Budget cuts, new fire strategies challenge Forest Service in Arizona

• The U.S. Forest Service is undergoing major changes, including funding cuts, staff reductions, and a headquarters relocation, raising concerns about its readiness for wildfire season.
• The agency has lost thousands of staff, and while it claims to have hired more firefighters, experts worry about the loss of other crucial support personnel.
• A new policy directive focuses on suppressing all fires immediately, a shift from the previous strategy of sometimes letting fires burn to reduce fuel.

Another wave of changes is sweeping the U.S. Forest Service, even before the dust has settled on last year’s shake-up, and it's raising concerns as peak wildfire season approaches.

In 2025, the agency was hit with slashed funding and multiple rounds of staff cuts, some of which the courts have deemed illegal. The agency also moved to rescind the roadless rule, to the dismay of environmental advocates concerned about the wild character of much of the country’s forests.

Now, the Forest Service is revising its playbook for firefighting, and overhauling its organizational structure, proposing to relocate its headquarters.

Already, these high-level decisions have had a local impact.

Forest treatment projects across the country have faced disruptions and funding squeezes, and it's unclear if fire response personnel will be at full strength. The Forest Service also seems to be doubling down on increasing timber extraction, experts say, in ways that don't always make economic and ecological sense.

These are more than just bureaucratic tweaks, but instead hint at a fundamental drift in what the Forest Service stands for, those experts say.

Overall, the moves could spell a departure from science-based management that might not be in the best interest of forest health, experts say, which creates uncertainty in the short-term and long-term readiness for dealing with wildfires.

At the cusp of peak wildfire season, experts are waiting to see how the disruption will impact the Forest Service’s readiness to meet it.

Fewer forest acres treated

Funding for the Forest Service continues to drop since President Donald Trump began his second term.

The 2027 fiscal year budget proposal allocates 25% less money for managing national forests, and close to half for the agency's operations. Many other budget items, including research and forestry assistance outside of national forests, have been eliminated.

Local communities are already feeling the pinch. In the Coconino National Forest, federal funding is down for forest treatment projects, leaving local partners to foot the bill.  

Typically, the Forest Service funds-match these collaborative initiatives. But this year, after Coconino County identified the San Francisco Peaks area north of Flagstaff as a priority project, the Forest Service said it had no money to contribute, leaving the county to cover the $3.5 million tab.  

“That's the first time we've had to do that,” said Jay Smith, Coconino County’s Forest Restoration director. “We've expressed our frustration that this is supposed to be us partnering together, not us paying for the whole thing.”  

Coconino County has no choice but to move ahead without its key funding partner. Its modeling has shown that any post-wildfire flooding in the area could rack up $2.8 billion worth of economic damage to the local community.  

So far, it’s unclear how many projects across the state are seeing the same funding squeeze. Other forests have been spared: For projects in Kaibab National Forest, the Forest Service has promised to chip in.   

In an email to The Arizona Republic, the Forest Service confirmed that it paused some fund-matching agreements in 2025 to review them for waste and abuse of federal dollars. However, the agency called those disruptions temporary without elaborating on the timeline, and failed to clarify which programs were impacted.

The chaos at the Forest Service has left its mark on the pace of wildfire prevention efforts. That much was evident from analyses by NPR and the nonprofit Grassroots Wildland Firefighters: Between 2024 and 2025, the cadence of fuel reduction nationwide shrunk by 1.5 million acres, a drop of nearly 40%. Prescribed burning declined 44%, equivalent to 700,000 acres not treated.

The Forest Service disputed the accuracy of the report, instead claiming that the agency met 92% of its goal last year for reducing hazardous fuels. The overall reduction of acres treated, it said in its email to The Republic, was in part due to the higher fire danger that hampered opportunities for carrying out prescribed burns.

Locally, wildfire mitigation in Arizona’s national forests seems to echo this trend. Prescribed burning was still carried out in the spring, “but it was pretty limited, less than what we've done in the past,” Smith said.

Still suffering from job cuts

Bobbie Scopa, who has 44 years of experience working at the Forest Service, isn’t surprised that forest treatment activity tumbled. It’s all to be expected from a year of staff cuts, from which the agency is still reeling.

“You can say that you're concerned about those projects, but if you're reducing the workforce, how is it going to get done?” the former firefighter asked.

The full extent of the carnage on the agency’s workforce is only now coming to light. By the end of 2025, the Forest Service had lost nearly 6,000 staff since the start of the year, a contraction of 16%. According to a recent report, the Forest Service in Arizona alone shed 200 of its employees.

Among the thousands of workers who left the agency, some of them inevitably worked on fire prevention projects. Even the personnel behind the scenes can make or break the pace and scale of these crucial undertakings, Scopa said.

"The need to balance our budgets will not impact our operational capabilities or firefighting capacity," wrote a Forest Service representative in an email to The Republic. The Forest Service chief said that the agency has surpassed its goal of hiring more than 11,000 firefighters after the mass departures of workers last year.

But that claim is a bit misleading, Scopa said, as it takes more than full-time firefighters to put out a fire.

Key to the response team are “red card” holders — qualified rangers, trail builders, ecologists — who are called up on a moment’s notice to add capacity to fire crews.

In the long term, fire mitigation teams can’t do without desk workers who handle contracts for thinning projects, or inspectors of a post-fire landscape who inform preventative planning. These personnel are far from the action, but are nevertheless indispensable to the overall effort to restore healthy fire ecology on a forested landscape.

Scopa has noticed that fewer coordinators are available to respond to a wildfire emergency.

Incident management teams are a crucial link in the chain of wildfire response, handling the logistical tangle of mobilizing the right people and resources to the right place.

Last year, the wildfire season was relatively mild, so most of the country got by with fewer incident management teams without too much pain.

But this year, which has already seen more than 16,000 wildfires, teams will have to be borrowed and shared across the country, miles away from the thick of action. Scopa is worried that this might hamper fire response if multiple wildland fires break out at once.

A pivot in policy

Experts and forest managers have expressed concern over the Forest Service’s directives to focus on suppressing fires rather than actively managing them.

In the Coconino National Forest, on-the-ground workers are now instructed to follow the blanket strategy of extinguishing all fires as quickly as possible. In the past, before peak fire season, the Forest Service usually lays out plans to manage some starts by letting fires burn for a certain acreage. Not any more.

The new directive seems to apply to all national forests.

So far, the Forest Service chief has provided scant detail about what that looks like on the ground, beyond claiming that the agency's firefighters have always leaned on a suppression strategy using direct and indirect methods.

It’s unclear how much flexibility the full-suppression strategy might give foresters in harnessing an active fire for reducing forest fuels, and whether it opens the door to fewer actions involving controlled fires, such as prescribed burning.

“We need all the tools in the toolbox” for combating wildfire risk, said Kelly Pohl, the associate director of the research nonprofit Headwaters Economics. “And that is going to include managing wildfires.”

Controlled burning runs on a knife-edge of risk. Fire is a necessary component of the health of Western forests. Introducing small fires on a fire-starved landscape can mitigate the size of future catastrophic burns.

But controlled burns can also spiral into full-scale conflagrations if meteorological conditions shift in ways unanticipated. Last year’s Dragon Bravo Fire ballooned out of hand, and park officials caught flak from lawmakers for their “contain-and-control” approach in dealing with the lightning-caused first sparks.

This year, the strategy of actively managing fires faces added headwinds.

The trauma from Dragon Bravo, including the destruction of a historic lodge on the Grand Canyon's North Rim, complicates public perception of fires, even managed ones. Clouding the picture are the scant snowpack conditions last winter and Arizona’s protracted drought, all but priming forests to burn.

Experts can’t say whether full suppression is the way to go, what consequences it might bring in the short run. “Maybe this is the right year to do that, if we’re as dry as they say we are,” Smith said. How peak wildfire season shapes up this year, “we'll see how it goes.”

Restructuring and relocating leadership

At the end of March, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced seismic restructuring in the Forest Service. Chief among the changes was moving the headquarters from Washington, DC, to Salt Lake City. The move will likely result in an exodus of career employees balking at uprooting their families.

Critics say that the policy decision harkens back to the 2019 failed attempt to move the Bureau of Land Management headquarters from the capital to Grand Junction during President Trump’s first term. Over 90% of workers quit the agency rather than move, prompting the next administration to reverse the decision.

Furthermore, in the same decree, the USDA also rolled out plans to close 55 out of 77 of the Forest Service’s research facilities. It will also replace nine regional offices with 15 state offices in the name of centralization.

All signs point to politics moving into the driver's seat for the agency’s decision making, rather than leaning on science. “These proposals, I don't believe, are designed to make better decisions,” said Brad Powell, a retired regional forester at the Forest Service. “They are to provide more political oversight of the agency.”

It’s also part of the federal government’s agenda to ramp up timber production, Powell said, consistent with the administration's constant messaging in the past year to boost economic extraction on public lands.

For example, Powell noted that California’s new state office and operations service center will be in Placerville, in the heart of the state’s timber-production centers, and far away from the southern forests where recreation is the main use.

At least in Arizona, forestry experts say the agency-wide timber focus doesn’t make much economic sense. Arizona’s ocean of ponderosa pine that sweeps north to east isn't highly coveted hardwood to begin with, so the state doesn’t stand to reap much profit. Most of that logged pine goes toward building shipping pallets and interior paneling.

The federal government has also revived the proposal of consolidating public land agencies’ firefighting functions under the umbrella of the Wildland Fire Service. Currently, firefighters from the Department of the Interior make up that new organization, established in January, but the White House hasn’t given up on the idea of including Forest Service crews in the mix, too.

Critics are raising the same objections since the White House first proposed the new organization.

Mitigating wildfires on a landscape is more than just suppressing them, Powell said, and it’s inextricably linked with long-term land management planning. Basically, the entire mission of each land agency.

“Just putting out fires — that's the easy part of the job,” Powell said. “Managing the forest to reduce that fire risk over time has to be done by land managers. It can't be done just by fire suppression folks.”

Shi En Kim covers environmental issues for The Arizona Republic and azcentral. Send tips or questions to [email protected]. 

Environmental coverage on azcentral.com and in The Arizona Republic is supported by a grant from the Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust. 

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