Also last week, Forest Service appointed David Lytle as Acting Deputy Chief of Fires and Aviation Management. He was the Deputy Chief for R&D, and has had a career mostly in science and research administration (also was State Forester in Ohio, traditionally thought not to be a big fire state). From the Hotshot Wakeup’s coverage:
Lytle has been in federal service for over 15 years, starting as a post-doctoral research ecologist with the North Central Research Station, and spent a decade as a science center director for the US Geological Survey, in the US Department of the Interior. David also served as state forester and chief of the Division of Forestry with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. He also worked as a conservation scientist with The Nature Conservancy.
Now, wildfire people don’t necessarily think that this is a good move, because they would prefer someone with knowledge of wildfire operations. And no doubt key characters at the Department and the FS knew what the optics would be.
Let’s go back to what the FS has been saying. They don’t have enough bench strength, and can’t hire more SES folks (although they will be doing lower-level fire hiring?) and non-SES people can’t be acting for more than 180 days. So Lytle was available and had the SES quals, and is a placeholder until they get someone else. I know others may say “will this person be able to defend the FS from Interior encroachment?” After all, he has Interior in his background.
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Also last week, Interior hired Brian Fennessey of the Orange County Fire Authority,
Fennessy tentatively accepted the USWFS director role, pending the completion of a federal onboarding process, according to NBC Los Angeles.
It appears that this position was advertised nationally and open to non-federal applicants. Here’s the job advertisement. It appears to be an SES position.
Here’s what the job announcement said:
We are seeking an individual with extensive leadership and technical experience in wildland fire management, interagency coordination and strategic policy development, along with a proven ability to lead large, complex programs across federal, state, tribal and local stakeholders.
He’s super-experienced in the wildfire world.
Anyway, with the coordination efforts between USDA and the newly formed USWFS, it seems like this would be an important time to have an experienced person at the FS helm. I’m sure that there is a story as to “why this doesn’t appear to be happening” but I’d think that it would be important to the success of the USWFS effort to have yoked together two oxen of the same relative strength. There is always a reason, though, and I’m interested what people have heard.
Merv George is no longer with USFS? His short tenure as SO for RogueRiver-Siskiyou still has an impact. Several years without the annual conflagrations from roadless and wilderness.
The same Merv George who tried to deny his staff safety boot reimbursement on the Rogue-Siskiyou and was arrested in a sex trafficking investigation in February of this year? Word on the street is he’s coming to Region 5 as a Deputy Regional Forester.
SES’er and the low rung of political appointees protect themselves first and foremost and most I dealt with had little expertise in anything and few tangible achievements other than working the system – my question would be more of is this the beginning of the planned demise of USFS R&D?
I never saw any tangible impact from any senior leader in fire. We’d clump up at the Regional level in early Spring to go over any new changes and hear the latest “gung ho” buzzwords. Most of the time it was just wind in the wire, or time well wasted. It’ll take time for any new initiatives from the top to make much, if any, difference, and other than hearing how great the new leaders are, not much change.
I remember one notable experience where the WO put on a session on risk, and compounding risks. They misunderstood how cumulative risk is calculated that left the entire group dazed and confused. All in a days work, I reckon…..
That’s encouraging.. I guess? I always thought my job as a middle manager (and isn’t everyone, even the Chief, in some sense a middle manager?) was to keep workers working, uplift their concerns and needs (with some judgment) and keep them from unnecessary initiatives, bureaucracy and such-like. At the same time, some units have to be guinea pigs for new technology, etc. Of course, the middle manager gets squeezed on both sides… “if you were a good planning director, your forests would be chomping at the bit to do Plan Revisions” vs. from the forests “who are you to try to sell us on doing plan revisions?”
Lytle Comments:
Forest Service Fire and Aviation Management (FAM) moved from the NFS Deputy Area around 1990–1991 as part of the “New Perspective” initiative. It was thought that FAM, because of its “all risk” mission, was better suited to the State and Private Deputy Area and would balance out the “span of control”. It was at the same time that FAM and the Forest Service received a “black eye” from the criminal scandal that unfolded with the Historical Aircraft Exchange Program, whereby the Forest Service would acquire retired C-130A and P-3A Orion aircraft from the Department of War in exchange for the aging C-119 airtankers. At the end of the transaction, FAM let slip the titles to the planes, placing them in private ownership. When Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the Federal Government lost its air tankers to Operation Desert Shield.
FAM’s budget, though, grew enormously over the next 35 years, outstripping all Agency budget line items (BLIs) and, in many years, outspending its appropriation, causing “fire borrowing.” Enormous appropriation increases and historic hiring occurred after the National Fire Plan. Weight rooms, diesel pick-up trucks, and expanded hotshot crews appeared on many national forests. Ashville, NC, was home to a hotshot crew! Utah and Prescott, Arizona, stood up hotshot crews in an orgy of spending without a concomitant reduction in acres burned.
The Federal Land Assistance Management Enhancement (FLAME) Act, a failed 2009 Appropriation Act “gimmick,” unleashed a fire-breathing dragon in section 503 by requiring the “National Cohesive Strategy,” whose motto is in part “…as a Nation, live with fire,” which unleashed the immolation of lands of all ownerships. Since the adoption of the National Cohesive Strategy, wildfires have become significantly larger and costlier. The great economist Milton Friedman once quipped, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” So, too, with fire suppression under FAM, there is a funding shortage.
In 2023, the Nere ‘do well forest supervisor of the Eldorado National Forest was promoted to Associate Deputy Chief of State and Private Forestry for FAM—his sole job! This was after his stellar performance suppressing the Caldor Fire, which immolated Grizzly Flats, CA.
After he retired in 2025, FAM was designated its own Deputy Area, and a caretaker served as the Acting Deputy Chief until her recent retirement.
Enter the current acting Deputy Chief, David Lytle, and the new Deputy Area. Now the Forest Service has five Deputy Areas. FAM also has a Senior Executive Service Director (Vacant), a brace of deputy directors, and a phalanx of assistant directors stretching from DC to Boise, nearly the span of Ecosystem Management Coordination (EMC)! FAM’s organization is using a classic “poison pill” approach common in the corporate world to make the Forest Service unattractive to Interior and its new U.S Wildfire Service Director. The Deputy Area is top-heavy with too many chiefs, and in 2026, the National Forest System burned acres might set a record!
Chief Fennessy Letter
Dear Chief Fennessy:
I wish you Godspeed in your appointment as the inaugural director of the United States Wildland Fire Service. You chose to wrangle a set of Bureaus within the Department of the Interior that have various and sometimes conflicting missions and Organic Acts authorizing their existence. And you will need the best of skills, diplomacy, and fortitude when and if legislation is passed to compel the Forest Service, along with its Fire and Aviation Management Deputy Area, into the new service. No sooner will you have thought that you achieved a compromise on the uniform style, patch size, and content with the Bureaus, and along comes the Forest Service, kicking and screaming!
I am attaching the Organic Administration Acts for the Bureaus and the Agency you will eventually lead. Fire and its uses are not expressly approved under any of the Organic Acts for the Bureaus that have them, except for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and its National Indian Forest Resource Management Act, which authorizes “controlled burning”. The Department of the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies’ annual Appropriations Bill requires emergency wildfire suppression, presuppression, and post-fire emergency rehabilitation. Appropriations law is quite clear in its intent. Funding for your new organization requires wildfire suppression, as Congress has declared it an emergency. So that means “confine and contain” as used in the Dragon Bravo Fire of July 2025 on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon is not a legal strategy, even if the National Park Service thinks so. Indeed, the Organic Act for the National Park Service authorizes timber sales for all National Park units, while livestock grazing is precluded only in Yellowstone National Park.
The Bureau of Land Management, a combination of the General Land Office and the U.S. Grazing Service, does not have an Organic Act. Some people call the Federal Land Policy Management Act (FLPMA), P.L. 94-579, the BLM’s Organic Act, but in reality, it is a land use and governance act for special uses, mining, and also covers the USDA Forest Service in terms of Occupancy and Uses within the National Forest System. Conversely, the BLM is subject to the National Forest Management Act for its Public Domain forest lands and its Oregon and California Railroad Lands in Southern Oregon. Did you know that the BLM has approximately 800 acres called “Meadowood Special Recreation Management Area” next to George Mason’s home on Mason Neck, VA?
The Bureau of Indian Affairs National Indian Forest Resource Management Act (NIFRMA) in section 25 U.S.C. § 3103(4)(D) authorizes Controlled Burning.
The US Fish and Wildlife Service has no Organic Act and, under any of its legislative authority, has no authorization to use fire.
The National Park Service does have an Organic Act (Act of August 25, 1916, Chapter 408 (39 Stat. 535)) that authorizes, among other things, discretionary timber sales and grazing except in Yellowstone.
The USDA Forest Service is based on four laws. The holy grail, though, is the Organic Administration Act (OAA) of 1897. That Act set Congressional management prerogative for the Forest Reserves, the embryonic national forest, and its protections and uses. Of the protections the Secretary (at the time Interior) was charged with…”Secretary… shall make provisions for the protection against destruction by fire.” All other subsequent laws passed by Congress either refine or enhance the OAA. These laws are the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act (MUSYA), the Resources Planning Act (RPA), and the National Forest Management Act (NFMA).
I am optimistic that your leadership will reduce the “Big Box” and wanton, cavalier “firing operations,” as well as euphemistic characterizations bordering on “Orwellian Newspeak” about how wildfires are being suppressed.
One thing in legislation that you will have to work hard to repeal is the Federal Land Assistance Management Enhancement Act (FLAME), a budget gimmick to solve “Fire Borrowing,” which failed to achieve its intent, but left us with the insidious “Cohesive Wildfire Management Strategy,” in Section 503, which the Federal Land Management Agencies (FLMA’s) took with fervor to invoke a warped vision of “…as a Nation live with fire.”
The federal lands that your bureau will be servicing are all based on conservation of the “goose that lays the golden egg.” To wantonly and abusively apply immolation through fire is on the way to killing the goose!
With best regards,