FY26 Trump Budget Request Details Released - New Wildfire Agency and Huge Cuts Outside WFM

[u/Flat-Suggestion-8373]

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.).

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf

[u/rockshox11]

"...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” '

[u/Flat-Suggestion-8373 → u/rockshox11]

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.