Montana Lawmakers Press Interior Officials for Details on New Federal Wildfire Agency
Ahead of a high-risk fire season, the Trump administration is revamping its wildland firefighting apparatus by reallocating 3,900 firefighters to the U.S. Wildland Fire Service. The strategy to streamline the federal response has raised concerns among some state lawmakers.
By Tristan Scott
As the drought-stricken West braces for a high-risk fire season, the Trump administration’s newly minted U.S. Wildland Fire Service is beginning to take shape, consolidating thousands of wildfire personnel from across a half-dozen agencies into a “single unified” bureau, according to Interior Department officials leading the initiative, which they framed as an effort to streamline the federal response.
Approximately 3,900 employees from a range of Interior agencies have been shifted to the Wildland Fire Service in recent weeks.
For some, the restructured system signals a new era of efficiency in wildland firefighting that’s desperately needed as the threat of catastrophic wildfires intensifies; it will streamline resources, improve coordination and clear bureaucratic hurdles that have hindered the federal response. For others, its arrival ahead of what fire forecasters predicted “will undoubtedly be an active fire season” raised concerns about agency readiness.
In Montana, lawmakers serving on the Environmental Quality Council (EQC) this week received a primer on the revamp from Interior officials who framed it as a “historic modernization” of federal wildfire management coalescing around a mission to prioritize fire suppression on public land. Some of the elected officials pushed back on that characterization, questioning the logic of disrupting a cooperative strategy that has endured for decades and demanding specific examples of how a realignment on such a grand scale would improve the wildland firefighting apparatus and benefit Montana communities and taxpayers.
“Frankly, everyone has a lot of serious questions about this new Wildland Fire Service, and as a firefighter myself who has worked within the system, I personally have some real questions about where we are headed,” said Sen. Willis Curdy, D-Missoula, who worked as a wildland firefighter for 38 years in the U.S. Forest Service’s Region 1. “We put together a … wildland firefighting system over the last 20, 30, 40 years and spent a lot of time and energy removing the kinks and improving the efficiency and movement and use of wildland firefighting resources, so … I want some real pinpoint examples of how this new system is actually going to be beneficial.”
Brad Shoemaker, the Wildland Fire Service’s fuels and post-fire specialist, told Curdy and other EQC members who gathered on March 26 in Helena that although the unification effort to “make our wildfire response capabilities more efficient, accountable, and better aligned with the scale of today’s wildfire challenge” is already underway, lawmakers should not anticipate any major policy shifts during the 2026 wildland fire season.
“Initially, at least for this year … we are doing a lot of assessments. We are looking at what things are working and what needs to change,” Shoemaker, speaking over a video feed from Washington, D.C., said. “We are not looking at ’26 as the year where we go in and make any significant changes to policy. We will operate in same way we did in ’24 and ’25.”
The new Fire Service merges wildland fire operations from six federal agencies, including the National Park Service, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, Office of Aviation Services, and Office of Wildland Fire.
However, the consolidation does not include absorbing the U.S. Forest Service. At least, not this year.
“We’re not there yet,” Troy Heithecker, the regional forester for the Rocky Mountains region of the USFS, said at the EQC meeting, noting that a feasibility study was underway to assess “the efficacy and possibility of moving the U.S. Forest Service’s wildland firefighting structure into the Wildland Fire Service. “We are still a standalone operation in the Forest Service. For now.”
The Trump administration last year asked Congress to include the Forest Service’s firefighting resources among those merged with the new agency, but congressional appropriators objected, citing the potential for overlap with the existing National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), which is based in Boise and coordinates fire across public land jurisdictions. They also cited potential conflict with the Interior Department’s internal coordinating office, the Office of Wildland Fire.
But that doesn’t mean the Forest Service won’t be integrated into the new agency in the future, a development that appears likely given Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s appetite for whole sale reform of the federal firefighting framework. As the former governor of North Dakota, Burgum has repeatedly cited coordination as a shortcoming for public land managers, referring to delays he encountered while trying to deploy aerial firefighting resources.
Rep. Tom France, D-Missoula, said he has strong concerns about the Forest Service’s eventual integration with the Fire Service. He said he worried that funneling those resources away from the Forest Service would impede its ability to mobilize personnel.
“There is concern that the Forest Service is already struggling to meet its mandates just because of the reductions to [its workforce], and that’s certainly been accelerated under this administration,” France said, adding that cleaving away the agency’s wildland firefighting funds would. “The only budget line item that’s increased is fire. So I’m concerned that if the Forest Service transfers all its fire authority and its fire budget to this new agency, that will further reduce the ability of the Forest Service to meet its legal duties to provide recreation, clean water, wildlife, timber, just because there won’t be the people or the budget to do that.”
Brian Yablonski, an EQC member and the CEO of the Property and Environment Research Center, expressed concerns that the new agency places “an overemphasis on suppression.” He asked the officials how they intend to balance the new agency’s focus on fire suppression with the widely accepted view that wildfire, when it doesn’t threaten communities and infrastructure, is an important factor supporting healthy and resilient forests and ecosystems.
“How do you recognize that there needs to be something on the other side of the ledger that makes sure we don’t get to that point of having too much wood in the woods again?” Yablonski asked.
Heithecker said the renewed focus on suppressing fire in the expanding wildland urban interface (WUI) is a reflection of expanding population centers and infrastructure, “so we can’t just let every fire burn.” However, he said the more fuels treatment and other wildfire mitigations that forest managers can perform ahead of a wildfire is going to be the strongest defense against extreme wildfire.
“The more that we can do before those fires break out to create healthy, resilient forests, the better the outcome is going to be when those fires do hit,” he said.