It has been a difficult summer for wildfires. By the end of September, nearly 8.5 million acres had ignited across the United States in 2026—well above the average annual acres burned—while dangerous entrapment events, where firefighters found themselves threatened by approaching flames and blocked from planned escape routes, hit a 20-year high. A mix of record drought and punishing weather conditions continues to make wildfire a year-round threat. Our nation is facing a wildfire crisis—a dire need to adapt our status quo. Crises are moments of inflection, where seemingly impossible changes can become achievable. We are at such a moment, and it’s time to reach for innovative solutions to meet it.
Three principles can help drive this national wildfire crisis toward a more manageable future: Coordinate improved wildfire suppression and pre-fire planning and mitigation; reduce risk in the built environment across federal, state, and local jurisdictions; and modernize the system, innovating and deploying new technologies and research to combat the worsening wildfire crisis.
A moment of crisis and opportunity
Wildfires cause damage that extends well beyond the forests that burn. In addition to destroying large swaths of vegetation and structures, wildfire can be catastrophic to human health, spewing highly toxic particulate matter that exacerbates health conditions such as asthma and coronary and lung disease. Indirect impacts from wildfire cause approximately 24,000 deaths per year nationwide—nearly twice the number of people killed per year by incidences of drunk driving.
The wildfire crisis brings massive economic costs, too, causing skyrocketing home insurance rates and non-renewals across fire-prone landscapes, and spiking consumer electricity costs as utility-ignited wildfires damage infrastructure and pose an increasingly existential threat to power utilities’ financial stability. The ecological impact of catastrophic wildfires also continues to grow alongside those human and economic impacts, with fire-dependent landscapes in dire shape after a century of wildfire suppression. Where fire once restored forests, many of today’s massive, intense fires are now destroying them, jeopardizing access to clean water, polluting the air we breathe, disrupting economies dependent on outdoor recreation, and threatening wildlife habitat and biodiversity.
No one on either side of the political aisle disagrees that our current wildfire system is unfit to address today’s needs and was in bad shape long before the current or previous administrations.
In September 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would address this crisis by reshaping how the country fights wildfire. The proposals would consolidate wildland fire suppression capabilities through a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service housed within the Department of Interior, combining firefighters from the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Indian Affairs, along with additional restructuring of firefighting crews within the U.S. Forest Service. The administration also announced that these consolidated firefighting forces would re-commit to a “full suppression” wildfire policy that was the nation’s reigning firefighting philosophy for over a century.
There appear to be two major motivations behind these proposals. The first is born from the private-sector philosophy that economies of scale can drive efficiencies in cost and contracting and overcome the fractured management, technology, standards, and systems of the current multi-agency wildland firefighting bureaucracy. The second is more philosophical: It reflects a growing distrust of land managers’ authority to make decisions regarding wildfire response and suppression. A unified Wildland Fire Service would strengthen the chain of command, achieving more top-down control of suppression decisionmaking. In the view of the architects of this new policy, recent incidences of failed containment—such as the Dragon Bravo fire in Arizona, where a small ignition in the Grand Canyon was allowed to burn under a “confine and contain” strategy and ballooned into a 145,504-acre megafire—have reflected local land managers’ struggles with the task of calling the shots to balance risk, safety, suppression effectiveness, and impacts to affected landscapes.
Critics of the current reorganization effort fear it could worsen the problem that decades of full-suppression policy helped create: a return to the “all fires out by 10 a.m.” policies and the resulting fuel-loaded forests that blow up each summer in catastrophic, stand-destroying blazes. They worry that this new emphasis on suppression and top-down management will further separate the act of fighting fires from the land management practices responsible for overall forest health, including reducing fuels and using prescribed burns to restore landscapes that need regular fire to function properly.
No one on either side of the political aisle disagrees that our current wildfire system, with a diminished workforce and an inconsistent, multi-agency patchwork of governance, is unfit to address today’s needs and was in bad shape long before the current or previous administrations. Nor would anyone suggest that we should have taken a substantially different approach to fighting the catastrophic fires that erupted this season, given the dire conditions on the ground. Ultimately, our wildfire system must be transformed to transcend the limitations of its bureaucratic past, and to respond to urgent needs to mitigate risks before fires occur. It may be that we should focus less on who calls the shots when fires break out, and more on ensuring that those decisions are made within the context of shared understandings of risk and robust investment in the actions that can measurably reduce those risks. We need to do more than consolidate forces and reduce bureaucracy. We need to think beyond the here-and-now to envision forward-looking policies for healthier forests and safer communities.
Fire disturbance can be a double-edged sword. Fire presents the risk of devastating impact, but it also serves as a necessary catalyst for renewal and revitalization, improving ecological health and reducing the risk of fires spreading into communities. The same can be said about fire policy. If developed and implemented thoughtfully with the right investments and incentives, policy change can help steer our forests and communities away from crisis and toward a safer, more fire-resilient future.
New principles for a wildfire-resilient nation
How should we meet the current moment and reimagine our policy framework for wildfire? For years, some policy minds have characterized wildfire as a “wicked problem”—one whose complexity defies simple definition and whose solutions are unclear. While acknowledging that complexity, we believe the wildfire issue can become a manageable problem, rather than a perpetual crisis, if we develop and advance a policy framework, investments, and incentives in accordance with three fundamental principles.
Principle One. Treat fire suppression and pre-fire forest management as complementary tools.
For a century, the U.S. wildland fire system was focused on eliminating wildfire, unintentionally creating the extreme wildfire risk we face today, particularly when combined with rapid development of communities in regions at high risk of wildfire. Catastrophic wildfires are typically high-intensity events moving at high speeds, occurring when the fuel load is high (thanks to decades of suppressing wildfires on landscapes that are adapted to regular fire), fire weather is extreme (hot, dry, windy conditions), and homes and other infrastructure provide additional fuel.
Amid these conditions, we must continue to improve our system for wildfire suppression, including early detection and response capabilities. This includes taking better care of our wildland firefighting workforce, which has borne the consequences of inefficient human resource, contracting, and other administrative systems, all while being asked to assume greater personal and business risk as they put their lives on the line. We must also provide a sustained, predictable, and fiscally responsible funding mechanism for wildfire operations. The 2018 Fire Funding Fix, set for reauthorization in Congress in the coming months, remains a vital initial step toward needed funding stability.
Fire officials frequently lament that they are fighting a 21st‑century problem using 20th‑century technology.
Fighting new fires, however, cannot be our primary tool for addressing wildfire risk. Fire suppression must be complemented with a more effective system to prioritize and invest in risk mitigation. We have decades of fire ecology research to inform land management practices to increase wildfire resilience and ecological health. In many ecosystems, this includes mechanical thinning to remove overgrown vegetation (a consequence of indiscriminate fire suppression) and the careful reintroduction of beneficial fire regimes through controlled burns, including the use of Indigenous-led cultural fire. For years, land management work has been a neglected side job, or even outright prohibited and criminalized in the case of Indigenous use of fire. We must ensure these activities are prioritized and executed in our most at-risk landscapes, well before fires start.
One example of a promising approach to balance suppression with risk mitigation does exist within the Forest Service’s nascent Potential Operational Delineations (PODs) program. Fire knows no boundaries, and PODs help land and fire managers work together to assess possible ignition sources and fire pathways and consider effective and safe responses under different weather conditions. They also engage those managers in the design and implementation of fuels treatments across jurisdictions, focusing not just on the boundaries that influence fire behavior, such as roads, ridges, and natural fuel breaks, but on other values at risk, such as homes, drinking water supplies, recreational assets, and wildlife habitat. The purpose of PODS is, in part, to enable informed decisions across geographical and jurisdictional boundaries, protect communities before fires start, and plan for what happens when they do. Perhaps most importantly, this enhanced coordination and transparency can help overcome the trust deficit emerging among some policymakers over suppression decisionmaking by land managers, by involving all levels of government in wildfire management and ensuring that decisions aren’t made by one entity at the expense of another, or worse, by administrators far away in Washington, D.C.
In concert with this integrated planning, we will also need to invest in solutions that prevent crises before they occur. Recent efforts to fund fire mitigation work commensurate with the scale of the problem, such as the one-time investments made through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), were a start. But these funds surged into a system whose local capacity had atrophied over many years and lacked efficient processes for implementation. Efforts to bolster an increase in workforce to fill gaps prompted budgetary shortfalls and have since been cited as a rationale for agency reorganizations and reductions in force. Stabilizing this workforce to avoid cycles of political hiring and firing is especially critical for projects that take years to plan, execute, and maintain. Future funding commitments for wildfire mitigation must be sustainable, predictable, and accountable.
Another barrier to effective wildland fire mitigation and management is fragmentation of land ownership. Public lands are often the entry point for hazardous fuels reduction and use of prescribed fire at scale. We need new partnership models to support coordinated fuel treatments and controlled burns across federal, state, and private lands that align the capacity of diverse partners—state and local governments, Tribes, nonprofits, the forest products industry, and other private sector beneficiaries. These partnerships must be accessible and streamlined, based on principles of shared stewardship and mutual accountability. This could include co-management agreements with tribes, state-led work on federal lands through Shared Stewardship Agreements, and nonprofit-led initiatives on private and public lands.
Such proactive partnerships must become the norm, integrating multiple fire management tools that are pre-funded and planned across jurisdictions and for all phases of the fire cycle: long before fires occur, during wildfire response operations, and through post-fire recovery.
Principle Two: Prioritize risk reduction in the built environment.
While there is always more to learn, we know more than enough to make significant progress toward improving community wildfire safety to protect homes and infrastructure. We can reduce the risk of individual homes, neighborhoods, and communities burning by retrofitting buildings with fire-resistant materials and methods; managing vegetation and other flammable objects surrounding homes and infrastructure; and managing the landscape surrounding the community, strategically reducing the fuel load to lessen the chance of wildfires reaching communities. However, we have yet to create the systems, programs, and incentives to implement these solutions.
This work is currently scattered across multiple federal and state programs for technical assistance and funding, often failing to reach the local authorities and homeowners who most need them. The federal government has a clear responsibility for incentivizing state- and locally led solutions, given the sheer scope and scale of federally backed mortgage interests at risk from fires, as well as federal expenditures for response and recovery. Provisions in the version of the Fix Our Forests Act currently being considered by the U.S. Senate present a good starting point, by establishing a single interagency program to help communities in the wildland-urban interface build and retrofit with wildfire-resistant materials, while simplifying and consolidating grant applications.
We need to do more than consolidate forces and reduce bureaucracy. We need to think beyond the here-and-now to envision forward-looking policies for healthier forests and safer communities.
Existing grant programs such as the Community Wildfire Defense Grants offer a proven avenue to reach communities and homeowners in need of wildfire mitigation support and technical assistance. The federal policy portfolio should be expanded to fill remaining gaps through programs that:
- Incentivize state and local actions to establish and implement strong wildfire codes, implement home hardening and defensible space mitigations in areas at high risk, and develop policies that encourage the disclosure and accurate pricing of wildfire mitigation risk in insurance premiums and coverage offerings.
- Incentivize home retrofits by changing federal tax codes to ensure that wildfire mitigation funding is not taxable, and consider tax credits designed to incentivize home hardening work in high-risk areas.
- Further support local jurisdictions with the necessary planning for evacuations, smoke management, and disaster recovery.
- Prepare community infrastructure, particularly water and electric utilities, for new wildfire risks. This includes creating and incentivizing programs that hold electric utilities of all sizes accountable to best practices for wildfire mitigation and response, perhaps in exchange for mechanisms that lessen their financial exposure when fires do happen. It also includes helping water utilities plan, finance, and ensure sustained provision of clean water through effective land management and watershed restoration practices.
Federal agencies must work beyond jurisdictional boundaries to coordinate, incentivize, and support local, state, and private-sector efforts to reduce risk in the built environment.
Principle Three: Modernize, adapt, and innovate.
Fire officials frequently lament that they are fighting a 21st-century problem using 20th-century technology. Firefighting agencies are often contending with rudimentary communications systems and antiquated equipment to mitigate and fight fires. We have not adopted models to effectively prioritize research and innovation needs, and field test, procure, and operationalize promising innovations for both mitigation and fire suppression. The applications for new innovation are broad, including:
- use of innovations such as unmanned vehicles for suppression aviation, fuels treatment, and prescribed fire control
- more innovation in communications educating policymakers and communities on fuels treatments, home hardening, and other risk-reduction measures
- more research into the drivers of community-scale conflagrations, including home-to-home ignition and spread
- systems that better track investments and outcomes
Growing interest and offerings from the private sector are often outpacing the ability of land managers and firefighting services to use them—but there are proven models from other public-private innovation entities across the federal government, such as DARPA, In-Q-tel, and ARPA-E, that have leveraged public resources to support and accelerate private-sector research into breakthrough technologies, from the Internet to modern GPS technology and Google Earth to the computer mouse. Similar public-private partnerships could accelerate new innovations in wildland fire and land management. Technologies in development include remote-piloted helicopters, autonomous vehicles to support suppression and prescribed fire, and decision-support systems to help prioritize fuel treatments. If successfully deployed, this work could not only reduce suppression and mitigation costs and enhance wildland firefighter safety, but also improve operational efficiency and coordination across jurisdictions and landownerships. Wildfire doesn’t stop at fence lines—our approaches to wildfire research and innovation shouldn’t either. We must innovate, adapt, and deploy new technologies to combat the worsening wildfire crisis.
The path forward
The federally driven wildfire management system has long failed to address the evolving demands for suppression, community risk mitigation, ecological health and resilience, and post-fire recovery. The current wildfire crisis provides the occasion to meet those demands.
By following the three principles for a wildfire-resilient nation—improving both fire suppression and pre-fire planning; reducing risk in the built environment; and modernizing the system—we can begin to design a new system that actually results in healthier landscapes and safer communities.
We are at a moment of crisis. We cannot afford to waste this opportunity to make real, effective, and lasting changes to how we plan for and fight wildfires.
