EDITOR’S NOTE: As Greater Yellowstone braces for what is lining up to be a serious wildfire summer, Mountain Journal in this three-part series examines what the federal firefighting system will look like and the conditions it faces. Part 1 reviews fire weather forecasts which show unusual conditi ons headed this way. Part 2 inquires about the staffing and structure of federal wildfire services after a year of political tumult. And Part 3 looks at the plans working through Congress to restructure a firefighting system that’s been in place for decades. Last week, a panel of Montana state officials asked their federal colleagues how plans for this summer’s wildfire season are shaping up. The responses they got left many in the room frustrated. This story also appeared in Mountain Journal “Everybody has lots of serious questions about this new Wildland Fire Service,” Missoula Democratic Senator Willis Curdy said during the Environmental Quality Council meeting on March 25. “I personally have really serious questions where we’re headed.” Wildfires burned 1.4 million acres before the first day of spring this year. The federal officials at the meeting agreed an “active season” was on the horizon. But only a fraction of an anticipated consolidation of federal wildfire agencies has taken place, leaving most of the responses and resources the same as they’ve been for decades. And the few federal changes which have occurred got dubious reception from the Montana officials. “We’re not looking at 2026 as the year we go in and make significant changes to policy,” Brad Shoemaker, U.S. Interior Department Wildland Fire Service fuels specialist, told the EQC. “What you saw in 2024 and 2025 is how we’ll operate.” Last year, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order directing the U.S. departments of Interior and Agriculture to combine their multiple wildland firefighting programs into a consolidated single agency. “The Federal Government can empower State and local leaders by streamlining Federal wildfire capabilities to improve their effectiveness and promoting commonsense, technology-enabled local strategies for land management and wildfire response and mitigation,” the order read. But most of the plan stalled last fall when Congress refused to authorize or fund it. After facing bipartisan skepticism in both House and Senate appropriations committees, the 2026 federal budget ordered a study to examine the potential benefits of a consolidated wildfire service. Those results aren’t expected before 2027. The United States has a long list of federal agencies overseeing its 640 million acres of public lands. Although from a city sidewalk it might appear like the same landscape of trees and grass, those agencies have different missions and methods of managing their holdings. The Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture and Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management each own slightly more than 170 million acres in the Lower 48 states (they own another 22 million and 71.3 million acres in Alaska, respectively). Those two agencies have somewhat similar responsibilities for producing timber, grazing livestock, and providing recreation among other open-space activities. They also protect their forests and grasslands from wildfire with legions of ground crews, aircraft and equipment. But Interior has several additional land management agencies, the largest of which are the National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs. Each has its own significantly different firefighting priorities. For example, BIA might want to protect commercial timber stands from a forest fire on a Tribal reservation, while NPS might view a similar blaze in a national park as a necessary ecological service. FWS administers 12.6 million acres of wildlife refuges in the Lower 48, all of which have different habitat needs than either national parks or reservation timberlands. The Windy Rock Fire west of Helena, Montana, started in August of 2025 and burned more than 6,000 before it was fully contained two months later. Credit: Jeremiah Maghan In January, Interior officials announced they had put about 4,000 firefighters into their portion of a new Wildland Fire Service. That combines formerly separate crews housed in the BLM, NPS, FWS and BIA. But it does not include the Agriculture Department’s Forest Service personnel or resources. And it does not change the structure of the National Interagency Fire Center, which has been standardizing training, incident command and dispatch duties for decades. “The Forest Service has the largest and most prepared firefighting force in the world,” Forest Service Region 1 interim Forester Troy Heithecker told the EQC. “Wildfire seasons are hotter, they’re longer, Montana’s forests are impacted by insect and disease outbreaks [and] they’re drought-stressed. We feel those conditions are only expected to worsen over time without continued action and innovation in how we work together across jurisdictions.” The agency would be cooperating with Interior to cut bureaucratic delays and standardize firefighting activities, he explained, but it would “maintain the strong coordination that already exists.” He added the Forest Service would participate in a congressionally required study of the potential benefits of a combined Wildland Fire Service. Aaron Thompson of the Interior Department Northern Rockies Coordinating Group told lawmakers WFS would speed up getting resources to fires, standardize fuels-management projects and improve communications. “Instead of four duty officers getting resources responding to a fire, we’ll now only have one,” Thompson said. “We won’t know what kind of successes that will bring until we get through a season or two as we evaluate the new service.” Curdy, who is EQC’s vice chairman, said his 38 years’ experience as a wildland firefighter, pilot and supervisor left him skeptical of Interior’s plan. As an example, he noted all those agency duty officers already work together in the same National Interagency Fire Center dispatch offices. A firefighter on the Bivens Creek Fire northwest of Ennis, Montana, sharpens his chainsaw in August 2025. Credit: Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest “I don’t see anything you offer that’s going to be more efficient,” Curdy said. “Convince me.”  Thompson added that other problems such as incompatible information technology, expense handling and contracting would also see improvements. And Shoemaker said closer cooperation would unify the ways different agencies manage similar landscapes. For example, after a wildfire on BLM land, that agency first starts an emergency stabilization approach to repair urgent damage, and works up a 3- to 5-year remediation plan. The Forest Service puts both stabilization and remediation into a single 18-month response. Consolidating federal firefighting has been an active topic for many non-governmental organizations. Luke Mayfield, past president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, told a recent Zoom gathering of the group’s membership that supporting a consolidated federal firefighting service remained a top priority. But he cautioned that all land-management responsibilities needed to be included: “It’s not just a suppression agency, but a holistic wildland fire management agency,” Mayfield said. “Otherwise, we’re just trying to squeeze more blood out of the same stone.” Many observers and former agency leaders appear more critical of the consolidation. National Association of Forest Service Retirees Chairman Bill Avey recently released a list of concerns, including how “diverting Forest Service budget to the new [Wildland Fire Service] raises serious questions about the agency’s ability to meet its broader mission, including timber and other natural resource management targets.” He added that spending billions on creating a new bureaucracy would not get at the root causes of catastrophic wildland fire, which he argued were overly dense forests, wildland-urban interface development, and changing weather patterns. Ed Shepard is a retired BLM deputy director of fire and aviation and now works on policy issues for the Public Lands Foundation. He said his colleagues also have apprehension about concentrating wildfire resources. “Our concern has been when you take fire and separate it from land management, you really create problems that I don’t think they really anticipate by doing this,” Shepard told Mountain Journal. “When you start meshing in fuels treatments, emergency rehabilitation and management post-fire, you need a lot of people involved,” he said. “There’s resource people, foresters, range management specialists, wildlife biologists, hydrologists, fuels management specialists — all working together.” Many of those people work full time in those disciplines and also are qualified to fight fire. “They’re the BLM militia,” Sheperd said. “If you move them to wildland fire, then you don’t have them for habitat restoration, timber sales and things like that. You’ve lost those people when you really need them.” During the Environmental Quality Council session, Missoula Democratic Representative Tom France raised a larger worry about federal capabilities. As the overall Forest Service workforce has shrunk over the past year, he asked how the agency could handle its non-fire requirements and duties. Consolidation could further stress new mandates such as increased timber harvest, he said. A USDA spokesperson told Mountain Journal that about 28,000 Forest Service responders are ready to mobilize in 2026, including 11,364 wildland firefighters backed up by a combination of full-time and seasonal staff. That number was 101 percent of the target hiring goal, according to the agency. “Our preparations for the 2026 fire season are on track or ahead of schedule,” the spokesman wrote in an email. “The Forest Service is working with the Department of the Interior to reduce administrative barriers, streamline the overall function of the interagency wildfire response system and advance the policies set forth in the President’s Executive Order 14308. With our significant wildland fire response capabilities, we stand ready to support the Department of the Interior as it establishes the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service.” The post Wildfire forecast, part 2: As fire season bears down, fractured federal wildland fire service complicates efforts appeared first on Montana Free Press. ...read more read less