Trump's Trials - Wildfire prevention work declines under Trump administration

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

With wildfires already burning and drought persisting across much of the U.S., fire experts are bracing for what could be an extreme fire season. The U.S. Forest Service is going into it having done far less work than in recent years to manage the dry, flammable vegetation that can fuel catastrophic fires. NPR's Lauren Sommer reports.Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Trump's terms. I'm Scott Detrow. President Trump promised every single American that he would make America safe again. Every single day in the Oval Office, the president looks at us and says, why haven't we done more? This will be an entirely different country in a short period of time. Every episode, we bring you one story from NPR's recent coverage of the 47th president. With a focus on ways his administration is pushing the boundaries of presidential power. Here's the latest from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin.

Wildfire experts see the ingredients developing for a bad fire season. More than half of the U.S. faces drought, and the U.S. Forest Service has done less work to prevent fires. NPR's Lauren Summer reports. Last fall, Matthew Hurtow faced the hardest day of his career. For 25 years, he studied a forest in California, part of his research as a forest ecologist at the University of New Mexico. It's called the Tea Kettle Express. Ferramental Forest because it's protected by the Forest Service for research. There are individual trees that I would go back and visit every year, you know, these big, gorgeous sugar pines and Jeffrey pines.

But Hurtow says the forest was pretty overgrown. It hadn't had a major fire since 1865. So all that dead vegetation like pine needles and small branches and stuff, it just keeps accumulating and then it's the source of energy for the next fire. Historically, California forests saw a lot more fires, lower intense. intensity fires that cleared out the underbrush. That changed when Native American tribes were forced from their land, because fire is a tool they used to manage the ecosystem. In the 1930s, the Forest Service also started putting out every fire it could. All that built-up vegetation can fuel extreme fires, ones that kill trees and spread to communities. So Herto and his colleagues started making a plan to clear it out. We all knew that this is what the forest needed. They planned a prescribed bird,

a fire that set on purpose during the cooler months. But Hurtow says planning with the Forest Service dragged on. And then, last August, lightning sparked the garnet fire. It raced through the tea kettle forest in one day. Herto went back to see the damage afterwards. I broke down and cried five times that day. You know, it was a pretty rough, rough thing to see. The Forest Service did not respond to questions about the prescribed burn.

Hertoe says what happened to T-Kettle isn't an isolated example. Around the country, far more controlled burning needs to happen. The clock was ticking. We've got relatively limited time to do the work that needs to be done. The Forest Service has long said prescribed burns are a priority. But in 2025, the first year of Trump's current term, the agency reduced vegetation on much less acreage than the year before, almost a million and a half acres less. That's according to an analysis of agency data by NPR, as well as the nonprofit at grassroots wildland firefighters. The biggest decline was in prescribed burning.

The Forest Service burned only about half as much acreage in 2025 compared to the two previous years. In a statement, the Forest Service says the drop was due to staff being occupied fighting fires and because conditions weren't right for doing burns in the Southeast. But as of last summer, the agency lost more than 5,000 employees, part of the Trump administration's efforts to reduce the size of government. That's concerned Senate Democrats like Ron Wyden of Oregon. These infernoes are not your grandfather's fires. They're bigger and they're hotter.

And we need to address this critical preparedness gap. He pressed Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz on that in a congressional hearing last year. Schultz responded that the agency had hired firefighters. So in terms of firefighting capacity, we're there. So we've not made any changes to our resource availability this year. But that doesn't necessarily fix it. the staffing gap. Bobby Scopa is vice president of grassroots wildland firefighters, an advocacy group for federal firefighters. She says vegetation projects require other Forest Service staff

to do contracts and permitting. There's a lot of people who help the fire organization get the work done that aren't firefighters. So we knew that there was a lot of disruption in the system. We were hearing about it from our members. When the Forest Service does less prescribed burning, Scopa says, it just sets the stage. for even more extreme fires in the future. Lauren Summer, NPR News. Before we wrap up a reminder, you can find more coverage of the Trump administration

on the NPR Politics Podcast, where you can hear NPR's political reporters break down the day's biggest political news with new episodes every weekday afternoon. And thanks, as always, to our NPR Plus supporters who hear every episode of the show without sponsor messages. You can learn more at plus.npr.org. I'm Scott Detrow.

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