“That's more than triple the amount of acreage that was treated in 2000,” said Mark Rey, the Agriculture Department undersecretary in charge of Forest Service operations. “It's not many times that you can talk about tripling the size, effectiveness and delivery of a federal program in that short of time.”

The Forest Service and Interior Department reported increasing the number of acres where trees and brush have been removed to reduce the risk of fire, as well as increasing funding for firefighting and partnerships with the private sector.

The self-congratulatory report came a day after Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry criticized the administration's environmental policies during a campaign stop at the Grand Canyon.

At the end of President Clinton's administration, land managers laid out a blueprint for managing the catastrophic fires that charred millions of acres in 2000. Their proposal, the National Fire Plan, is nearing the end of its fourth year.

Assistant Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett said the Bush administration has reduced risks to communities, improved the health of the forests and plans to build on its record using the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, which was signed by the president in December.

The new law cuts back on the environmental studies required for fire-prevention logging on at-risk forest lands and limits legal challenges to fuel-reduction projects.

Kerry voted against the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, but has endorsed elements of it, including community planning for threat-reduction projects. He also has said that at least 70 percent of money for the reduction of fuels should be spent in forests that surround communities.

About 60 percent of the money dedicated to forest treatment is now spent on areas where homes abut forests, Rey said. About half of the total acres treated fall into this category.

Jay Watson, director of the Wilderness Society's Wildland Fire Program, said the increase in funding by the Bush administration has come at the expense of community protection programs, which the administration has proposed wiping out in its budget for next year.

“The fire plan has succeeded when it comes to fire suppression. It has failed on community protection and ecological restoration," said Watson.

Land managers have harvested timber or used controlled blazes to remove excess growth from more than 2.5 million acres of forest and rangeland in this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. Last year, more than 2.7 million acres were cut or burned.

“What these figures show is that we have been dramatically moving forward with the program that the president called for just two years ago,” said Rey. “It's indisputable that the health of the forests and rangelands that have been treated is higher.”

In Utah, the number of acres treated to prevent forest fires has been small and shrinking in recent years, according to administration figures. The number peaked at 80,415 acres in the 2002 budget year and slipped to 53,257 thus far in this budget year.