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 entering it having done far less work than in recent years to manage the dry, flammable vegetation that fuels catastrophic fires.
In 2025 the Forest Service reduced hazardous vegetation on almost 1.5 million fewer acres than in 2024, according to an analysis of agency data by NPR and firefighting experts. That marks a significant drop from the more than 4 million acres of work performed in the last year of the Biden administration. The largest decline was in prescribed burns—the low-intensity fires set intentionally to clear dense underbrush—which in 2025 covered roughly half the acreage they did in 2023 and 2024.
Many forests evolved with frequent low-intensity fires that clear undergrowth; Native Americans used controlled burns for millennia, and federal policy to suppress all fires began in the 1930s. As climate conditions have warmed and fuels have built up, the lack of regular small fires has contributed to more extreme blazes that burn hotter and into tree canopies, threatening ecosystems and communities.
The Forest Service said the drop in prevention work is largely due to staff being occupied with firefighting and because conditions were not suitable for prescribed burns in parts of the Southeast. The agency lost about 16% of its workforce as of last summer, with 5,860 personnel leaving in the first six months of 2025 amid administration efforts to reduce the size of government. Senate Democrats have raised concerns that those cuts have hampered the agency’s ability to prepare for wildfires.
“The clock is ticking,” says Matthew Hurteau, a forest ecologist at the University of New Mexico. “We’ve got relatively limited time to do the work that needs to be done.”
A telling example is the Teakettle Experimental Forest in California’s Sierra Nevada, a 3,200-acre research area set aside in the 1930s. Hurteau and colleagues had planned a prescribed burn after decades without a major fire and with accumulating dead trees from drought and beetle kill. The project, backed by more than $5 million from California’s Cal Fire, required Forest Service environmental reviews that Hurteau says took far too long and lacked will from district leadership to expedite.
Last August the Garnet Fire, sparked by lightning nearby, roared through Teakettle in a single day under dry, windy conditions, burning at high intensity and killing many old-growth pines. Hurteau recounts returning to the forest in October and breaking down multiple times while surveying the loss. He and other land managers say such tragedies underscore that there still isn’t nearly enough controlled burning being done.
The Forest Service has for decades prioritized prescribed fire and set an agency goal in 2022 to reduce flammable fuels on an additional 20 million acres over the next decade. In 2023 the agency treated about 3.7 million acres and in 2024 more than 4 million acres, but that work fell to about 2.6 million acres in the first year of the Trump administration, according to an analysis shared with NPR by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and Redstone GIS Consulting. Prescribed burning specifically dropped from over 1.6 million acres in both 2023 and 2024 to roughly 900,000 acres in 2025; the Forest Service says it burned about 1 million fewer acres in fiscal year 2025.
Forest Service leadership recently testified that the agency had hired about 9,700 firefighters as of early March, slightly more than the prior year, and is proposing that its firefighters move into the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, which consolidates Interior Department firefighting staff. Firefighting experts caution, however, that those hires do not necessarily replace key support personnel lost in recent reductions—contracting officers, fuels specialists and other non-firefighter roles that enable fuels-reduction projects.
“There’s a lot of people who help the fire organization get the work done that aren’t firefighters,” says Bobbie Scopa, vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. Removing a contracting officer, she notes, can have the unintended effect of halting large amounts of fuel reduction because contracts can’t be issued.
The Forest Service said the drop in burning in 2025 mostly occurred in the Southeastern U.S. “due to elevated wildfire activity and elevated fire behavior due to excessive fuel loads from Hurricane Helene and other environmental factors.” Yet its data show prescribed burning also declined in several states not affected by that storm. Over the past four years, Southern states have seen about twice as much prescribed fire as Western states, reflecting longer-standing policies and training in the Southeast that encourage controlled burns.
Even under normal conditions, prescribed burns face obstacles. They must be done during relatively short seasonal windows when weather is cool and damp enough; though most burns proceed without incident, rare escapes—like a 2022 fire in New Mexico—have prompted nationwide pauses. More commonly, prescribed burning is delayed or canceled because Forest Service staff are tied up fighting large wildfires. Experts warn this creates a vicious cycle: more extreme fires pull personnel away from fuels work, which then allows more fuels to accumulate and sets the stage for even larger blazes.
“We have conditions that are worse than they used to be and the seasons are longer,” Scopa says. “We need more people. We need more firefighters and we need folks to do the fuels work separately.”
Reducing flammable fuels is not primarily about stopping every fire, but about improving conditions for firefighters to work safely and effectively. “If you send firefighters into a forested area that has not been treated, it’s going to be much more difficult,” Scopa says. With dwindling prevention work and a risky season ahead, land managers and communities face heightened danger unless fuel-reduction efforts are restored and expanded.