Trump aims to consolidate federal firefighters into one agency

That alarmed Timothy Ingalsbee, fire ecologist and former wildland firefighter, enough to visit Capitol Hill in early June and urge lawmakers to take a hard look before making a huge leap.

“The major danger of this proposal is that it will sever fire management from land management,” said Ingalsbee, who’s also the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a nonprofit based in Eugene. “We’re just going to be locked into that reactive mode of emergency firefighting — divorced from any pre-fire mitigation, post-fire recovery or rehabilitation and community fire preparedness.”

According to the draft order, the new service’s “immediate priority” would be fire suppression, and the National Association of Forest Service Retirees, which includes several former USFS chiefs, similarly believes that solely focusing on snuffing all fire out is a step backward.

“It could actually increase the likelihood of more large catastrophic fires, putting more communities, firefighters and resources at risk,” wrote Steve Ellis, chair of the organization, in a letter to Congress. “What the public really needs is for the administration and Congress to address the conditions that fuel these large fires.”

About 65,000 wildfires burned nearly 9 million acres across the country last year, including a record 1.9 million acres in Oregon.

To Ingalsbee’s surprise, Trump walked back the draft’s outright suppression language in his final executive order, issued last Thursday. Instead, the president more so focused on modernizing firefighting through things like enhanced mapping capabilities and eliminating burdensome regulations, including those related to prescribed fire.

During an Oval Office address on June 10, however, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Brooke Rollins, his counterpart in USDA, emphasized that expanding national timber production will be a central strategy in addressing hazardous fuel loads, which runs against scientific consensus.

“We are working at both of our agencies to eliminate all red tape, cut costs and increase our timber sales and active management to reduce the intensity of wildfires when they start,” said Sec. Rollins.

In a 2023 report, the 50-member Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, convened by Congress to offer recommendations on addressing the wildfire crisis, wrote that “while fire is central to this crisis, it is also a critical part of the solution.” The report and other studies affirm that prescribed fire and thinning — a much more selective process than wholesale logging — is the most effective wildfire mitigation strategy.

After the 2020 Labor Day Fires, an analysis by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica found that public lands logged in the five years prior burned with the same intensity as those that hadn’t been cut because even logging doesn’t remove brush, stumps and other fuel.

While Ingalsbee agreed the final executive order is an improvement compared to the draft, Trump mandated the merger occur within 90 days, potentially causing disruption as wildfire season peaks. Further, the president requested $6.55 billion for the new service before Congress has even approved the change, and Ingalsbee still believes that consolidation will have negative ecological impacts.

“Different agencies have different land bases with different ecosystems and fire regimes,” said Ingalsbee. “If you’re just fighting fire in a conventional way, one land unit to the next, you’re going to run contrary to the needs of the specific land base.”

“Congress has not authorized or provided funding for this consolidation and telling the agencies to do this in 90 days, at the height of summer fires, is literally playing with fire that will only burn our communities,” Senator Jeff Merkley wrote in a statement.

During his trip to Washington, D.C., Ingalsbee met with 47 representatives and senators, and he said many weren’t aware of the proposal. While most agreed that any sort of consolidation requires more careful research and should not be done while wildfires are burning, Ingalsbee heard a common refrain from Republican officeholders: “We cannot publicly oppose Donald Trump.”

Divorced from fighting fires, Ingalsbee also stressed that USFS would essentially be gutted, and it will if Congress abides by the agency’s budget request for the next fiscal year. USFS is asking for $2.4 billion in discretionary appropriations come October, compared to $8.9 billion in FY2025.

This includes cutting operations and maintenance, which covers employee salaries and other administrative expenses, and the budget for national forests by about one-third. Funding for the agency’s research programs alongside the State, Private and Tribal Forestry account, which includes grants to bolster state and volunteer fire capacity, would be completely eliminated.

“The FY 2026 Budget recognizes that local partners should be empowered to fund their wildfire protection capabilities. While the Budget does not request new funding for this account, it will strategically utilize existing carryover balances to responsibly and effectively close this program,” the USFS document states.

Before the Senate Committee on Appropriations last week, USFS Chief Tom Schultz admitted the agency is currently using money designated for other state grants to fund severance packages for employees who took deferred resignation, ignoring direction from Congress.

“This isn’t a consolidation plan — it’s a demolition plan,” said Ingalsbee. “Nearly everything the Forest Service does is tiered towards fire ... so ripping that out of the Forest Service begs the question, ‘What will be left?’” From his perspective, it’ll just be timber sales and hiking trails.

Merging USFS into DOI isn’t a new idea either. According to the Congressional Research Service, similar proposals stretch across 13 different administrations dating back to 1911, and the Government Accountability Office assessed its feasibility in 2009. The office’s report identified differences in culture, organization and statutory authority as major barriers.

“Many officials and experts suggested that if the objective of a move is to improve land management and increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the agencies’ diverse programs, other options might achieve better results,” reads the report, such as improving collaboration while maintaining separation.

All of this is occurring, of course, while land management agencies reel from widespread firings and deferred resignations. As previously reported by Columbia Gorge News, USFS has lost at least 500 employees in Oregon and Washington since February. Shultz said that USFS is trying to re-hire the 1,400 fire-certified employees who previously left, and there was already a shortage of wildland firefighters prior to recent reductions in force. Ingalsbee worries another major reorganization will further alienate wildland firefighters.

“Every one of them will be terminated from their career position in their home agency,” he said. “There’s no trust that they’re going to be cared for by their federal employer.”

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