Experts on public lands and wildfires are voicing concern about how budget cuts to federal agencies will affect firefighting during the approaching fire season.
On Tuesday, four experts spoke about the issue during a Zoom call held by the nonpartisan Center for Western Priorities.
Public-lands agencies including the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management have lost more than 26,000 staff members since DOGE cuts began in 2025, said Andrea Delgado, former deputy regional forester and supervisor of safety, fire, fuels and aviation management with the Rocky Mountain Region of the U.S. Forest Service.
Meanwhile, Delgado said, ongoing work intended to prevent wildfires “slowed dramatically in 2025.”
She said the Forest Service treated 35 percent – some 1.4 million acres – less land with prescribed burning and thinning in 2025 than in 2024.
In the Four Corners, Utah and New Mexico both treated more acres in 2025 than in 2024, according to information on the Center for Western Priorities website. Utah treated about 33 percent more acres and New Mexico treated about 26 percent more.
However, Arizona treated 11 percent fewer acres and Colorado saw a decrease of 1.4 percent. Colorado treated just 69,248 acres in 2025, by far the fewest acres of any of the Four Corners states.
Of 11 western states, just three (Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming) treated more acreage in 2025 than 2024, according to the website.
On Monday, the National Interagency Fire Center issued an forecast saying there is above-normal potential for significant fires in June across much of the West, including the Four Corners and Great Basin.
During the Zoom call, Hugh Safford of the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of California-Davis said programs related to fire management suffered far fewer cuts than non-fire programs, but that can be misleading.
Cuts to non-fire programs have meant major reductions in risk-reduction activities and research, and a focus only on “putting fires out after they are ignited,” Safford said.
Safford is a former regional ecologist with the Pacific Southwest Region of the U.S Forest Service
Bobbie Scopa, vice president of the group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, agreed that firefighting programs have not been cut as severely as non-firefighting programs. However, those cuts still affect efforts to prevent, detect, and battle wildfires, she said.
Scopa is a former assistant regional fire director in the Northwest and a former Type 1 and Type 2 operations section chief for the U.S. Forest Service.
She said people in lookout towers, dispatchers, and those who manage firefighting efforts during major blazes aren’t counted as actual firefighters.
“When a fire starts, we think about a lookout, a person in a tower with binoculars. That person is not a firefighter,” Scopa said. “They’re impacted by all these cuts. When they call that fire in to dispatch, there’s a whole organizational support system in dispatch. . . they’re not firefighters.
“When firefighters need support and help with supplies and that sort of thing. . . when a fire exceeds the initial attack and they are unable to put the fire out initially, we have to call in an incident management team.”
Those teams are often 50 to 70 people who provide the framework that helps manage the fire, organizing food, maps, records, and logistics, but they are not considered actual firefighters, Scopa said. They may be staff members working in recreation, timber management, or other areas.
“All these people are coming from non-fire positions, and there are fewer teams now than there used to be,” Scopa said.
Jeff Mow, vice chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks, said when a wildfire happens, it’s important to have a local team available that understands how to work with local communities.
Mow, a former superintendent of Glacier National Park, said last year he heard from people in a number of incident management teams that, because of the turnover in leadership caused by all the budget and staffing cuts, there were many administrators who didn’t know how to work with local communities.
“Morale is very low right now and I think it’s gotten much worse in the last few months, with the [Trump] administration spending money on amenity projects in D.C.,” Mow said.
Scopa said there are fewer Type 1, or complex, teams to handle major fires than there used to be, which means that teams that would normally handle smaller incidents may be forced to take on fires that are beyond their capabilities, putting them, the landscape, and the resources at risk.
The participants also said it may be difficult for federal agencies to hire seasonal, temporary workers this summer because there have been too many times recently when people were hired and then told, never mind, they weren’t wanted after all.
