ICYMI: NPR: Trump administration falls behind on wildfire prevention with risky fire season ahead

Washington, DC –  Ongoing droughts across the country are increasing the risk of wildfires, but the Trump administration has fallen behind on prevention efforts. Trump has gutted the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) — weakening the federal government’s ability to properly mitigate, manage, and respond to wildfires at a moment when the risks are higher than ever. Last year, the USFS lost thousands of jobs because of Trump’s cuts, threatening wildfire prevention. Trump’s cuts are leaving us less safe and less prepared for wildfires. 

NPR: Trump administration falls behind on wildfire prevention with risky fire season ahead

With wildfires already burning and drought persisting across much of the U.S., fire experts are bracing for what could be an extreme fire season. The U.S. Forest Service is going into it having done far less work than in recent years to manage the dry, flammable vegetation that can fuel catastrophic fires.

In 2025, the Forest Service reduced vegetation on almost 1.5 million fewer acres than in 2024, according to an analysis of the agency’s data by NPR and firefighting experts. It marks a significant drop from the more than 4 million acres of hazardous vegetation work done in the last year of the Biden administration.

The biggest decline was in prescribed burns, the low-grade fires intentionally set to clear dense underbrush, helping reduce the intensity of future wildfires. In 2025, the Forest Service burned only about half of the acreage that it did in both 2024 and 2023, according to an NPR analysis of agency records.

Despite the extreme wildfires of recent years, there’s actually a fire deficit in most of the country. Many North American forests evolved over millennia with low-intensity wildfires that clear out dense undergrowth. Native Americans use controlled burns to shape the ecosystem, but those measures became far less common after tribes were forced from their lands. In the 1930s, the Forest Service also adopted a policy to extinguish all wildfires.

As conditions have gotten hotter, the buildup of dense vegetation has fed extreme fires that have torn through vast stretches of land and, increasingly, into communities.

The Forest Service said in a statement that the drop in prevention work is mostly due to staff being occupied with firefighting and because environmental conditions were not right for doing prescribed burns in the Southeast. The agency lost 16% of its workforce as of last summer, with 5,860 personnel leaving in the first six months of 2025 as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce the size of government. Senate Democrats have raised concerns that such cuts have hampered the agency’s ability to prepare for wildfires.

Wildfire experts say the less prescribed burning is done, the more the Forest Service faces conditions that lead to extreme wildfires.

“The clock is ticking,” says Matthew Hurteau, a forest ecologist at the University of New Mexico. “We’ve got relatively limited time to do the work that needs to be done.”