Western lawmakers have used recent Interior Department and Forest Service 2006 budget hearings to criticize proposed cuts to wildland firefighting funds and delays in removing insect-ravaged stands of tinder-dry timber.

There's also bipartisan sentiment to get rid of the Bush administration's traditional method of determining wildfire suppression budgets. The federal agencies base funding requests to Congress on the average annual firefighting costs from the last 10 years, then later ask lawmakers for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of "emergency" supplemental funds if the account is drained by a busy fire season.

"The pattern we go through is to cut back on firefighting in the regular [appropriations] bills and then when fires occur, we put up all the money and somehow kid ourselves into believing this is budget discipline," said Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, a member of the subcommittee that holds the Interior Department's purse strings.

"If there are indications there are going to be significant fires, we should put the money into regular bills and if the fires don't occur, you can always - heaven forbid - give it back," said Bennett.

Much of the fire budgeting problem stems from the difficulty of accurately forecasting the severity of the fire season months in advance of knowing how quickly mountain snowpacks will melt in spring and summer. In 2002, the worst fire season in the past 50 years, 3.6 million acres had burned by late July. Yet by the end of the year, 7.2 million had gone up in smoke, driving federal costs to $1.66 billion.

Fire forecasting is made even more difficult this year by a topsy-turvy winter, when the Pacific Northwest has been sunny and unseasonably dry as Las Vegas, St. George and parts of the Southwest have battled flooding.

But in much of the Rocky Mountain West, the relentless drought parches on.

"In the Great Basin West, we are the driest in recorded water history and unless we get a wet spring, our forests will be increasingly vulnerable," said Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho.

Adding to the fire susceptibility of western woodlands is the infestation of bark beetles that leave broad swaths of forests dead and dry. Sales of insect-killed timber on Utah's Dixie National Forest have been appealed by environmental groups.

"Protests and petitions have prevented us from saving the Dixie forest from devastation by the beetles," complained Bennett. "If nature kills the trees, the trees deserve to be dead. But if humans kill the trees and turn them into houses, somehow that's evil. I do not support that view."

Interior Secretary Gale Norton says the Bush administration has aggressively tried to pre-empt a catastrophic 2005 fire season by thinning trees on over 12 million acres of public lands during the past four years, as much as had been done the previous eight years. With a $10 million increase in hazardous fuels reduction projects in the 2006 budget request, Norton said Interior agencies and the Forest Service hope to thin another 4 million acres by next year.

"The fire season is always a difficult time, as we see people's homes threatened and we fight against nature to protect lives and save property," said Norton, whose agency is asking for $756.6 million for wildland fire management, up $24 million from last year.

Yet Western lawmakers are steamed over the administration's proposed $283 million cuts in some fire management programs, including grants to help rural communities fight fires and prevent fuel buildup. Senators are warning such deficit-reducing moves may end up costing taxpayers more in the long run.

"You have to review this carefully, because the things we are cutting are really going to come back and haunt the government," Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., told Forest Service officials during a hearing last week.

2004 a fairly quiet, but costly, year

l Last year was a relatively mild fire season in the West, burning 1.4 million acres but still costing federal land agencies $920 million to suppress.

l Utah had the fourth-largest wildfire in the lower 48 states last year: the lightning-sparked Hawkins blaze, which consumed 35,292 acres and cost $2.8 million to fight.