The Forest Service Is Being Dismantled

The USDA has ordered a sweeping restructuring of the United States Forest Service — the agency responsible for managing 193 million acres of National Forest and Grasslands across the country, coordinating wildfire suppression from California to Montana, and conducting the fire science research that underlies every fuel treatment prescription and fire behavior model in use today. Regional offices are being shuttered, headquarters relocated to Salt Lake City, and 57 research stations closed.

The administration calls this a reorganization. The scope — closing all regional offices, shuttering 57 research stations, relocating headquarters across the country — amounts to dismantlement in practice. This is happening to the federal government's primary wildfire management institution, established in 1905, at the beginning of what our data shows will be one of the most dangerous fire seasons in modern history.

What the Data Says Right Now

Across the western fire corridor — from southern California through Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana to the Canadian border — snowpack stands well below normal. Oregon's median April 1 snow water equivalent is 0.0 inches, the worst on record. California's Sierra Nevada is at 74% of normal. Idaho at 41%. British Columbia is tracking below historical averages.

Firewatch, our fire prediction model trained on 37 million observations across this full corridor with 91% predictive accuracy, identifies specific 4km grid cells where large-fire risk concentrates. The model uses 37 features — fuel moisture, wind speed, topography, fire history, snowpack, climate oscillations, fuel type — from 47 years of federal climate data, 73,000 fire records, and 155,000 Canadian fire records.

The agency being eliminated is the one that would have used information like this to pre-position resources, execute prescribed burns, and coordinate suppression across state and international boundaries when fires start.

What Was Already Lost Before Today

• $300 million in Forest and Rangeland Research — eliminated in FY2026 budget
• $283 million in State, Private, and Tribal Forestry cost-share — eliminated
• Fuels treatment collapsed from 3.6 million to 1.7 million acres nationally (53% drop)
• ~3,400 USFS personnel terminated, including 700 certified firefighters
• Incident command system fractured by Wildland Fire Service reorganization under DOI

Those cuts were already catastrophic. This restructuring effectively dismantles what remains.

193 Million Acres With No Managing Agency

The National Forest System spans the western fire corridor:

• California: 20 million acres across 18 National Forests, including the Sierra, Shasta-Trinity, and Los Padres — where the August Complex (2020, 1M acres) and Dixie Fire (2021, 963K acres) burned
• Oregon: 15.7 million acres including the Deschutes, Willamette, and Rogue River-Siskiyou — where April 1 snowpack is zero
• Idaho: 20.4 million acres including the Frank Church Wilderness and Nez Perce-Clearwater — the model's highest-risk corridor
• Montana: 16.9 million acres including the Bitterroot, Flathead, and Helena — where beetle-kill fuel loads are concentrated
• Washington: 9.3 million acres including the Okanogan-Wenatchee and Gifford Pinchot — the 2015 and 2020 fire zones

There is no replacement. The Wildland Fire Service under the Department of Interior, created by executive order in January 2026, was designed to consolidate fire operations — not to manage 82 million acres of forest land across these five states alone. The silviculturists, hydrologists, and biologists who understand the specific forests where fire will burn are Forest Service employees. They are the ones being displaced.

The Numbers

What Happens Next

State agencies across the corridor cannot replace the Forest Service. California's CAL FIRE manages state responsibility areas but not the 20 million acres of federal forest. Oregon's ODF, Washington's DNR, Idaho's IDL, and Montana's DNRC each manage fractions of what the Forest Service covered in their states. None has the budget, workforce, or authority to absorb 193 million acres of federal responsibility.

Tribal nations across the western corridor have the sovereign authority and cultural expertise to execute prescribed fire under the Tribal Forest Protection Act. They steward millions of acres across the region. But they cannot replace a 30,000-person federal agency that manages land from Alaska to Puerto Rico.

The FEMA BRIC program — court-restored at $1 billion with a July 23 deadline — remains the last federal lifeline for community fire resilience. Counties across California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana should be submitting applications now. If that funding is also withdrawn, there is no federal wildfire infrastructure remaining.

British Columbia, which shares fire weather corridors with Washington and experienced its worst fire season in history in 2023 (2.8 million hectares), now faces a fire season with no American federal partner on the other side of the border.