Wildland firefighters fretting Trump, agency shakeups ahead of dangerous fire season

Key Forecasts and Conditions (As of March 2026)

• Early Start: An exceptionally early snowmelt in the West has left landscapes primed for fire, breaking records set over the past 40 years.
• High-Risk Areas: In March, elevated risks are focused in the southern Rockies, southern Plains, and Southeast.
• Impending Western Risk: For April through June, the Southwest, Pacific Northwest, and Central Rockies face above-normal fire potential, with a long, busy summer season expected.
• Primary Drivers: Climate change and extreme drought are severely drying out vegetation and reducing soil moisture. 

As most readers know, this interested party has been advocating for moving the US Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture into Interior since the blog's creation in 2010; but, having the Trump Organization doing it is terrifying.

The Forest Service and Interior’s Bureau of Land Management each have 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. 

But the Interior Department also includes the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service and Bureau of Indian Affairs. Each of those has its own wildfire protection force, with significantly different 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, which have different habitat needs than either national parks or reservation timberlands. [Wildfire Forecast, Part 2: A Fractured Federal Wildland Fire Service