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, the chairman of the forest service retirees group and a former wildfire incident commander.
The group, which includes 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.”
Cleaving the Forest Service’s firefighting duties from its role as a land manager would be “like separating cojoined twins — it would basically kill the agency” said Timothy Ingalsbee with Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a Eugene, Oregon-based advocacy group.
Another destructive fire season is expected this year, driven by above normal temperatures for most of the country, according to federal officials.
More than 1 million acres have burned 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 that's similar. Before his election last year, Sheehy founded an aerial firefighting company that relies heavily on federal contracts.
A prior proposal to merge the Forest Service and Interior to improve firefighting was found to have significant drawbacks by the Congressional Research Service in a 2008 report.
“A wildfire agency would likely focus on fire control, largely because acres burned are the most readily measurable performance standard," the report said. “Wildfire management activities that seek to reduce damages, such as protecting individual structures and reducing biomass fuels, are less likely to be emphasized.”
Burgum indicated 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 of 11,300 by mid-July.
Interior employs about 6,700 wildland firefighters, 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 aimed at wildfires, the Trump administration last month 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.
Most of those forests are considered to have high wildfire risk, and many are in decline because of insects and disease.
Matthew Brown, The Associated Press
