A dangerous fire season across the West is unfolding just as the Trump administration overhauls the way the country fights wildfires — a shift that has California officials watching closely, even as the Golden State enjoys one of its calmer fire summers in recent memory.
Since spring, seven people have died fighting fires in Colorado, Utah and Oregon: four firefighters killed in a burnover on Colorado’s Knowles Fire, two helicopter pilots lost in a crash in Utah, and a bulldozer contractor killed while cutting fireline in Oregon. Fires have scorched millions of acres and destroyed hundreds of structures throughout the region.
California, meanwhile, has been sending its own engines and crews out of state to help battle blazes in Colorado and the Pacific Northwest. But even with its deep bench of resources, the state isn’t immune to the strain being felt nationwide. The country has been operating at Preparedness Level 5 — the highest tier of wildfire response — since mid-July, meaning virtually every available firefighting asset is already committed. Requests for additional crews and equipment are increasingly going unmet.
**A shift toward full suppression**
The backdrop to this fire season is a significant restructuring at the federal level. The administration has merged wildland firefighting crews from four Interior Department agencies — the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs — into a newly formed U.S. Wildland Fire Service. That agency, along with the U.S. Forest Service, is now pursuing what officials call “full suppression,” meaning nearly every new wildfire is targeted for rapid extinguishment rather than being allowed to burn under controlled conditions for ecological benefit.
Administration officials describe the approach as a necessary response to a summer marked by extreme heat, drought and dangerous fire behavior. Brian Fennessy, the former Orange County Fire Authority chief who now leads the new Wildland Fire Service, said the agency’s fire officials — not land managers — now have final say on whether a fire is left to burn.
“When it was a fire for resource benefit, fire (officials) may have had a say, but they did not hold the final decision,” Fennessy said, describing the previous system under the Interior Department. “Now, we hold, on the fire side, that final decision.”
U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said his agency has not formally reinstated the old “10 a.m. rule” — a Depression-era policy requiring fires to be extinguished by the next morning — but acknowledged that the practical effect this summer has been much the same: aggressive knockdown of new fires rather than managed burns.
“We aren’t making any commitment to that time frame,” Schultz said, “but in terms of this time of the year, right now, we are not going to just sit back and let fire go and achieve other objectives. We’re going to be aggressively suppressing.”
Forest Service spokesperson Adrienne Freeman, who is based in California, said the calculus ultimately comes down to available resources. With national firefighting capacity stretched thin, there’s little room to manage fires for forest health right now.
“If something goes funny, we don’t know if we’re going to get the resources to manage it — and we pretty much know we aren’t because that’s not where houses are,” Freeman said.
**Concerns about long-term consequences**
Critics warn that treating full suppression as the default strategy — rather than one tool among several — could backfire over time. Decades of aggressive firefighting, combined with climate-driven drought, have already left many Western forests choked with dry, overgrown vegetation. Suppressing every fire without exception, some experts argue, only adds to that fuel buildup, setting the stage for future blazes that are harder to control.
Johanna Nosal, a forester who spent 15 years with the U.S. Forest Service in California, Colorado and Montana before taking a federal buyout in 2025, said prescribed burns can’t come close to matching the scale of what’s needed.
“We’re putting these fires out, and sometimes we’re successful at it… but it’s just a year-to-year Band-Aid,” Nosal said. “What eventually happens is you have a lack of resources and these weather periods that will create these huge blazes that no matter what you will do will keep spreading.”
Bobbie Scopa, a firefighter with 45 years of experience across local, state and federal agencies, estimates the government would need 30,000 to 40,000 more firefighters to actually make full suppression work — and even then, she said, “you still wouldn’t be successful.”
Reflecting the strain, incident commanders on Utah’s Widemouth 2 Fire, which has burned nearly 130,000 acres, say repeated requests for hand crews and engines have gone unfilled, forcing reliance on international assistance.
**California’s advantage — and its worries**
Few states are as well-positioned to absorb these federal changes as California, which has invested heavily in its own firefighting capacity over the years, including the world’s largest aerial firefighting fleet. Cal Fire now employs more than 12,000 people, making it the largest state fire agency in the country and second in size only to the U.S. Forest Service among wildland firefighting forces worldwide.
Cal Fire officials, including spokesperson Emily Kilgore in the Tuolumne-Calaveras Unit, say they haven’t noticed disruptions in coordination with federal partners so far this season, including during the recent Dove Fire near Yosemite.
Still, state leaders are wary of what federal cutbacks could mean down the line. California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot warned in a May letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins that the state has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars — nearly half a billion since Gov. Gavin Newsom took office — covering wildfire safety projects on federal lands that the Forest Service has historically underfunded.
“While I understand the intention to operate a more efficient federal agency, many of these changes could impact our state’s wildfire readiness and create added public safety risks,” Crowfoot wrote.
Federal agencies remain responsible for protecting roughly half of California’s land, with Cal Fire handling mostly rural, privately owned wildlands that make up about a third of the state. The stakes of getting that partnership right were made painfully clear last year, when catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles killed 31 people, contributed to hundreds of additional deaths, and caused up to $131 billion in property and economic losses, according to a UCLA analysis.
**An agency in transition**
The Forest Service itself is undergoing sweeping changes, including relocating its headquarters from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City and consolidating research operations in Fort Collins, Colorado. The agency has shed 16% of its workforce since 2024, according to U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, an Oregon Democrat who has pressed Schultz on the reorganization’s risks.
Salinas and others worry that separating fire crews from the land management agencies they once worked alongside could sever critical lines of communication — for instance, warnings about not bulldozing firelines through habitat for endangered species or culturally sensitive sites.
Fennessy disputes that concern, saying fire personnel and land managers remain co-located and in daily contact. “I question the motive or intent of those that want to make that argument,” he said.
Investigators are also still examining whether the broader reorganization played any role in the deaths of the firefighters killed on Colorado’s Knowles Fire in late June. Fennessy called any suggestion of a connection “ludicrous” and said he’s confident, based on his knowledge of the ongoing investigation, that “there is absolutely zero connection.”
For now, officials across the West acknowledge there’s no tidy resolution to the tension between protecting lives and property today and maintaining healthier forests for tomorrow.
“There’s no simple answer,” Scopa said. “We’re not gonna put out all the fires. We’re never going to be successful… The environment is not conducive to that, the fuels are not conducive to that, the staffing is not conducive to that.”
Original source: CalMatters
