The Trump administration’s new wildfire agency is taking shape at the Interior Department, coalescing around a mission to prioritize swiftly putting out fires on public lands, even as some experts question that strategy.
To some, the U.S. Wildland Fire Service offers an answer to the growing threat of large-scale wildfires by providing tighter coordination of the many federal agencies that respond to fires.
But its sudden emergence this year, as a drought-stricken West faces a high-risk fire season, has raised questions about how it will operate and how many staff have been reassigned. Tracy Stone-Manning, who served as the Bureau of Land Management director under the Biden administration, last week raised concerns that the shift of thousands of firefighters to the new agency will needlessly separate agency land managers from fire experts.
There is also the big philosophical debate about how to deal with wildfires and whether the service will side with the contention that wildfires must be quickly suppressed instead of, sometimes, allowed to burn. This would be a shift for some Interior agencies, such as the National Park Service, that have integrated fire into their management of ecosystems, with the idea that the natural cycle of burns and regrowth can actually nurture landscapes over time.
“If this is the beginning of a long-term split between fire management and land management, there is grave danger ahead,” said a National Park Service firefighter recently moved to the Wildland Fire Service. They were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
The agency has drawn scrutiny in Congress, with some Democrats questioning why so many employees have been moved without their approval or vetting. The shift began last month, according to internal Interior statements.
“Congress controls the purse strings for a reason,” said Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree, the leading House Democrat overseeing Interior’s budget. “When the administration shuffles thousands of employees across agencies, changes their reporting structures, and rebrands entire operations, that has real budget implications.”
At a Feb. 5 town hall with federal firefighters, Wildand Fire Service Chief Brian Fennessy, who was tapped for the job late last year, acknowledged the uncertainty.
“We’re talking about change, right? And with change, there comes uncertainty,” he said, according to a transcript obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News.
He added that disruptions would not happen all at once, especially with fire season nearing: “I would expect if you’re a firefighter out there listening to this, you’re going to be doing what you’ve always done.”
Interior did not answer detailed questions for this story and previously declined to say how many employees have been moved. In a statement, the department said it is “implementing a deliberate, phased approach to unify its wildland fire management … and is continuing coordination with Congress as that work progresses.”
The department said more details about the agency’s structure and funding will be shared “at the appropriate time.”
“Throughout this process, firefighting capabilities remain fully operational, and there is no gap in response capability or readiness for wildfire suppression activity,” the agency said.
Suppression focused
Although there has not been many public statements about the agency and its approach, fire suppression has emerged as a central tenet of Fennessy’s agency. It was created in January by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, pulling together operations from six agencies, including the National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Land Management.
During the February town hall, Fennessy called suppression the service’s “primary mission” in response to a slew of questions he said he received about whether putting out fires would overshadow other work like mitigation and tending the landscape. He said they would also do that other work.
“Just because we’re primarily a fire suppression agency does not relieve us of that responsibility to provide those services that we always have been,” he said.
The tension reflects broader uncertainty about how the agency will reshape Interior’s fire and land management. Roughly 3,900 employees from various Interior agencies have been moved to the Wildland Fire Service in recent weeks. Increasingly over recent decades, the bureaus and offices those employees came from integrated fire response with ecosystem stewardship, because fire reduces underbrush that fuels megafires and insect infestations like bark beetles, which have spread in warming climates.
Over time, many land managers have come to embrace wildfire as an inevitable — and often beneficial — force that shapes forests, grasslands and wildlife. In some cases, fires should be allowed to burn, said Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, an advocacy group of current and former wildland firefighters.
“All suppression, all the time, is basically a failed — failing and failed — strategy,” he said. “We are losing the war on wildfire, and the whole paradigm needs to shift to working with fire instead of fighting against fire.”
But when communities, historic structures or lives are at risk, decisions about whether to let fires take their course or extinguish them as fast as possible can quickly become political — as seen during last year’s Dragon Bravo Fire on the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park. After the blaze destroyed a historic lodge and damaged a water treatment facility, federal firefighters who initially allowed it to burn faced criticism from Arizona’s Democratic governor and some members of Congress. As hot, windy conditions intensified the fire, crews shifted to full suppression.
Some conservative lawmakers and timber industry advocates have pushed for increased logging on public lands, arguing that removing dead brush during timber harvests can reduce wildfire risk.
“We want to get back into actually harvesting timber,” Burgum said last year during a meeting of the Western Governors’ Association in Scottsdale, Arizona. “When [companies are] there, when they’re working, that’s part of the forest management that we need to reduce the fire load that exists in these forests.”
As fire planning shifts to the new agency, some land and fire experts worry the competing philosophies could clash rather than be reconciled.
Fire is “intimately intertwined“ with land management, the NPS firefighter said. “Attempting to solve problems in one area without the knowledge and expertise from the other will be doomed to failure,” they added.
Fennessy pushed back on some of those concerns during the town hall, and asked for patience as the agency develops.
He said the overarching mission of the agency is still being written, because it will take input from the executive team, firefighters and support staff.
“This is a new agency that we, not me, we are putting together,” he said.
A senior BLM official said the agency threatens to fracture land management over time through a brain drain and culture shift.
While many transferred firefighters will bring an integrated approach from their land management experience, that could erode as older staff retire and are replaced with new Wildland Fire Service employees, said the official, who was granted anonymity because they are not allowed to speak to the media.
Additionally, land managers have also become experienced fire managers out of necessity and removing fire from their authority will chip away at that expertise. Years from now, the use of fire as a tool on the landscape could be severely damaged as land managers lose authority over fire, and a suppression ethos drives the fire leaders, they said.
The official warned the shift could also kneecap BLM, as the loss of fire personnel — who represent as much as one-third of BLM’s staff — also cuts the bureau’s budget to do the many land improvement projects tied to fire, as well as recreation and habitat.
Forest Service, too?
Some see the consolidation as the first step in a broader Trump administration goal: absorbing the Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service firefighters. The much bigger Forest Service firefighting force handles the majority of public land fire response.
“I did not expect the Trump administration to be satisfied without the Forest Service,” said Ingalsbee. “It’s really not a consolidated, federal fire agency without them.”
The Trump administration last year asked Congress to create a Wildland Fire Service at Interior that would also absorb the Forest Service’s fire resources. But congressional appropriators first ordered a feasibility study, citing the potential bureaucratic overlap with the existing National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) that coordinates fire across public lands. Interior also already had an internal coordinating office, the Office of Wildland Fire.
Burgum has previously said coordination is a major problem for public land wildfires. He’s frequently cited a North Dakota wildfire during his time as the state’s Republican governor, saying delays in deploying federal air resources allowed that blaze to grow deadly.
Mark Ruggiero, a 40-year veteran of federal fire agencies who retired from the Interior’s existing central fire office, disagreed with the secretary’s assessment.
NIFC, based in Boise, can mobilize resources within minutes, and when there are delays, it’s usually in peak season because aircraft and equipment are already deployed, he said.
“I don’t know what [Burgum’s] referring to, but when there’s fires going and equipment is needed, the mobilization happens quickly,” Ruggiero said.
But Ruggiero said Interior’s consolidation could work if done carefully, noting Fennessy’s good reputation. Some groups, including the Western Fire Chiefs Association, have praised Fennessy, citing his experience both as a fire leader and, at the start of his career, as a BLM hotshot firefighter.
“They selected the right person to lead this effort,” he said.
Liz Klein, a former senior Interior official under the Biden administration, agreed the fire consolidation could make sense at Interior depending on the execution. Interior’s previous fire coordination office has been perceived as lacking authority to direct the various bureaus and offices, she said.
Klein also worked at Interior in 2010 during the Obama administration when a massive oil spill inspired the executive branch to create several new Interior offices through executive orders.
Following the Deepwater Horizon offshore explosion and oil disaster, which killed 11 workers, then-Interior Secretary Ken Salazar divided offshore energy responsibilities between three new entities — the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, and Office of Natural Resources Revenue.
The changes were implemented quickly during Obama’s first term with little political rancor and after a commission suggested to Congress a new agency was needed to replace a toxic offshore regulatory culture.
“There was certainly an interest on the part of the Obama administration to actually take steps and use executive authority where we could, and that’s what we did,” Klein said.
The Wildland Fire Service was also created by a secretarial order. But it has attracted the ire of Democratic appropriators, who’ve demanded Interior account for the movement of thousands of employees, and their associated budgets, without congressional input. Interior has not responded to a February letter from top Democrats overseeing the department that demanded a halt in the creation of the new agency and answers about staffing, coordination and budget, according to Pingree’s staff.
Maggie Sunstrum, a spokesperson for Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), said the fire service should include extensive preparation and consultation, with myriad groups and advocates, as well as lawmakers.
“Any effort by the Department to restructure a federal responsibility as large, as complex, and multi-disciplinary as wildland fire should have more directly involved Congress,“ Sunstrum said of Merkley’s position. “It also should also have included extensive consultations with management experts trained in government-specific organizational structure, operation, and finance, and incorporated comprehensive, long-term estimates of costs and benefits.”
The new service has also raised both intrigue and concerns among the rank and file, whose long-standing issues are low pay, understaffing, inadequate training and outdated equipment, said the NPS firefighter.
