r/Wildfire • u/Flat-Suggestion-8373 • May 02 '25
News (General) FY26 Trump Budget Request Details Released - New Wildfire Agency and Huge Cuts Outside WFM
Here are some of the wildfire-related items in the FY26 budget blueprint that the White House released today (link below). Chiefly, it proposes a “new Federal Wildland Fire Service” under DOI. But also note significant changes in related areas, like the draconian cuts to the “non-fire” side of Forest Service (e.g., almost complete elimination of FS R&D, significant cut to already underfunded NFS activities, etc.).
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u/Prehistory_Buff May 02 '25
These people know absolutely, literally nothing about Rx fire. They seriously think that we can timber sale out way out of firestorms. God, what is going to happen y'all?
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u/Flat-Suggestion-8373 May 02 '25
Seems that way. Project 2025 literally states, “The Forest Service should focus on proactive management of the forests and grasslands that does not depend heavily on burning.” And I know that question is rhetorical, but to state the obvious: an increasing rate of catastrophic wildfire, including community conflagrations.
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u/Wanderingghost12 State May 03 '25
Hell, NC just had a massive fire in April and fire season is year round in most of the West now. Grasslands are some of the places we should be burning the most but here we are
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u/Hoary May 03 '25
Big fire. Little response because can't. People die. FF's refuse unsafe situations, get fired. FF's afraid of losing jobs do the unsafe stuff, probably die. That's my prediction in a nutshell.
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u/kubotalover May 02 '25
They go together for sure but stem removal is the first step. Definitely don’t need the fuels shop following up every sale with rx fire. The costs are too damn high. Wait 5 or ten years for a maintenance burn.
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u/Prehistory_Buff May 02 '25
Oh yeah, I'm not begrudging cutting timber where it's needed, by all means thin the stands it'll help, but my district is starting to explode every August and the only way around it I think would be year-round Rx burning (in safe weather of course) to get as much covered as possible. Right now we are only getting full coverage every ten years in habitat that burned every one to two historically.
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u/SientoQueMerezcoMas May 03 '25
Who cares about the cost? We’re a service not a business. These are mostly fire-adapted ecosystems.
Timber sales only impacted the larger structure and arrangement of fuels, they do nothing to address fine fuel loadings, duff, brush, timber litter, etc.
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u/kubotalover May 04 '25
Your costs affect the feasibility of timber sales. Pay for your own treatments if you want to burn everything
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u/Ready-Ad6113 May 02 '25
I work on a USFS research station. Guess were all out a job (except the few FIA guys) almost all of our funding is being cut. NFS is being cut hard too, don’t know how they’ll harvest or manage forests now.
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u/ExcitingPanda9911 May 02 '25
If Congress goes along with this (or if the Admin. pursues it regardless), it’s hard to imagine any of FS’s research stations would remain open.
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u/Ready-Ad6113 May 02 '25
They don’t want researchers around because we provide evidence and facts against their destructive policies. We can only hope this will fail but it’s unlikely.
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u/zoinkability May 02 '25 edited May 02 '25
It's super depressing, not just from a jobs standpoint but also from a science standpoint. A lot of the research done in the FS is very long term. All those long term studies would be abandoned, and if a later administration — or even congress next year — wanted to restart them they would essentially be starting from scratch again. 10, 20, 30, 40+ years of federal investment in these studies down the drain.
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u/Wanderingghost12 State May 03 '25
It's already begun from what friends of mine have told me. I know a gal who works for the USFW and they had to abandon their 13-year data collection on Northern Spotted Owls. The sensors are still out in the woods but no one can collect or interpret the data. When the program lost funding, last I heard, researchers were talking about illegally downloading the files to save the research since it's so important to NSO population monitoring
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u/Flat-Suggestion-8373 May 02 '25
If you skim through the doc, you’ll see that the research functions of agencies across the government would be particularly impacted (e.g., USGS would be cut by over half a billion, and it has an annual budget of just $1.5b).
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u/Ready-Ad6113 May 02 '25
Can’t have evidence and facts getting in the way of corporate interests and profit.
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u/Past-Garlic-519 May 03 '25
Remember when they made billionaires even richer when they mandated federal workers to get a product to keep their meager job? Pepperidge Farms remembers 🤣
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May 02 '25
This needs to be front page, headline, top of the feed. It’s got the MOST info I’ve heard in months, and real numbers. Does anybody know if this is “proposed” reductions or if this is reality?
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u/BakedBones1207 May 02 '25
This the president's budget blueprint. Normally congressional appropriations staff just throw it away and do what they want. Susan Collins and Patty Murray chair the Senate committee.
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u/Flat-Suggestion-8373 May 02 '25
Normally, sure. But we don’t normally have an Admin. interested in challenging impoundment law. And at the very least, this sends a clear signal about what the Admin. thinks about the role of land management agencies. And which employees the Admin. thinks are worth keeping around.
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u/Ready-Ad6113 May 02 '25
If these cuts go through, it’s basically the end of the USFS. We don’t have the infrastructure or mills to harvest what they want. Midterms are next year too so all of this might be undone. All this damage for nothing.
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u/Past-Garlic-519 May 02 '25
I don't know who I hate most, our current administration or smokey. It's a dream come true watching them fight eachother knowing one isn't going to come out 😂
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u/hereandthere_nowhere May 02 '25
A page specific troll, neat. Rarely see one of these in the wild.
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u/Past-Garlic-519 May 03 '25
How's your 505 whatever ghost protest going fucking loser 😂. It's going to be hard wearing big boy pants and getting a real job but Goodluck
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u/zoinkability May 02 '25
Patty Murray is from WA, which has huge amounts of national forest land, as well as having a research station in Olympia. Seems like she could be a point person for advocating against cuts like these.
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u/No_Illustrator_1358 May 03 '25
She will be, along with Pramila Jayapal, Adam Smith, and Dr. Kim Schrier in the House.
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u/Flat-Suggestion-8373 May 02 '25
Proposed. The budget request will go to Congress, who will appropriate funding at whatever level they ultimately choose. That being said, the Administration has expressed an interest in spending far below enacted appropriation levels, even when its legality questionable. So it’s possible that they try to pursue some of these cuts without the blessing of Congress (like what they’ve done to USAID, CFPB, etc.).
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u/Ready-Ad6113 May 02 '25
It’s a request and not official yet. However they will probably pass it since it’s written by the douche Russel Vought (the “put them in trauma” guy) and Susan Collins is a republican. If it does pass, this is essentially the end of the USFS. Other non-environmental agencies are expecting deep cuts too, so we’ll see how this plays out. Better brush up my resume though as I work on a research station.
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u/Shoddy_Pay5822 May 02 '25
Best of luck teaching all the FS folks how to do their own times in QuickTime let alone getting them all onboarded, PIV card issued. physical and medically cleared, background investigated. DOI is already a small support org. Overloaded with work. Cant imagine them taking on the FS firefighter workforce all at once.
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u/BakedBones1207 May 02 '25
Why go through all that work when you can privatize?
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u/Ok-Measurement-8537 May 02 '25
Seems to be the plan: 1) Create unsustainable conditions within the agencies that are then viewed by the public as a failure 2) Privatize
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u/BakedBones1207 May 02 '25 edited May 02 '25
This is what I've been saying all year. If we do great the answer is "see you're fine you don't need more" and if we do awful due to lack of logistics and staffing then "see they can't hack it we need to unleash private industry".
edit: typo
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u/Past-Garlic-519 May 03 '25
They will just blame these out of control fires on "climate change". Which is the same PIOs tell the people when we lose RXs and incidents.
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u/ProfessionalPoet1029 May 06 '25
This has been my suspicion for the last couple of years, that there seems to be an effort to privatize more sectors. Then I worked for a year for a contracting firm and realized... Yup, that's exactly what is happening. The private industry will be put in a position to be our nation's saving grace.
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u/ZonaDesertRat May 02 '25
Most of the overhead have DRPed or will be on the RIF list, so it will be even worse than recent fire hires!
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u/YOLO_Bundy May 03 '25
Fire positions are ineligible for DRP or VERA.
Do you even read the emails that have been coming out, or are you just here to REEEEE every chance you get?
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u/hartfordsucks Rage Against the (Green) Machine May 02 '25
Not to mention they want to gut most of and then combine the remnants of all DOI support functions. You guys thought ASC was a hot dysfunctional mess...
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u/Shoddy_Pay5822 May 03 '25
ASC is still a hot lunch. Not sure how they had that many people employed in New Mexico that only wanted to do the minimum and make maximum excuses….oh yeah. I remember, it was remote work. I could hear their kids in the background and their dogs barking when we were at work.
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u/hartfordsucks Rage Against the (Green) Machine May 03 '25
Yeah it's totally WFH and not the fact that NM is dead last in the US in education. Not exactly the best and brightest pool of potential employees. The frontline staff might as well be paid in sunsets too. It's almost like when an employer doesn't pay competitive wages they have to hire anyone with a pulse instead of people that can actually excel at the job. Not to mention they also work for the same incompetent WO that we all do.
But yeah, WFH that was the problem.
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u/Shoddy_Pay5822 May 03 '25
More downvotes please! It only Proves that this sub is taken over by people who didn’t work at a station through furloughs and covid. I don’t know one person I fought fire with who was sympathetic to work from home people going to work or ASC for that matter.
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u/YOLO_Bundy May 03 '25
DOI is its own worst enemy with excessive redundant admin. Leaving was the best thing I ever did.
Clean up the unneeded bureaucratic bullshit and move everyone over.
It’s not that hard, but people here look for any reason to maintain the status quo regardless how fucked up things are currently.
This is a good thing.
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u/Amateur-Pro278 May 02 '25
Who cares???? I thrive in the grey areas!!!! When everything is a shitshow and there are no rules I will FINALLY get to do what makes sense!!!!!
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u/rockshox11 :hamster: May 02 '25
"...State and local partners, these partners should be encouraged to fund their own community preparedness and risk mitigation activities." AKA homeowners and communities are on their own.
As much as I hate to admit it, this is inadvertently kind of fine? Like yea mitigating all the fed WUI in the west hasn't happened and wasn't going to. This just like plainly says we are throwing private landowners and communities to the wolves- they say we're going somehow address the wildfire crisis with logging (as if WUI's everywhere have commercial wood products), while simultaneously obliterating the budget for everything else.
Colorado is on the right track by forcing insurers to recognize mitigation efforts done by homeowners. Maybe states and municipalities will see the writing on the wall that no one is going to create defensible space for them- and that allowing for subdivisions abutting flammable environments was a bad idea and they'll need to harden their own communities. Its entirely within their power and it's more socially just, if you ask me.
See this recent comment from someone on The Smokey Wire:
' The Carr Fire burned, at first, entirely NPS ground, that had burned in the previous decade, and through manzanita and brush and gray pines, none of which are commercial or able to be trucked to a mill. Further, it did the most damage in communities that were highly against defensible space both around the communities and individual homes. The worst damage was because of large expanses of private land ownership and homeowner decisions, under catastrophic conditions and a historic “firenado” '
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u/hartfordsucks Rage Against the (Green) Machine May 02 '25
It also fits their philosophy of eliminating FEMA. Brutal individualism for the poor, socialism for the rich. Oh your town got wiped off the map by a hurricane? Dang sounds rough, good luck out there, you're on your own!
Also, states will have to either increase taxes or gut public services to pay for those mitigation activities. Or most likely, they'll just sell off the land and make it someone else's problem.
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u/Flat-Suggestion-8373 May 02 '25
Agreed that it’s largely an accurate reflection of the reality of community risk mitigation today. I also read that statement (and the broader FS cuts) as consistent with the Admin.’s potential interest in large-scale land transfers to the states, locals, etc.
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u/bennyccp May 02 '25
Does this mean we have to get the engines repainted?
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u/I_H8_Celery Parasite Type 2 May 03 '25
I comment it on every post about the new agency but I firmly believe it: this new wildfire agency is just their way to remove you from union representation. The FS master agreement is good until 2029 while this proposed new agency could easily be declared national security and lose their right to have a union just like the TSA.
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u/SouthernPop736 May 02 '25
So realistically what does any of this mean for Rx fire and fuels programs?
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u/sjciwmw May 03 '25
Visit your favorite public lands now. You’ll look back in 20 years and wish you did
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u/ResidentOverhead May 02 '25
It doesn’t actually outline a budget number for the proposed new fire agency.
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u/Flat-Suggestion-8373 May 02 '25
No, and we probably won’t see that until the full, detailed budget request is released within the next month or so. Notably, there is no increase/decrease noted for that item in the doc, which could mean they expect the agencies to implement the new agency without additional resources beyond those already provided for wildfire management.
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u/Hoary May 03 '25
Not that I support what they're doing, but I think there is no number because it'd be a brand new agency and so there is no increase or decrease from the budget, which is what that column was supposed to show. Yeah they could have just listed it as an increase from 0 to whatever, but it is true that an agency that didn't exist before can't have a change in budget from before. That said, I agree with the person who said this will be an unmitigated shit show.
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u/ResidentOverhead May 04 '25
That might have been me…
But I was curious if they would show a number could it would help get an idea of what they are thinking. Ie fixing and building something great, or slowly dismantling it and handing it over to the contractors.
Time will tell…
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u/Immediate-File-8478 May 05 '25
Are we real acting like we have a smooth operation that doesn't need an overhaul right now?!?
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u/Amateur-Pro278 May 02 '25
I love it. I thrive in the grey and this will be such an unmitigated shit show that I will flourish in the rubble!!! Nobody is giving out parking tickets when the whole city is getting bombed so I will just start going totally cowboy and doing what makes sense.
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u/murpees May 02 '25
Yeah you keep saying this but I don’t think you understand what you are talking about. If “thriving in the grey area” means doing nothing like a bagger and not giving a shit then you are exactly right.
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u/Amateur-Pro278 May 02 '25
After almost 3 decades in Fed fire I know exactly what I am talking about.
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u/Sarcastikon May 03 '25
You’ll get someone killed I’m sure
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u/Amateur-Pro278 May 03 '25 edited May 03 '25
Dear Cuck,
Do you know that many of our PPE standards were written over 37 years ago and have not changed? Did you know we still are required to wear criminally substandard hardhats when the rest of the world has moved on from them into safety helmets? Did you know that we aren't ALLOWED to wear respirators? Even if you buy your own you are not allowed to wear it on the line because USFS has no respirator plan. Once everything starts going to shit we can actually start making moves to make us safer. Only a bitch would put their people at more risk. Things aren't black and white, our agencies actually constrain us with substandard gear, policies and protocols.
Grow up and start exploiting like a leader instead of sitting around, sniveling like a bitch.
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u/Subject-Amount-9346 May 02 '25
Consolidating everyone under DOI will be an unmitigated shitshow. The chucklefucks writing all this up don't have a clue how anything works, much less the intricacies of the fire world. Where will we host suppression resources that were previously FS employees? Keep them in the same duty station of an agency they no longer work for? Vacate these duty stations and increase response times by literal hours? Build new duty stations right next door?
None of those are good options and will do nothing but reduce our initial attack capacity.
Part of me wants to see them do it and fuck it up so bad.