It’s fire season, and as blazes start to dot Wyoming, the Trump administration is ordering big changes to the federal wildland firefighting workforce. Currently, each unit of federal, public land manages fires within its boundaries, with a lot of coordination and resource sharing with states and nearby local fire departments. Fire is integrated into the land management decisions for each district of U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Bureau of Indian Affairs land.
Now, Trump is calling to remove fire from those agencies and consolidate into a single Wildland Fire Service housed in the Department of the Interior. The vast majority of federal firefighters and resources are currently in the U.S. Forest Service under the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
To understand the merits and oversights of the change, Wyoming Public Radio’s managing editor Nicky Ouellet spoke with Steve Markason. He’s led firefighting and fire mitigation on the Bridger-Teton National Forest, and now runs a private consulting business for homeowners and neighborhoods to figure out how to lessen their fire risk called Teton Wildfire Mitigation Team LLC.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Steve Markason: I don't think it's a bad idea. I just think it needs to be well thought out. It needs to be planned well and it's not something we can just say, ‘Hey, we're gonna do it like right now, in the middle of fire season,’ which I'm a little concerned about, because that seems to be the push.
Nicky Ouellet: Can you lay out what you see as the pros and the cons of making a change like this? Let's start with the pros.
SM: It professionalizes the fire service, so that's a good thing. With that kind of support for pay and retention, it might help keep folks from leaving for other higher-paying jobs with state agencies or other organizations. Consolidation could create a synergy that would help as far as response and bulk up some of the resources together and a more coordinated response.
But boy, I have to backtrack and say the interagency incident management teams and interagency programs and how we all approach fire, we're all doing it the same way. It's standardized across the board between the BLM, the Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S. Forest Service. I don't really see any hiccups there as far as how they're currently working together.
But I think the argument is if it's consolidated into a professional wildland fire service, then it would get even more efficient and less bureaucratic. I think there's a case for that in the long run.
On the flip side, there's logistical challenges. How are you gonna take all the USDA Forest Service people, who have offices and vehicles and computers, and put them in with the Park Service? Where is everyone gonna work out of? How are those logistics gonna be met so that they are more efficient, so that the organization is structured in a way that's less bureaucratic? Those really need to be ironed out before we even punch the button and say, ‘We need to do this.’
NO: Has that been part of what's been communicated in Trump's executive order or [Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s] talks about what they're envisioning?
SM: I haven't heard a lot of details about that. But in talking with my counterparts at the federal agencies, I don't think they've heard a lot of details either.
Then the other biggest challenge to me is if we combine and we organize for fire response in that way, is it gonna be full suppression oriented or is it gonna be fire management the way it is right now?
I'll give you an example. Right now, fire management programs are comprised of fire operations and suppression resources and fire line leadership. They're coupled with the fuels programs that plan large landscape-level fuel treatments on our public lands, either prescribed burning or mechanical treatments or thinning. They work with all the Forest Service and the Park Service “ologists,” all the specialists, the wildlife biologist and the archeologists and the recreation folks, who collaborate with those fuels and fire specialists to implement projects like prescribed burning.
Where I haven't seen anything in any of the executive order literature [is], how are those people gonna fit in? How do we collaborate with these specialists to implement projects on the pace and scale that we need to really lower risk? How’s that gonna happen with this consolidation?
NO: You mentioned that this isn't a brand new idea. This was being considered back in 2008, and at that time, the Congressional Research Service released a report about a proposal that would bring the Forest Service and the BLM into a single agency. They found then that a wildfire agency would likely focus on fire control because acres burned are the most readily measurable performance standard, and anything seeking to reduce damages, like you're saying, protecting individual structures or just reducing fuels on the landscape to prevent future enormous burns, those are less likely to be emphasized.
SM: I teach community wildfire mitigation practices all over the country with coalitions and collaboratives. One of our premises is that we're not gonna ‘one more engine, one more helicopter, one more air tanker’ out of this problem. The amount of fuels on the landscape, the amount of fire suppression for the last 70 to a hundred years, we have conditions on the landscape and there's conditions with climate that we're just seeing fires that are outstripping our capacities.
I'm not saying that control is not important. It absolutely is for protecting those values at risk. But that needs to be coupled with very strategic landscape-level treatments. Also, homeowners’ responsibility to harden their homes, to build defensible space, to swap out their roofs, to make sure there's zero- to five-foot zones from their house or clear flammables and the things that will start homes on fire.
If we create a fire service that's only control-centric, I don't think we're gonna solve the conundrum we're in with large fires and huge impacts to communities.
NO: If-slash-when this change goes through, how do you see it playing out in Wyoming, where so much of the land is managed by feds?
SM: The way I see it, if I was still sitting in there as a fire management officer, there's a lot of logistics to work out, as far as reclassifying people into their new positions, working under a new agency, transferring all your health, retirement benefits and coverage into the new agency. That's not a big deal because people go back and forth from different agencies.
Then, organizing the resources, the engines, the actual trucks, the actual equipment. Where are you gonna store everything? Who's gonna work where? There's not enough space in Teton County for all agencies to work under one roof. There's a lot being done, but everyone's working either under DOI or USDA facilities and the facilities and the vehicle part needs to be planned out strategically.
NO: The Trump administration is saying we need to avoid catastrophic flames like what happened in LA. We need to have faster response times. How do we do that?
SM: We push for wildland urban interface (WUI) building codes in every community, which isn't gonna be very favorable. We have one in Teton County and we're building fire resilient homes with Class A roofing and the right vent screening and the right landscaping. But that's not really palatable to the public to take on more regulation, especially when you're building a home. But these are investments as homeowners and communities, we need to make to be fire adapted. So that’s really what’s necessary. We need to work from the house out.
