The Hotshot Wakeup and various others have predicted this. From Semafor. Note that this is bipartisan since Sheehy is an R and Padilla is a D.
Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy is teaming up with California Sen. Alex Padilla on a bill to organize wildfire response under a new National Wildland Firefighting Service within the Interior Department, according to details first shared with Semafor.
The bill would require the Agriculture and Interior secretaries to combine their wildfire operations under the new agency, with a specific budget and plans for a Senate-confirmable director.
Sheehy said the current bureaucratic organization under multiple departments had “failed” firefighters and led to towns being engulfed by wildfires: “The time is now to reshape our approach to American wildfire management and start fighting fires better, stronger, and faster.”
The GOP senator, who founded an aerial firefighting operation in Montana, is now on a half-dozen bipartisan fire-related bills — one of which, to improve wildfire forecasts, advanced through committee this week.
Gee, what could go wrong with this? New dispatch centers for the new agency would be needed in every NF, BLM District, etc. Or would they be housed in existing fed offices?
I was at Zigzag Ranger Station, yesterday, in Mt. Hood NF; Currently the ZZ Hot Shots and FS engine crew are under the line manager authority of the District Ranger.
>> Will there be a new manager, ON SITE, to oversee what had previously been the USFS fire organization? Someone needs to be there to manage Initial Attack, etc., right? Or will that be handled remotely?
>> What about RX burn activities? Will all of that be turned over to new outfit in Dept. Interior?
>>>>>>>>>>. This amazing idea seems like a perfect challenge for Musk and his Dept. of Government Efficiency; Can anyone say duplication?
It’s good to look for creative solutions for challenging problems but some of the stuff that’s being tossed out does NOT pass the red face test.
1973 was my first fire season w/ USFS and I’ve been around the agency, in varying roles, ever since. I’ve seen good ideas and plenty of bad ones.
I suspect that if Senator Sheehy’s dreams come true, most and perhaps nearly all fire suppression resources will be private contractors. He is after all the founder and until a couple of months ago the CEO of Bridger Aerospace, one of the federal government’s largest aerial firefighting contractors. This privatization model fits well with the philosophy of DOGE. FS/BLM oversight will be largely budget and contract admin.
Listening to what Senator Sheehy has said, he is very interested in better conditions and pay for the federal workforce. And aerospace is already contracted, so…???? So we don’t think he means what he says and puts into legislation? Here’s a link to an interview with him. https://thehotshotwakeup.substack.com/p/senator-tim-sheehy-after-the-horrific
As a native of the Pacific NW and co-founder and current core-team member of FiresScape Mendocino, I am really glad to see “Wildfire” get more attention in Congress.
My experience from Australia tells me bigger organisations don’t work and often become bigger empires.
Regional and community fire fighting teams are important, thats where key focus should be.
It is best to resolve what the problems are and learn effectively the lessons that need to be learnt and capture and share these.
And become displaced from the communities affected, and are subject to national political whims,, or AI ones trained politically. Those would be my fears as well.
There are many rational arguments to be made for this in terms of efficiency and clarity and ability to fire fire as well as possible.
At the same time, it seems like it’s a part of a movement I tend to resist toward centralizing power and giving it to a more overtly political department. The further the decisions are made from the local places, the less well this tends to work for them. Plus centralizing tends to move away from transparency and accountability – think Albuquerque Service Center.
I suspect those initiating it will be at least somewhat sensitive to that, but institutional power aggrandizement tends to have its own gravity and the fire industrial complex is likely to be no exception. I also am wary of NOAA and NASA- in love with their satellites, models and AI and possibly growing further from fire practitioners.
Probably the worst idea since Albuquerque Service Center!
Grassroots Wildland Firefighters have been working on this for a long time. There are definitely many camps out there in support and against such a concept. As a fire practitioner for the USFS and NPS for 35 years, I have been contemplating a Unified Fire Organization for years if not decades. The fire budget now takes up more than 1/2 of the USFS budget – this is not going down anytime soon. We have 2 primary Departments (Ag and DOI) and within those Departments 5 agencies. What tends to be most maddening is the duplication and redundancies of ‘systems’: 2 different IT systems; 2 different training and qualifications systems; 2 different hiring systems; 2 different budget systems (and inconsistencies even between DOI units); 2 different position descriptions; 2 different medical standard systems; different background checks; you get my drift – I have lots more. There is an unbelievable amount of waste in people’s time and resources in what I just described.
“Removing fire from land management” is not the boogyman you think it is. Most if not all fire folks I work with have a deep connection with natural resources and they would not want it any other way and neither would I. I don’t see us emulating CAL FIRE (but we do need to advocate for pay and benefits parity if we are to half a chance of retaining a strong federal response). I do already see many aspects of federal fire program already under national control (Hotshots, Smokejumpers, Helicopters, Air Tankers) Engines and Type 2 hand crews are still somewhat under the direction of District Rangers, but even that grip is loosening. Change is hard and I do not believe this is change for the sake of change. 25 years ago we promised Congress if they gave us (fed fire agencies) more money (National Fire Plan), we could bend the suppression curve down. The last 25 years proves we top heavy, have less firefighters on the ground and experiencing ever more dangerous and destructive wildfires. We did not deliver on our promise to the American people. It’s time we consider transformative changes for the next 50 years…. A National Fire Service is worthy of consideration.
Thanks for this Kelly! I was trying to explain why consolidation could help.. your “2 different” explanation yesterday, but I think the scope of issues is difficult for folks outside government to imagine.
Separating wildland fire management from land management is a very stupid idea that will have disastrous consequences.
This new video may help explain the “problem.” https://youtu.be/7DtQAGK92mo?si=PiFLXEulFwkPgEVb
If the link doesn’t work, search “the fire problem full documentary”
I appreciate your strong sentiment, but we all need to hear WHY you believe this will be so disastrous. I believe too many people take a short cut and convince themselves that a National Fire Service ‘automatically’ is removed from the land management agencies and will be shifted to the Department of Homeland Security. That is certainly one option, albeit quite unpopular.
I really like this documentary. Unfortunately the title ‘The Fire Problem’ is actually A People Problem. Fire is happy doing its thing – it’s not the problem… it’s people that interrupt this natural element. I love the unrealistic idea of large landscape burning, I’ve been trying for decades. Here are the elements that shut me down: Too smoky, too hot, too cold, too risky, too big, not enough people, too expensive, might escape, not on my watch….decision makers kick the can and wash their hands, there are few incentives but plenty of consequences.
MTSmoke, I should know better than to comment on a video until I’ve watched all of it. However, skimming through it, it looks like a really great video! But, and I may have to edit my concern, single solutions to complex problems seldom profit. Yes, we need more fire on the land; but, the ecosystems, coupled with the weather of the West does not allow for a full blown, Rx fire shift. I think New Mexico may(?) have learned their lesson on that one.
Apache-Sitgreaves AZ, Fire dependent, lots of natural wildfire, large fire organization, and even then carrying out a successful Rx burn program was a hand onto your seat operation. We probably had escapes – some small, some quite large, on 20% of our burns/managed wildfire! To quote an old time fire staff, “ putting fire on the ground to stop fires is more complexticated than that!
Well MTSmoke, I watched the entire video. It is a good “fire centric” presentation, that makes for some thoughtful discussions. However, I didn’t see one forester in the whole thing! I never saw, other than in passing, the discussion of treating timber stands through mechanical means, then putting fire on the ground.
If, folks think we (FS) will burn up tens of millions of dollars of timber, incinerate watersheds, eviscerate wildlife populations, just to put fire on a landscape then I got some beachfront property in Arizona! And as for fire IMT’s determining values at risk, that’s done by the Agency Administrator, in their delegation of authority to the IMT. At least, that’s how it supposed to work; the IMT’s work for the Unit.
It is a good video, it just centralizes the discussion from the fire shop – and it’s NOT the fire service, it’s the forest service…. Points to ponder for sure.
Here’s the text of the bill …
https://ciosenus.app.box.com/s/w4pmx57i3hfcqq8jaul3narpwcrdcasz
Could this fire fighting combination be accomplished with a proper change to a USDI Forest Service? Putting the Forest Service back into the land management department it should always have stayed in prior to 1905. Separating ecosystem management and public lands management and recreation and, and, and, from the meat, corn, and soybean production Department.
Uh, no! The FS belongs in the Department of Ag, because it was founded as an output, commodity based Agency. The founding concerns were water, timber supply and grazing – all quantifiable! The move, over the past 55 years, to make them fit into the “Parkie” widget is just erosion of the original mission. Timber and grazing are easy enough, but the water was based on Western water – not Riparian Rights; water as a Real Property.
Fire was a concern but was easily handled by a local, from the ground up organization, employing everyone on the local Unit. It worked well until someone decided a new mousetrap was “finer than frog hair, split three ways!”
Past 55 years would go back to 1970 – the heyday of forest and old-growth liquidation by the FS with the highest annual timber outputs by far. Not very “Parkie” like to say the least. I think your view of the FS mission from the start is a little off. The FS was started in 1905 by Pinchot and Roosevelt as a reaction to the liquidation of timber on private lands by timber industry, so that the public lands would not suffer the same fate. Pinchot was appalled by the beginnings of FS clearcut practices that had barely begun during his last living years, compared to the clearcutting heydays from 50s through 1989 and Dwyer injunction. (As written about in “The Big Burn” by Timothy Egan). FS were such “good stewards” of forest and grazing management that Congress had to pass multiple laws to reign them in (sort of) – National Forest Management Act and Taylor Grazing Act (and NEPA, ESA). Neither of the laws slowed them much, as the timbering and overgrazing continued basically until successful lawsuits intervened.
“Fire easily handled by local …”. Wasn’t there a rather large fire in 1910? Oh yes, the “Big Burn” of 3 million acres in little more than a weekend driven by high wind. The same element that will continue to drive large fires today no matter how much fuels reduction and firefighting money is thrown or dropped on it.
TSW Reader, you may want to go back and review history of the FS; water, grazing and timber was the reason for founding. 1989 was the highest cut year for timber production and the Courts and Congress were the meddlers in charge of the environmental Regs that came about. Not that they were bad, but even they had their start with Howard Zhaniser and his band of Wilderness proponents. Had the FS settled with the Zhaniser crew, I doubt the extremes of the environmental movement would have come about. Interesting times in the government, I think, you ought to read his (Zhaniser’s) book!
One thing for sure, the FS has managed to destroy most of the timber industry in the West, leaving the taxpayers to pay for fuels mitigation – i.e. logging. Good thing most lands East of the 100th Meridian are blowing and going in modern, true, forest management.
Yes and the BLM has been targeted in the past as the “Bureau of Grazing and Mining” or whatever (couldn’t locate the derogatory term using a search engine). To some, BLM is worse for the environment due to the land it occupies is used for energy production. BLM also is more politicized, which leads to broader political swings, which I don’t think is good for anybody, particularly locals and employees.
I’m not sure the BLM is more unstable politically from the USFS. A friend who is up the ranks there says they all understand their mission to be to provide certainty for large-scale energy development. I am curious, though, why the proposed new legislation hands control of the new fire agency to the DOI, not Forest Service.
Zeeko, my guess would be that Interior has more agencies in wildfire to round up BLM, Parks, USFWS and BIA, so easier to move one (FS) to that group.
But I don’t know… did it come from the Wildfire Commission report?
Mildly entertaining to see some of the consternation at this idea from the rather, uh, trumpy, elements of the crowd here. Thought you voted for change? Roll fire functions into interior and watch the USFS that you purport to care about atrophy to near nonexistence following the gradual carveout of applicable environmental laws and the shunting of most funding towards firefighters, our redblooded american heroes. FS’ll hang on marginally to provided subsidies to the right kind of Americans engaged in the right kind of government subsidized jobs, of course.
Shhh. Most don’t want to hear that kind of thinking here.
But do you think the newly minted firefighters will clean the toilets and change out the toilet paper in them, since they are no longer ‘forestry technician’ (who never threw paint at a tree to save their lives?).
Would be interesting to see them either demanded to do real work for all 40 hours or so of their pay week, or told they only get paid if on a fire.
Anon, no, it’s just we’ve sat and watched the fire organization go from inclusive to exclusive, stove piped, prettied up and not near as successful, but way more costly, as in the past! Put the local firefighters in as Forest techs. Make your magical organization of firefighters work under FEMA, and keep them OUT of the Rx fire program…. That’d work!
Why FEMA and not Interior?
It’s THE recognized emergency management group; it would keep from muddying up interior. I think they, FS, USFWS, etc could then manage instead of spend…..
Hi Anonymous: How does this fit your equation (I know zip about wildfire fighting and less about USFS employment practices): https://forestpolicypub.com/2025/02/06/new-firefighting-agency-in-interior/