Wildfire Forecast Part 3: Where Wildfire Money Goes

EDITOR’S NOTE: As Greater Yellowstone braces for what is lining up to be a serious wildfire summer, Mountain Journal in this three-part series examines what the federal firefighting system will look like and the conditions it faces. Part 1 reviews fire weather forecasts which show unusual conditions headed this way. Part 2 inquires about the staffing and structure of federal wildfire services after a year of political tumult. And Part 3, below, looks at the plans working through Congress to restructure a firefighting system that’s been in place for decades.

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Fire requires three things to burn: Fuel, oxygen and heat, known as the “fire triangle.” Firefighting depends on a different triangle: Weather, workforce and money.

Those have undergone rapid evolution in the past few weeks as the 2026 fire season accelerates. The weather component of firefighting in 2026 looks increasingly hostile as a “super El Niño” grows more likely. The National Interagency Fire Center’s April forecast noted record warmth observed across much of the West in March along with many basins reporting zero snowpack remaining at a time when they usually are reaching their seasonal peaks.

On the workforce front, a U.S. Department of Agriculture spokesman said the U.S. Forest Service reports meeting most of its wildland firefighter hiring goals with about 28,000 responders ready to mobilize, which is roughly the same as 2025. And the Interior Department has consolidated four formerly separate firefighting forces into a single Wildland Fire Service of about 4,000 personnel. All those crews work through NIFC to protect public lands and adjacent communities.

Officials with the reconfigured Interior Wildland Fire Service told Montana’s state Environmental Quality Council last month that they did not expect to change much of their organizational firefighting structure this year, although big changes remain on the drawing board. Weather and workforce have already met in a roaring start to the 2026 fire cycle. As of the end of March, 1.6 million acres have burned across the country, which is 231 percent of the previous 10-year average. So far this year, 16,746 wildfires have been reported, also well above average, at 168 percent, according to the April 1 Wildland Fire Potential Outlook.

Which brings us to factor No. 3. And last week, two major announcements laid out how much the federal government plans to spend and where those dollars might go.

On Friday, President Donald Trump released his fiscal 2027 budget proposal. It envisions shrinking the USDA budget from this year’s $25.7 billion to $20.8 billion in 2027, a 19-percent reduction. Interior would fall 12.9 percent from $18.2 billion to $15.9 billion.

But Trump’s cabinet secretaries intend to keep wildland fire a priority. Interior earmarked $3 billion to cover wildfire costs, and proposes creating a new “wildland intelligence center” focused on technology development in the coming budget. That wildfire cost allotment essentially combines reserve funds previously shared between Interior and Forest Service firefighters.

At USDA, the document states the “Budget further implements the President’s important actions to combat the wildfire crisis, consistent with E.O. 14308, ‘Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response,’ by unifying Federal wildland fire management into the U.S. Wildland Fire Service at the Department of the Interior.” However, the budget document did not break out what dollar amounts would be available for that unification, or when it might occur.

Separately last week, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins on March 31 released a reorganization plan for the Forest Service which slices several administrative layers out of the agency. Rollins pledged not to make significant changes to wildfire services, including the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.

The USDA plan would eliminate 57 of the Forest Service’s 77 research facilities nationwide. The Rocky Mountain Research Station based in Missoula would remain intact. It houses one of the nation’s most prominent wildfire science departments. Field researchers elsewhere, including many with localized wildfire expertise, would be managed out of a central research headquarters in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Debate continues

How those administrative shuffles might affect forest fire response has received mixed reactions.

Sharon Friedman runs “The Smokey Wire,” a dedicated Forest Service news blog. She said she viewed the reorganization announcement and the president’s budget proposal as separate subjects. Congress has routinely disregarded the president’s vision and followed its own appropriations priorities, especially where it may affect the local economies of sitting senators and representatives. But the USDA secretary’s order could have greater impact.

“That’s a transformational thing,” Friedman told Mountain Journal. “It’s not just nibbling around the edges. And getting rid of the regions isn’t as shocking or novel to me as getting rid of the R&D layer.”

Friedman isn’t concerned that specific research might be harmed or halted by the change, because field scientists could continue sending their findings to their local national forest or the central office for review.

“The thing about the [research stations] closures seems to me more about the facilities themselves and what they cost to keep running,” Friedman said. Spending less money on buildings, in other words, could actually mean more spending on actual science.

Other observers were more alarmed. In a particularly emphatic Substack post, “More Than Just Parks” co-founder Jim Pattiz described the reorganization plan as having the “subtlety of a wrecking ball and the morality of a foreclosure notice … The largest public land agency in the country [was] just handed, on a silver platter, to the people who’ve spent their entire careers trying to destroy it.”

“More than Just Parks” spent years working together with the Forest Service on documentaries and other publicity, Pattiz said. After Trump’s re-election, the organization became more politically involved. In an interview with Mountain Journal, Pattiz argued that the USDA announcement was a 20-times larger version of the first Trump administration’s 2019 relocation of the Bureau of Land Management from the nation’s capital to Grand Junction, Colorado. That cost the agency nearly 90 percent of its headquarters employees. The Biden administration returned BLM to Washington, D.C. in 2021.

“[The Trump administration] found a creative way to further downsize the workforce, make them subservient to this administration’s pro-extraction goals, and to state governors who are aligned with this administration,” Pattiz said. “It enables bad decisions to be made that this administration wants.”

That can happen, Pattiz said, because legions of Forest Service researchers and policy experts will likely retire or quit rather than relocate their families and programs to the reduced number of service centers. Most of those are experimental forest programs studying locally specific ecological functions, often with datasets developed over decades of observation.

“A lab that documents the damage from mining runoff or road-building or clear-cutting is an enemy,” Pattiz said of the current administration. “And enemies get eliminated.”

Congress keeps coming

Meanwhile, Congress has other cards to play. Many of them aim to tinker with the overall policy of wildfire management.

In January, Congress passed budgets for the current-year Forest Service and Interior wildfire programs. The Forest Service will have $1.01 billion for suppression activity, while Interior’s combined wildland fire agencies will have $383.7 million. They share access to a Wildfire Suppression Operation Reserve Fund of $2.85 billion, which kicks in after the main budgets are exhausted in big fire years or rolls over to subsequent years. That number could climb to almost $4 billion next year according to calculations by Politico‘s E&E News. 

The reserve fund has been an ongoing project since former Montana Senator Jon Tester started pushing the FLAME Act in 2009. Supporters appreciated its elimination of “fire borrowing,” where the Forest Service pulled money from its other activities to pay for big fire years. Opponents like Taxpayers for Common Sense challenged the practice for incentivizing the Forest Service to suppress fires regardless of cost. That reserve fund is set to expire in 2027, and will likely be a point of debate after the unified fire force studies are published.

On the sidelines, several senators and representatives drafted legislation to deregulate Forest Service activities and enhance wildfire response. Many of those bills were rolled into the 2026 Farm Bill, which underwent mark-up in the House in March.

The Farm Bill directs almost $400 billion in spending over the coming decade. Tucked alongside agricultural subsidies and food programs for the poor are extensive wildfire policy changes. Specific totals for the forestry portion of the bill aren’t laid out, but it appears to fall in the Farm Bill’s $6.7 billion “other miscellaneous programs” category.

The Farm Bill now includes most of the Wildfire Prevention Act of 2025, authored by Wyoming Senator John Barrasso along with Montana senators Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy, and Idaho’s Senator James Risch, all Republicans. That bill would expand the size of “categorical exclusions” for logging and wildfire projects from 3,000 acres to 6,000 or 10,000 acres, increase use of prescribed fire, use livestock grazing for hazardous fuels reduction, and fund a technology test-bed program for bringing new wildfire tools to market. The bill states that those tools might include new hazardous fuels reduction treatments, drones for both extinguishing and starting fires, communications gear, remote sensing devices and safety equipment; drawn from the fields of artificial intelligence, quantum sensing, augmented reality and 5G private networks.

Montana Republican Representative Ryan Zinke’s H.R.598, which would invalidate a court decision known as the “Cottonwood Rule” requiring heightened scrutiny of Forest Service impacts on federally endangered species, was also added to the Farm Bill. So did a measure by California Republican Representative Tom McClintock that would require all fires on national forests to be controlled within 24 hours of detection at times when the country is in severe drought, high fireshed risk or at National Preparedness Level 5 — the most extreme level of wildfire activity.

Asked during a visit to Butte’s Montana Tech campus in March about ongoing efforts to consolidate federal wildland firefighting resources, Zinke recalled wanting to “cross-walk the Forest Service over to Interior” when he was Interior Secretary during President Trump’s first term. He said he recently talked with retired Forest Service chiefs about the new proposal, and that he was looking at improving the agency’s front-line technology and response capabilities.

“We’re burning down forests, spending millions of dollars and you can’t cut a tree,” Zinke said during a visit to Butte’s Montana Tech College on February 27. “There’s better models of management.”

That idea faces opposition from many within the Forest Service. Retired Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth told Mountain Journal that separating firefighting from the rest of the agency’s land-management expertise “was a solution in search of a problem.” 

Nearly half of the world’s most disastrous wildfires since 1980 have occurred in the past 10 years, according to a new study published in the journal Science. And the most economically destructive ones have taken a particular spike since 2015, the researchers found.

“The rise in wildfire disasters isn’t just a perception, it’s reality,” co-author Crystal Kolden, director of the UC-Merced Fire Resilience Center, said in a press release. “For decades, wildfires primarily impacted largely unpopulated areas, but contemporary catastrophic fires are killing more people and destroying more homes and infrastructure.”

Current Forest Service wildfire responses suppress 98 percent of its fires before they grow larger than 100 acres. And most of those are controlled within 72 hours of initial attack. The remaining 2 percent produce the “megafires” that burn thousands of acres until a weather event or topography put them down. And those often happen at the exact times McClintock’s proposal outlines.

“If we’re extinguishing 98 percent of wildfires on initial attack, will this consolidation bring us to 99 percent?” Bosworth asked. “I’m not nearly as worried about reorganizing the Forest Service as I am about moving fire over to Interior. That could have drastic consequences.”