This is an interesting story from E&E News, not least because the headline and tagline are:
Must Congress OK Wildfire Program Mergers? Trump Officials Aren’t Sure
The administration has consolidated fire response on Interior land and is pushing for the department to absorb Forest Service firefighting.
Whereas the story seems to say “different forces within the Administration seem to want different things.” Predictably, USDA seems to want to hang on to its firefighting capacity (and budget). My understanding is that reporters don’t write headlines, maybe AI does?
Some of the recent news stories (and opinion) don’t seem to be very clear on whether they mean 1) combining Interior agencies’ wildfire folks (which is currently going on) or 2) moving FS wildfire people over or 3) both. This story seems to focus on 2.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who has led an effort by the administration to consolidate the fire program across public lands, declined to confirm for Senate appropriators Wednesday that he believes Congress must approve his proposal.
Confusingly, “public lands” is an expression generally used for BLM (e.g. the Public Lands Foundation). So it’s hard to tell if Congress is against combining within Interior and if they were, they should probably have said something before now.
Elsewhere on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who oversees the Forest Service, said while talks are going on between the federal agencies, she suspected Congress would need to weigh in.
“My understanding is it does require congressional approval,” Rollins told reporters after a budget hearing. “But these two organizations have existed successfully as individual organizations for decades and decades and decades now. So it isn’t quite as easy as saying, ‘OK, now we’re going to put them together.’”
She said there were conversations being had at both the Interior and Agriculture departments on the subject. “We want to be as efficient and as aligned as we possibly can be,” she said.
The USDA didn’t immediately respond to a request Thursday for comment on the different perspectives. Interior said in a statement it “will do everything in accordance with the law.”
The divergent comments are a glimpse at how the Trump administration is reacting internally to frustrated efforts championed by Burgum to build a massive new fire agency within his department.
Because, under Burgum, it appears that there is a “massive new fire agency” within DOI – so is that effort “frustrated”?.
Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told House appropriators last week the administration will soon seek a formal request for proposals to conduct the study,
which would be completed in around six months — close to the end of the current fiscal year.
Schultz also told the House panel that the Forest Service and Interior have made progress on consolidating work that doesn’t require merging the agencies. That would include firefighter training, for instance, he said……In the meantime, Simpson said, he hopes the agencies consider combining efforts on acquisition of firefighting equipment, among other measures short of full consolidation.
I would say that from what I’ve heard through wildfire networks, R Congressfolk are wary of moving USDA to Interior. For whatever reason, Interior has a tendency during D Admins to make “sharp stick in the eye” decisions about federal lands.. against R governors’ and Congressfolks’ wishes.. after elections that don’t go their way. Western R Congressfolk might still be feeling the pinch of the Rock Springs RMP, the Lava Ridge Wind project, or the Montana RMP amendments. USDA generally has other things on its mind than partisan provoking, or appointees are less ideological, or whatever.
So whether Burgum technically needs Congressional approval or not may not really be the key question. It might not be worth the political capital to go against his own folks in Congress. Plus D’s (at least the ones I pay attention to) seem to be against anything proposed by this Admin, so there’s that.
I’d say the Firefolk Transfer idea is DOA, but we’ll see.