By Matthew Auer, University of Georgia, and Dhruv Gupta, Dartmouth College
Europe’s terrible wildfire season should stir empathy. It’s an apt feeling not only because wildland fires have claimed lives and charred forests, homes, and businesses, but because we know that pain firsthand in the US from our own deadly fires.
In the US, the toll includes six firefighters losing their lives – a reminder of the dangers inherent in wildfire management and the courage of those who perform it. Among those who perished was a Canadian Forest Service firefighter. Which underscores a second reality. At the time of this writing, around 675 wildfires are actively burning in Canada, many that are remote enough, they won’t be actively suppressed. Yet, smoke from these fires creep east and south, smudging the skies of major American cities and pushing some to the top of the world’s worst air pollution rankings.
The 2026 wildfire season should make us think about fires not from a US perspective but a continental perspective. Responders from Canada traveled south to help contain fires in Colorado in June and July. In turn, US wildfire experts collaborated with Canadian counterparts to manage wildfires in Quebec. The same transcontinental approach is underway in Europe. The European Commission pre-positions hundreds of firefighters from EU countries to high-risk areas. In July, Spanish crews fought fires in Portugal even as Spain battled its own blazes and received help from neighboring countries. France, too, has been a prominent participant in this mutual aid – both giving and receiving help during a difficult wildfire season.
Managing wildfire risk today requires partnership and collaboration like never before, across national boundaries. With collaboration in mind, it’s appropriate to examine the performance of the newly established US Wildland Fire Service. The agency consolidates five fire management services within the Department of the Interior in an effort to, as a White House Executive Order states, “streamlin(e) Federal wildfire capabilities to improve their effectiveness and promot(e) commonsense, technology-enabled local strategies for land management and wildfire response and mitigation.” The president hopes to go further still, absorbing the U.S. Forest Service’s wildfire management operations into the new, unified structure. Congress has resisted, calling for an independent, non-partisan review of the proposal’s potential impacts. The Forest Service recently awarded a contract to Research Triangle Institute to study the feasibility of incorporating the Forest Service Fire and Aviation program into the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service.
We have performed our own analysis of the stakes involved in a streamlined, unified wildland fire service. Our research framework recognizes the wide-ranging perspectives on this issue. Associations like Grassroots Wildland Firefighters are backing efforts to improve and simplify procurement processes, expedite provision of equipment to the field, and simplify and harmonize agency-specific rules for hiring and performance evaluation. In contrast, critics say the Trump administration’s wildfire reorganization has sown confusion among firefighters over chains of command, arrived after a major wave of workforce downsizing in Interior and the Forest Service, and was pushed through without congressional approval or funding.
Our own view is that, whether you are a proponent or critic, all parties should demand careful oversight of the new streamlined service even as the administration is building and flying it. Too often, public administration students are taught that policymaking follows a neat, sequential set of steps with evaluation taking place towards the end of a “policy cycle.” This is flawed reasoning in several ways, but notably because any job that involves daily, major risks to human health and safety – the quintessential reality for a handcrew, engine crew, smokejumper, or air tanker pilot – cannot wait for an end-of-year program evaluation. The stakes for wildfire managers – particularly wildland firefighters – are too high for a wait-and-see approach.
The Ipsos Global Trustworthiness Index ranks the most trusted professions across dozens of countries. The top five vocations are doctors, scientists, teachers, restaurant staff, and members of the armed services. As a greater share of the population encounters wildfire and its effects, we predict that firefighters will crack the top-five. But respecting or even lionizing the work of wildland firefighters won’t make their work less hazardous. Our own research underscores this point. While Congress funneled substantial amounts of funding to federal and state wildland fire managers under the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we heard from state foresters that Biden-era funds were not nearly enough for the task at hand – whether for hazardous fuels reduction, training of wildfire professionals, purchase of equipment, or community education. And we note that neither the executive order creating the new US Wildland Fire Service nor the associated Department of Interior order address what other sources, including the Government Accountability Office, deem top-tier challenges for firefighters, namely low pay, obstacles to career advancement, poor work-life balance, mental health challenges, and remote or expensive duty stations.
All else equal, consolidation and streamlining are neither inherently good nor bad as policy prescriptions. What matters are the results. Good wages, career advancement, safety, high-quality healthcare, access to the best equipment, comprehensive situational awareness training, clear communication standards, the preservation of partnerships across networks of wildfire managers – these are among the key metrics for US Wildland Fire Service authorities and their congressional overseers to monitor, in real-time.
Continual, not periodic, evaluation of the consolidation effort is needed – not simply because wildfire incidents are increasing or because more people live in or downwind of wildfire-prone areas. Constant evaluation is imperative because wildland firefighters literally sacrifice their health and well-being to preserve the general public’s.
Matthew R. Auer is Dean and Arch Professor of Public and International Affairs, School of Public and International Affairs, at the University of Georgia.
Dhruv Gupta is at the Department of Government, Dartmouth College, United States.
1 Comment
The key metrics pointed out are in fact vitally important to firefighters. I would regard these metrics as inputs to the creation and maintenance of an effective, safe, and well trained fire organization with excellent recruitment and retention. But the orders creating the Wildland Fire Service speak of “streamlining Federal wildfire capabilities to improve their effectiveness and promoting commonsense, technology-enabled local strategies for land management and wildfire response and mitigation,” which I interpret as output values. And simply calling the old system inefficient and uncoordinated without being more specific in the definition of these terms makes it difficult to develop the key metrics required to measure the results of the reorganization over time. What I suspect it will come down to are questions asked by OMB and GAO, among other entities, such as are injuries and fatalities reduced, do suppression costs go down, do Initial Attack rates improve, are more hazard fuel acres being treated, and are these treatment of a scale affecting wildfire behavior and effects? And while more funding may be useful, recall that Congress added a billion dollars to the federal fire budget in 2000, and yet here we are with rising wildfire costs and acreage, while falling farther behind in acres needing hazard reduction work.