Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily News website (Ryan Spencer). Here’s an excerpt:
June 26, 2025
[Colorado U.S.] Senator John Hickenlooper is looking into the proposal to create a U.S. Wildland Fire Service and what it could mean for wildfire response and resources
President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget proposal outlines plans to create a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service by combining the wildfire assets currently distributed between the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. The budget request states that the “dispersed nature” of the federal wildfire program “creates significant coordination and cost inefficiencies that result in sub-optimal performance.” It would house the U.S. Wildland Fire Service in the Department of Interior. But in a letter to the Senate earlier this month, a nonprofit group representing thousands of U.S. Forest Service retirees, including seven previous chiefs of the agency, raised concern that consolidating federal firefighting operations would be “a costly mistake.”
“Wildfire management is more than extinguishing fires,” National Association of Forest Service Retirees Chair Steve Ellis wrote in the letter. “The critical linkage between fire suppression and forest management, including fuels reduction and prescribed fire, must be maintained. Severing forest management and forest managers from fire suppression will make firefighting less safe and put communities at greater risk.”
In addition to relocating firefighting operations, Trump’s budget request for the Forest Service asks Congress to zero out millions of dollars of funding, including for forestry research and grants that support state, tribal and private forestry efforts. It also proposes cuts of $392 million to the Forest Service management budget and $391 million to forest operations…Ellis, who worked for the federal government for 38 years in both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, said “the fire program is integrated into almost everything the Forest Service does.” From forest thinning to prescribed burns, prevention and suppression, Ellis said strategies have to be integrated into the broader forest management goals. By removing firefighting operations from the Forest Service, the proposal could divorce firefighting from land management, he added…
When asked about the U.S. Wildland Fire Service proposal, White House Assistant Press Secretary Taylor Rogers pointed to the Los Angeles wildfires that killed 30 people, forced 200,000 to evacuate and burned 57,000 acres earlier this year…But Ellis questioned whether a consolidated federal firefighting agency like the U.S. Wildland Fire Service would have done anything to prevent or lessen the impacts of the Los Angeles fires. In his experience, Ellis said the fire program in the United States is “pretty seamless” with different agencies not only working with each other but also collaborating with state and local partners to combat wildfires.