BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered government officials to consolidate wildland firefighting into a single program, despite warnings from former federal officials that it could be costly and increase the risk of catastrophic blazes.
The order aims to centralize firefighting efforts now split among five agencies and two Cabinet departments. Trump’s proposed budget for next year calls for the creation of a new Federal Wildland Fire Service under the U.S. Interior Department.
That would mean shifting thousands of personnel from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service — where most federal firefighters now work — with fire season already underway. The administration has not disclosed how much the change could cost or save.
Trump in Thursday’s order cited the devastating Los Angeles wildfires in January as highlighting a need for a quicker response to wildfires.
“Wildfires threaten every region, yet many local government entities continue to disregard commonsense preventive measures,” the order said.
The Trump administration in its first months temporarily cut off money for wildfire prevention work and reduced the ranks of federal government firefighters through layoffs and retirement.
The order makes no mention of climate change, which Trump has downplayed even as warming temperatures help stoke bigger and more destructive wildfires that churn out massive amounts of harmful pollution.
More than 65,000 wildfires across the U.S. burned almost 9 million acres (3.6 million hectares) last year.
Organizations representing firefighters and former Forest Service officials say it would be costly to restructure firefighting efforts and cause major disruptions in the midst of fire season. They also say it could put more focus on trying to extinguish fires — a futile endeavor when blazes get too big — instead of preventing them. That could set the stage for more severe fires as forests get overgrown.
A group that includes several former Forest Service chiefs said in a recent letter to lawmakers that consolidation of firefighting work could “actually increase the likelihood of more large catastrophic fires, putting more communities, firefighters and resources at risk.”
Another destructive fire season is expected this year, driven by above-normal temperatures for most of the country, according to federal officials.
The left-leaning advocacy group Center for Western Priorities said Trump’s proposal was “madness” given that wildfire season is underway.
“If President Trump was serious about improving the nation’s wildland firefighting capabilities, he would stop hollowing out the agencies tasked with fighting wildfires,” said Aaron Weiss, the group’s deputy director.
A prior proposal to merge the Forest Service and Interior to improve firefighting was determined to have significant drawbacks by the Congressional Research Service in a 2008 report.
But the idea more recently got bipartisan support. California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla and Montana Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy are sponsoring legislation similar to Trump’s plan. Sheehy, who was elected last year, founded an aerial firefighting company that relies heavily on federal contracts.
Trump also on Thursday signed into law another bill from Sheehy that would reauthorize the sale of U.S. military aircraft and parts for wildfire work. Sheehy said in a statement that fighting wildfires “more quickly and aggressively is America First common sense.”
In a separate action aimed at wildfires, the Trump administration last month rolled back environmental safeguards around future logging projects on more than half U.S. national forests.
The emergency designation covers 176,000 square miles (455,000 square kilometers) of terrain primarily in the West but also in the South, around the Great Lakes and in New England.
Most of those forests are considered to have high wildfire risk, and many are in decline because of insects and disease.
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I fought forest fires flying large helicopters on contract to CalFire and the US Forest Service. We didn’t call it the Forest Circus without good reason. I flew helicopters in the Amy, too, and I have never seen so much bloated mismanagement anywhere. CalFire with it’s enormous budget and wasted money, working alongside the Forest Circus with their bloated budget and wasteful practices were absolutely on the edge of criminal. Having so-called “helicopter managers” at every fire? They knew nothing of the helicopter capabilities, yet we had to give them performance sheets every morning telling them what we could do based upon the weather, the terrain, and the aircraft’s performance charts. As a pilot I could tell them anything and they had no idea if what I predicted (based upon our aircraft’s charts) was true or not. Flying on a fire in Idaho, the guy from Santa Clara CA, was sitting in his privately owned vehicle with the engine idling so the air conditioner kept him cool – all during our flying hours. At the end of the day he knew how many times I flew back for fuel and after I handed him a report, he knew what I had logged (true or not) as water or retardant drops in gallons. He was paid to drive his own vehicle all the way to Idaho to sit in it all day and he had virtually no idea what was going on. What a waste of money. Too often we were held on the ground and not released to fight the fire because too many men were still on the ground fighting the fires, so we sat around watching the fire grow out of control when we could have extinguished it or at least slowed it before the day heated up with the fire beginning to create its own storms and turbulence that would prevent us from flying and that was always after all the men on the ground had retreated from fire fighting because of the hazardous conditions. I have friends within CalFire and absolutely have witnessed their climbs to power. Many built “empires” and controlled the system. A few others got out because they were sick of the waste and mismanagemt that they, too, became embroiled in at CalFire. Just a thought: Why should government (CalFire aviation in particular) compete with private enterprise, especially when private enterprise does a better job for less taxpayer money?