Wildfires are a growing threat. Do we need a new federal agency to help?
Wildfires have consumed thousands of buildings, killed dozens of people, and smothered millions in choking smoke in recent years. Blazes like the Los Angeles wildfires in 2025 have also revealed that fighting these massive blazes continues to be hampered by bureaucratic traps — which agency is in charge of the response, who is on the hook for the cleanup, what layer of government is accountable for prevention, and who has to pay for it all?
“In too many cases, including in California, a slow and inadequate response to wildfires is a direct result of reckless mismanagement and lack of preparedness,” President Donald Trump said last year in an executive order.
That confusion is one reason why the Department of the Interior announced last month that it is taking steps to create a new Wildland Fire Service. The idea is to streamline disparate firefighting efforts across 693 million acres of federal land into one agency.
The idea has promise, and the move to bring in Brian Fennessy, a veteran Southern California fire chief, to helm the agency was applauded by many in the firefighting community. But the agency is already off to a shaky start. The Interior Department requested a budget of $6.55 billion for the new Wildland Fire Service initiative, but Congress pointedly did not include funding for it in the recent spending package in January because it would have required changes across multiple federal departments. Lawmakers did say they are open to studying the idea.
The debate over the funding aside, few doubt that there is a real problem here: Dealing with wildfires is a convoluted and costly endeavor that spans state, local, and federal agencies. Over the past five years, the federal government has spent an average of $2.4 billion on average to fight wildfires per year. Inside the Interior Department alone, there are multiple divisions with a hand in fire operations, including the Office of Wildland Fire, the National Park Service, and the Bureau of Land Management. Meanwhile, the US Forest Service, which conducts the bulk of federal firefighting, is currently a part of the Department of Agriculture.
As the federal government dithers over who should take the lead on fighting wildfires, the dangers are only growing.
“The US fire management system itself is strained close to the breaking point,” said David Calkin, a wildfire consultant and a former scientist at the US Forest Service. “The way we prepare for fire is a heavily bureaucratic intergovernmental process that is not agile to the rapidly increasing complexity of fires.”
But is a new wildfire service the solution?
Some of the experts I spoke to said there’s merit to the idea of putting the government’s wildfire-related work under one roof. However, there are worries among firefighters, land managers, and researchers about how this effort will play out, particularly if it places too much emphasis on putting out fires and not enough on the slow, tedious work of reducing their overall threat in the first place.
“I think there’s a lot of concern, but it’s based on uncertainty and a bit of fear,” said Christopher Dunn, a former wildland firefighter and now an assistant professor studying wildfire risk at Oregon State University. “It could come out to be very helpful to the workforce, helpful to our landscapes if it’s done right.
