As historic snowpack lows dovetail with significant federal workforce reductions, Bobbie Scopa has a close eye on ignitions.
She spent 45 years on firelines and now helps lead a nonprofit of concerned current and former federal wildland firefighters, Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. But she won’t make a prediction about what the season will look like.
“Conditions can be as dry as you can imagine, but you don’t get any ignitions. And so if you don’t get the ignitions, you’re not gonna have big fires,” she said.
She’s one of several fire watchdogs who spoke to reporters at a June 2 news conference managed by the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation and advocacy organization that tracks support for environmental policies.
Panelists said they’re tracking acreage of prescribed burns, how much forests are thinned and how many federal employees are fighting fires.
Federal data show Wyoming was one of few states to have a slight increase in how much small trees were thinned last year. The state also saw an increase in the number of units with prescribed burns and how many units of piled materials were burned. Thinning and targeted burning can help reduce the severity of future fires, according to U.S. Forest Service research.
But along with Utah and New Mexico, Wyoming was part of the exception as all other states saw decreases, according to Andrea Delgado, a former U.S. Forest Service fuels and forestry specialist.
She said that wildfire mitigation in national forests and grasslands fell by 35% last year compared to 2024.
“That’s an area nearly six times the size of Rocky Mountain National Park that did not get treated,” she said.
In 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture told the public that cuts under the Trump administration’s DOGE committee would spare firefighting operations.
Still, across the West, federal land agencies were down 26,000 staff from 2024 to 2025, according to an analysis from former government officials of data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Some of the former employees offered critical support to fire suppression and mitigation work.
That means teams nationwide could still feel the pinch.
In May, the Spread Creek Fire on the Bridger-Teton National Forest tested local teams. High winds whipped the fire to 257 acres within a 24-hour period. The district received 100 firefighters from out-of-state to contain the blaze. But as more fires begin to pop up across the West, help could be slower to arrive.
Scopa said the cut positions don’t necessarily extinguish embers, but they manage logistics.
“Making sure the food is showing up, [making] sure that the maps are accurate and drawn, and the financial records are managed,” she said. “This is a huge business.”
The National Interagency Fire Center updated its summer forecast this week, with western Wyoming entering “significant wildfire potential” starting in July.
