Several people send me links to this NPR piece. The title is
Trump administration falls behind on wildfire prevention with risky fire season ahead
First, we’ll parse out the numbers, then we can think about the mechanics of doing the work and alternative hypotheses for what we find. I asked our friends at the Forest Service Press Office for the numbers that that the Forest Service has. Here they are, so let’s use them and go through the NPR story. First of all, let’s talk about Fiscal Years. They go from October 1 to September 30. So October, November, and probably January were before any Trump related cuts happened. It seems, though, as the NPR analysis was done on FACTs and used CY.
In 2025, the Forest Service reduced vegetation on almost 1.5 million fewer acres than in 2024, according to an analysis of the agency’s data by NPR and firefighting experts. It marks a significant drop from the more than 4 million acres of hazardous vegetation work done in the last year of the Biden administration.
There are no links to datasets as with the previous Grassroots study we looked at here. Just an “analysis of the agency’s data by NPR and firefighting experts.” Hopefully you don’t need to be a firefighting expert to look at columns of numbers of accomplishments on FACTs. I’m assuming that’s what they used.
The biggest decline was in prescribed burns, the low-grade fires intentionally set to clear dense underbrush, helping reduce the intensity of future wildfires. In 2025, the Forest Service burned only about half of the acreage that it did in both 2024 and 2023, according to an NPR analysis of agency records.
Using FY, it’s also about half of the PF of 2023 and 2024, but only a little under the PF of 2022, which I also believe was a Biden year. It makes you wonder whether FY 2023 and 2024 were anomalous in some way.
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In 2023, the Forest Service reduced hazardous vegetation on about 3.7 million acres, and in 2024 did more than 4 million acres.
Again, I can’t compare CY and FY.
That work fell during the first year of Trump’s second administration to 2.6 million acres, according to an analysis shared with NPR by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and Redstone GIS Consulting. That includes mechanically cutting and removing vegetation, in addition to burns.
Prescribed burning, which had reached over 1.6 million acres in both 2023 and 2024, fell to about 900,000 acres in 2025, according to an NPR analysis of agency data. The Forest Service, which analyzes its data based on a fiscal year that begins in October, says it burned 1 million fewer acres in fiscal year 2025.
If anyone has access to FACTS, maybe we could get the data by region by month by CY and take a look. Does the public have access to FACTS? If so is it hard to use?
The Forest Service said in a statement that the drop in prevention work is mostly due to staff being occupied with firefighting and because environmental conditions were not right for doing prescribed burns in the Southeast. The agency lost 16% of its workforce as of last summer, with 5,860 personnel leaving in the first six months of 2025 as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of government. Senate Democrats have raised concerns that such cuts have hampered the agency’s ability to prepare for wildfires.
The story, of course, doesn’t mention that the FS had bulked up about the same amount just prior, and that fire folks were protected, but not all the support folks, nor all the people doing the NEPA- but the latter shouldn’t show up for a year or two. We could also tell how accurate the FS statement was by looking at R8 over time. In fact, we could probably tell a lot by breaking it out by state, month and year.
In 2023, the Forest Service reduced hazardous vegetation on about 3.7 million acres, and in 2024 did more than 4 million acres. That work fell during the first year of Trump’s second administration to 2.6 million acres, according to an analysis shared with NPR by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and Redstone GIS Consulting. That includes mechanically cutting and removing vegetation, in addition to burns.
Again, we can’t compare CY to FY without looking ourselves. And FY 2025 had over twice as much WMO as FY 2024. Which to me was a bit surprising given the concerns about not doing enough WMO in this Admin.
So let’s look at the mechanics of how this works. To do PF or MT, you need an approved NEPA document. Conceivably those were all done and ready to go in CY2025 based on the prior Admin. Let’s look at how this works, take PF first. There’s a NEPA doc, there’s the right conditions, and if the fire folks are there.. they do it. Not necessarily support people, though, are lighting things off and watching. What other things would fire people be doing instead ? Perhaps with all those acres of WMO, they were monitoring those. The WMO acres were almost as large as PF in 2025 and higher than any other Fiscal Year. So maybe the missing support folks are less important for WMO than PF? But I’m not sure that makes sense. I imagine a team with WMO that needs support, not so much a local PF. You might think that those occur in the same seasons (please let me know if not) because when wildfires are most dangerous and resources are tight in the heat of the summer are not times to do either WMO or PF. I’m just thinking out loud here, so anyone who knows more about that, please tell us how it works.
Could doing more WMO than any other year affect the capacity to do PF? Or maybe they were told not to get grassland acres and focus on WUI (we had some WUI PF this past year in my neighborhood)? Maybe they ran out of funding for MT service contracts since IRA and IIJA bucks were used up? We could probably tell something by looking by month by Region. The original Grassroots study did provide that information.
Remember from the original GWF study:
Here’s what I said then:
Hmm. Region 2 and part of Region 4 (Utah) are doing exceptionally well. Note that the comparison is not September to September across the years. So actually Utah looks like its on its way to exceeding previous years.. making the same assumptions about what months are best for PF work. It would be interesting to see this broken out by PF and MT (back to The Peoples’ Database). Did fewer employees leave Utah, Colorado and Wyoming? Did they have the greatest amount in external grants for this work? Did they have a different mix of what kind of employees and contractors they use to do the work?
Maybe some Regions lost the folks who knew how to enter info into FACTS?
Or were the folks prepping the work redirected to timber sales without a fuel treatment component (that seems unlikely, depending on how the purpose and need is rationalized)?
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And of course, while some people left, others were hired by NGOs who received chunks of IRA and IIJA bucks to do.. hazardous fuel treatments. How did that balance out?
Who knows? It would be interesting to look deeper at the FACTs. And share your experience if you are currently working. Finally, I asked the Press Folks about the large amount of WMO. I know some people are concerned that it will go away. And of course other people are concerned that it will be used too much. This is their answer:
Our priority is reducing wildfire risk for communities, and we use every tool in the toolbox to do that. When lightning ignites a fire, we assess whether parts of the fire can safely help meet Forest Plan objectives, but that does not change our overall approach. The Forest Service maintains an aggressive initial attack posture to contain fires quickly and protect firefighters and the public.
In early May, I spent a couple days walking through Bitterroot National Forest’s (Montana) Hog-Sapphire prescribed fire, which was done April 8-10 of this year (2026). BNF claimed that they successfully burned 1600 acres, but I found that very little of that area had actually been burned, probably less than 100 acres. This fire was implemented mostly with drones dropping fire and also with some hand ignitions along a road. But the forest is usually still pretty wet in Montana in early April, and the drone drops resulted in mostly very small spot fires when they started fires at all. I estimate that less than 10% of their treatment area actually burned on sunny slopes, and near 0% burned on shady slopes. Very little ecological benefit appeared to be accomplished. Pine needles were the most likely to burn, followed by dry pinegrass, downed logs (which were just blackened on the surface, and not consumed), and lastly, a few small Doug fir. These “ladder fuels” were probably the main target, but the fire did not touch the majority. In the moister valley bottom along the road, where they apparently used drip torches, they killed some patches of short deciduous shrubs: wild rose, aspen, snowberry, ninebark, choke cherry, and serviceberry. If this prescribed burn is any indication, Forest Service claims of acres treated should be viewed with caution and skepticism. This action was done at huge taxpayer expense, and the public also paid with degraded air quality at a time of year when skies should be crystal clear.