters into the new Wildland Fire Service. At the March 25 EQC meeting, Aaron Thompson of the Interior Department Northern Rockies Coordinating Group told lawmakers WFS would speed up getting resources to fires, standardize fuels-management projects and improve communications.
“Instead of four duty officers getting resources responding to a fire, we’ll now only have one,” Thompson said. “We won’t know what kind of successes that will bring until we get through a season or two as we evaluate the new service.”
EQC vice chairman Senator Willis Curdy said his 38 years’ experience as a wildland firefighter, pilot and supervisor left him skeptical of the new plan. As an example, he noted all those agency duty officers already work together in the same National Interagency Fire Center, which has been standardizing training, incident command and dispatch duties for decades.
“I don’t see anything you offer that’s going to be more efficient,” Curdy said. “Convince me.”
Thompson responded that other problems such as incompatible information technology, expense handling and contracting would also see improvements. And Shoemaker added that closer cooperation would unify the ways different agencies manage similar landscapes. For example, he said, after a wildfire on BLM land, that agency first starts an emergency stabilization approach to repair urgent damage, and works up a 3- to 5-year remediation plan. The Forest Service puts both phases into a single 18-month response.
Consolidating federal firefighting has been an active topic for many non-governmental organizations. Luke Mayfield, past president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, told a recent Zoom gathering of the group’s membership that supporting a consolidated federal firefighting service remained a top priority. But he cautioned that all land-management responsibilities needed to be included: “It’s not just a suppression agency, but a holistic wildland fire management agency,” Mayfield said. “Otherwise, we’re just trying to squeeze more blood out of the same stone.”
Many observers and former agency leaders appear more critical of the consolidation. National Association of Forest Service Retirees Chairman Bill Avey recently released a list of concerns, including how “diverting Forest Service budget to the new [Wildland Fire Service] raises serious questions about the agency’s ability to meet its broader mission, including timber and other natural resource management targets.” He added that spending billions on creating a new bureaucracy would not get at the root causes of catastrophic wildland fire, which he argued were overly dense forests, wildland-urban interface development, and changing weather patterns.
Ed Shepard is a retired BLM deputy director of fire and aviation and now works on policy issues for the Public Lands Foundation. He said his colleagues also have apprehension about concentrating wildfire resources.
“Our concern has been when you take fire and separate it from land management, you really create problems that I don’t think they really anticipate by doing this,” Shepard told Mountain Journal. “When you start meshing in fuels treatments, emergency rehabilitation and management post-fire, you need a lot of people involved,” he said. “There’s resource people, foresters, range management specialists, wildlife biologists, hydrologists, fuels management specialists — all working together.”
Many of those people work full time in those disciplines and also are qualified to fight fire.
“They’re the BLM militia,” Sheperd said. “If you move them to wildland fire, then you don’t have them for habitat restoration, timber sales and things like that. You’ve lost those people when you really need them.”
During the Environmental Quality Council session, Missoula Democratic Representative Tom France raised a larger worry about federal capabilities. As the overall Forest Service workforce has shrunk over the past year, he asked how the agency could handle its non-fire requirements and duties. Consolidation could further stress new mandates such as increased timber harvest, he said.
The federal officials replied that joining forces would solve those challenges.
“Wildfire seasons are hotter, they’re longer, Montana’s forests are impacted by insect and disease outbreaks [and] they’re drought-stressed,” Heithecker told the EQC members. “We feel those conditions are only expected to worsen over time without continued action and innovation in how we work together across jurisdictions.”
