Bill Would Boost USFS Funding

From E&E News($) this morning….

Fiscal 2020 compromise legislation would boost funding for agriculture and forestry programs, including additional money for wildfire suppression in national forests.

For the Forest Service, appropriators said they would provide a $10.3 million increase toward clearing vegetation and dead or dying trees — known as hazardous fuels — in national forests to cut the risk of catastrophic fire, especially in the wildland-urban interface.

The measure would also boost funding for state and local volunteer firefighting capacity, helping to bring the total Forest Service funding to $7.43 billion, compared with $6.08 billion in discretionary funding in fiscal 2019.

The proposal also would devote an additional $1.95 billion to wildfire suppression as part of a wildfire disaster fund Congress agreed to two years ago. That is the Forest Service’s share of a $2.25 billion budget cap adjustment also devoted to the Interior Department.

5 thoughts on “Bill Would Boost USFS Funding”

    • My guess is that those funds would also go to prescribed fires, as well as pile burning. Burning activities are becoming more and more uncertain every year. Sometimes, there just aren’t enough burn days in the year, when the USFS has their full fire complements. Predicting when those days will happen, and having wildfires still burning is a problem in the fall.

      It used to be that timber crews would help out during burning season but, that era seems passed.

      Reply
  1. “especially in the wildland-urban interface”

    That would be nice, but a word search doesn’t indicate any preference for this area.

    Reply

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