President Donald Trump and his top Cabinet officials have repeatedly blamed the most catastrophic wildfires on poor forest management. His administration, however, appears to be lagging on that very work.
In the first nine months of this year, the United States Forest Service slowed its rate of prescribed burns, tree thinning and other fire-prevention work across its hundreds of millions of acres of land, according to an outside analysis of U.S. Forest Service data being circulated by Democratic senators.
Sens. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and nine other Democratic senators wrote the Forest Service on Tuesday, demanding details about staffing levels and plans to meet wildfire mitigation needs.
The letter, shared exclusively with NOTUS, referred to an analysis from nonprofit organization Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, which found that less than 1.7 million acres of USFS land had been burned, thinned or treated in the first nine months of 2025 — compared to a 3.6 million-acre average per year over the previous four years.
Some states saw far more significant declines than others — chief among them Idaho, Montana and Oregon, with fuel treatment numbers for the first nine months of 2025 that were less than half the averages for the previous several years, according to the organization’s analysis.
“Instead of seizing every moment to prepare for and mitigate fires, the Trump administration has spent months undermining essential fuels mitigation work by firing hundreds of public servants at the Forest Service and cutting off critical federal funds that support fire prevention efforts across the West,” Merkley told NOTUS in a statement.
Trump regularly points fingers at states for mismanaging forests, like when fires ravaged the Los Angeles area in January. But federally, fuel load reduction efforts likely need to increase at least 10 times their current levels to be truly effective, according to Matthew Hurteau, the director of the Center for Fire Resilient Ecosystems and Society at the University of New Mexico.
The data analysis cited in Democrats’ letter ended with the fiscal year at the end of September. Current Forest Service firefighters and Senate Democratic staff told NOTUS there has been no change significant enough to get the Forest Service back on track to complete the year in line with previous averages.
The Forest Service is hiring permanent seasonal firefighters for the coming year — but it may not be enough. In the Pacific Northwest, the number of jobs that are open is still too low to meet the agency’s needs, a current Forest Service manager told NOTUS.
“The deadline for reporting accomplishments in FY25 was postponed due to the government shutdown. The numbers you have are inaccurate and not final,” a Forest Service spokesperson told NOTUS after publication. “Each year, the U.S. Forest Service has an annual hiring goal of 11,300 operational wildland firefighters. This year, we surpassed that target ahead of schedule and reached a peak of nearly 11,400 firefighters by August, the level for which we are funded. This is in addition to the full-time permanent employees that work in and support wildland fire management.”
Current and former Forest Service members say they have long faced serious workforce issues, and those problems were only compounded by the Trump administration’s DOGE cuts earlier this year.
“This year, with the very early DOGE cuts and the probationary employees who were fired, there was so much uncertainty that time of year, and so nothing was getting done,” said Riva Duncan, a 30-year wildland firefighting veteran of the Forest Service and now the vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters.
The Forest Service has struggled for years to recruit and retain firefighters, who face grueling job conditions with very low pay. As the severity and frequency of wildland fires has increased across the country, firefighters have less and less time for any breaks at all, let alone for the fuel mitigation work that usually happens in the offseason.
As a result, wildfire mitigation practices have been slow and lacking for years, or managers have to resort to less-effective treatments, one current Forest Service manager told NOTUS.
“They’re asking the same personnel who go fight the wildfires on a national scale, and also who are obligated to meet minimum staffing and initial attack response obligations at home, to continue to work and be gone constantly and even travel the nation to go do hazardous fuels reduction,” one current Forest Service manager said.
“The workforce is so shot out and depleted, they’ve even decreased expectations. We’re behind the targets, even when the targets have been reduced,” they said.
Federal firefighters did get a temporary pay increase from the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and then a permanent increase from the Trump administration in March, but the amount has not been enough to significantly improve retention, according to current and former firefighters.
There is a risk that the agency won’t be able to recruit the most qualified people, said Barbara Satink Wolfson, the University of California’s fire adviser for several counties along the central California coast.
“So many people have taken early retirement, and a lot of early-career people were let go. It’s not sustainable where we are right now, and trust has to be built back with people in those professions,” she said.
Meanwhile, Trump’s administration has placed a renewed emphasis on increasing the amount of timber sales that occur on federal lands, frequently associating logging with wildfire mitigation in public statements.
At a wildfire season preparedness briefing in May, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum described increasing timber sales as “reducing fire load” and helping to solve fire issues.
Wildfire experts have questioned the Trump administration’s emphasis on timber sales as a way to mitigate fires.
“In Colorado, the trees that have the highest timber value are not those trees that are close to communities that we need to do a lot of thinning in,” said Camille Stevens-Rumann, an associate professor of forest and rangeland stewardship at Colorado State University. “Timber harvesting is for the biggest, oldest, largest trees, but when we do fuels reduction treatments, we’re often targeting those small trees.”
Hurteau said the same: Areas that make for the most profitable logging are not the same areas that need fuel-reduction treatments.
“I’m super concerned about the decline, as should anyone who lives in a Western U.S. watershed, because that’s where your water comes from,” Hurteau said.
Note to readers • This story was reported and published by NOTUS and was shared with The Salt Lake Tribune as part of a partnership.
This story has also been updated to include a statement from the Forest Service.
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