Wildfire policy leaders slam Trump’s firefighting proposal

Tim Ingalsbee stood with a shovel in hand as flames crept across the Siskiyou National Forest.

It was 1987 — a year scientists stepped up warnings about climate change — and the Silver Fire had become a monumental event, burning 100,000 acres. More than three decades later, in 2020, the Holiday Farm Fire in Lane County surpassed it, burning 173,000 acres. 

Ingalsbee witnessed the rapid rise of megafires and how they are starting farther north in Willamette Valley cities, where fire was once a distant concern. 

Rather than staffing up for worsening fire seasons, the Trump administration has been cutting back. It eliminated U.S. Forest Service positions and, in its recent budget, proposed consolidating wildfire programs across multiple federal agencies into a single unit. 

Ingalsbee, a former U.S. Forest Service firefighter and now executive director of the Eugene-based nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE), isn’t opposed to reform. 

However, Wednesday, the organization issued a policy paper warning the Trump administration is positioning a federal wildland fire service as a streamlined “superagency” that would improve efficiency. In reality, the group argues, such consolidation could further strain systems both ecologically and operationally.

“There are merits to thinking about the concept of consolidating, at least the fire policies, all together, and improving coordination,” Ingalsbee said, referring to the federal agencies that split responsibility of managing fire, including the Bureau of Land Management, Department of the Interior, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and U.S. Forest Service.

“But in the context of DOGE [the Department of Government Efficiency], just defunding budgets and dismembering agencies, it just seems like this kind of deceptive downsizing,” Ingalsbee said. 

In a Wednesday interview with Lookout Eugene-Springfield, U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., called the Trump administration’s approach to a federal wildland fire service reckless. Not enough research has been done to fully understand the flaws in the current system, let alone how to fix them, he said.

Nearly 48% of land in Lane County is owned by the U.S. Forest Service. Over the past five years, more than 700 square miles have burned across a patchwork of federal, state, and private lands, Merkley said. That’s an area about five times the size of Portland. 

“The thing that really scares me right now is that the Trump administration is cutting our number of people working the Forest Service substantially, and that’s undermining our ability to quickly respond to fires,” said Merkley, who sits on a Senate committee that secures funding for a range of environmental projects.

In a conference call last week, Merkley said Trump is putting wildfire preparedness and response at risk on the precipice of what could be an aggressive wildfire season in Oregon. 

Nearly 500 Forest Service jobs have been lost in its Region 6, which covers the Pacific Northwest. No figures have been made available for national forests in Lane County, including the Willamette and Siuslaw. And it is unclear exactly how many jobs have been reinstated.

Lookout Eugene–Springfield asked the U.S. Forest Service about cuts and consolidations, and officials said they were working on an answer.

Leaders, including Oregon State Fire Marshal Mariana Ruiz-Temple, say people need to adapt to a new fire reality. In Lane County, that means living in a fire-prone landscape in an era of hotter temperatures and drier conditions. This, paired with expanding development into forests, is adding to fire risk. 

“I think that 2020 was a really clear indicator that wildfire can happen every year, and frankly in some cases, we’ve been really lucky,” she told Lookout-Eugene Springfield last week. 

In recent close calls, wildfires prompted evacuations in forested areas of North Springfield in 2023 and near Moon Mountain in 2022, though both fires were quickly contained.

Ingalsbee, Merkley, Ruiz-Temple have all emphasized that prevention is the best course of keeping a disaster from happening at our doorsteps. 

That responsibility is shared between the public and those who manage forests and lands, they say. 

For Oregonians, it means practicing fire-smart habits: fully extinguishing campfires, avoiding parking on dry grass, and staying alert during high-risk fire days. For managers, that can mean using tools that reduce fuel that feeds fire. Such tools include what practitioners call prescribed fire, which burns away shrubs and brush. 

It’s stewardship that is part of a holistic approach to wildland fire management, not one that just puts out a blaze. 

“Creating a separate fire management [agency] from land management [agency] will sever the connection between fire management and land management,” Ingalsbee said. “It will lose that stewardship ethos, and it will just be a kind of municipal fire department in the woods.”