A historic six-figure advertisement campaign is targeting senators who, for months, haven’t touched a bill that aims to overhaul the United States’ wildfire policies.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed the Fix Our Forests Act in January and has yet to have any motion in the Senate. The bill has effectively been stonewalled under both the Biden and Trump administration after it also stalled in committee in a Senate committee in 2024.
The Act would create an interagency Fireshed Center focused on wildfire prediction and tracking, establish fireshed management areas in forests with high wildfire risks, and expedite the review of wildfire-related forest management projects under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Critics against the Act claim it would further open up forests to logging and allow a large-scale rollback of the Endangered Species Act, National Historic Preservation Act, and National Environmental Policy Act.
Advocates at Megafire Action, a non-profit organization focused on policies to help avert catastrophic wildfires, recently unveiled the ad campaign, claiming to be the first ever made to support a piece of wildfire legislation, just days after the Trump Administration announced the upcoming creation of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service. Megafire Action CEO Matt Weiner told WildfireToday that the Service wouldn’t be designed to address the same problems that the Act tackles, which means Senators need to take action on the bill now.
“The missing piece in all of this is workforce,” Weiner said. “We’ve been asking our wildland firefighters to do too much with far too little for too long, all while putting their health and safety on the line. My hope is that building a better, more efficient system will help us make the case for workforce reform and funding.”
Weiner addressed the concerns brought up by other members of the Senate, but said the larger issue is lawmakers’ lack of urgency on the matter.
Megafire Action’s ad buy will target Washington and other local news outlets through video and static advertising and run for one week.
5 Comments
The problem is the administration. They are so chaotic, so willing to break stuff, so obviously trying to implement Project 2025. They are simply vandalizing agencies in a power grab. Examples abound:
The USDA Memorandum of July 25th orders a reorganization of the $203 billion agency. It defines the reorganization in terms of “Principles.”
1. “Ensure the Size of USDA’s Workforce Aligns with Financial Resources and
Priorities.”
They claim that “Over the last four years, USDA’s workforce grew by approximately 8% and employees’ salaries increased by 14.5%.” There is No source for these numbers.
2. “Bring USDA Closer to Its Customers by Relocating Resources….”
They are doing the opposite. They are moving power to red states. They are separating National Forests from their constituencies. See below.
New ‘Administrative centers’ to be established for the USDA, represented by MAGA curious republicans.
1) Raleigh, North Carolina – Ted Budd (R), Thom Tillis (R) 1.25 million acres NF
2) Kansas City, Missouri – Josh Hawley (R), Eric Schmitt (R) 1.5 million acres NF
3) Indianapolis, Indiana – Jim Banks (R), Todd Young (R) 204,000 acres NF
4) Fort Collins, Colorado – Hickenlooper (D), Michael Bennett (D) 14 million acres NF
5) Salt Lake City, Utah – John Curtis (R), Mike Lee (R) 6.1 million acres NF
The seven largest National Forests in the US are: Tongass, Chugach, Humboldt-Toiyabe, Salmon-Challis, Bridger-Teton, Okanogan-Wenatchee, and Beaverhead-Deerlodge. They are located in Alaska, Nevada, California, Idaho, Wyoming, Washington, and Montana respectively.
There are 16 million acres of National Forest in Oregon, 20.8 million in California, 4 million in Washington, all with progressive senators……
Why are they eliminating regional offices in these states? National Forests are mostly in the far west. The new bureaucracies are mostly in eastern states with Trump-chump senators. Project 2025 anyone? They follow that blueprint pretty closely.
[Comment edited for brevity – Editor]
The agency has lost all direction. While the US Wildland Fire Service may be a step in the right direction, creating more bureaucracy, moving to new administration centers, and establishing even more departments and centers is not the right answer. Did we learn nothing from the disasterous consolidation of HR to the Albuquerque Service Center? Firefighters are underpaid and over worked. They have no housing. They are working longer seasons on increasingly larger fires. While the agencies seem happy to give contractors high pay, they refuse to even call their employees firefighters or pay them a living wage. A successful fire season is based on the amount of overtime and hazard pay, which also encourages burnout and injuries. Don’t even get started on how difficult it is to work with OWCP to get medical care. Recruitment and retention are an issue that is only getting more and more difficult.
Seems that the Fix our Forests Act is in conflict with the US Wildland Fire Service bill. Deconfliction will have to be worked out in conference. Once our Congress sorts out their differences over a government shutdown, maybe they can address the conflicting direction from each bill.
I thought we weren’t using the term “fireshed”. I’ve been working in fire mapping over 14 years and I study fuels in the WUI and a number of teachers and Fire Scientists I know have told me not to use the term fireshed at all.
Interestingly, the Act is very keen on the term with multiple mentions, defined as: FIRESHED — The term “fireshed” means a landscape-scale area that faces similar wildfire threat where a response strategy could influence the wildfire outcome.
Comments are closed for this article!