On a rare, windless April day in southern Washington, Adam Lieberg, a land manager with the Columbia Land Trust, found himself waiting at a computer instead of lighting controlled burns. Those small, intentional fires—meant to consume twigs, needles and other ground fuels—are one of the most effective tools for reducing the severity of future wildfires. But Lieberg and other local practitioners say federal policy shifts and funding delays are keeping them from doing that work at the time it’s safest and most effective.
Last year the Forest Service told the Columbia Land Trust it would receive more than $9 million through the Community Wildfire Defense Grant Program to fund fuels-reduction work over five years. The program, created with Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act money and launched in 2022, was designed to send states, tribes and local partners the resources to plan and carry out prescribed burns and other projects in fire-prone communities. In Washington alone, nearly $20 million for burn-related projects has not been released, according to the state forester, and organizations across the country report the same bottleneck.
The hold-up stems from a December 2025 USDA memo that changed the agency’s conditions for grants and partnerships. The memo, issued to align agency relationships with an “America First” agenda, added requirements for recipients that go beyond wildfire management: partners must agree they will not support certain climate-related activities and will avoid funding or supporting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, among other provisions. State officials say some of those new terms conflict with state laws and therefore cannot be accepted, which prevents federal awards from being formally accepted and paid out.
Washington’s state forester says the result is organizations missing their funding windows. Lieberg explains that without the guaranteed grant money he cannot hire or schedule crews and risks losing the narrow spring season when conditions—after snowmelt and before high summer heat—make prescribed burning easiest to control. He fears that losing a season of proactive burning will allow more dead material to accumulate on the ground and increase the odds that an uncontrolled wildfire will start and spread.
The funding delays are not the only policy changes affecting prescribed fire. In April, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum directed agencies to begin the wildfire season with a presumption of full suppression for all fires on federal lands, limiting the use of prescribed burns and stating that, after a point in the season, prescribed fires underway would need explicit approval to continue. The Forest Service leadership has echoed a similar suppression-first stance. Those memos mark a reversal from recent years in which federal agencies used prescribed fire and managed wildfires as tools to reduce fuel loads.
The combination of tougher grant conditions and a higher bar for allowing controlled burns means less prescribed fire is likely on public lands this year. Nationally, the Forest Service has already burned fewer acres in recent years; agency data show just over 1 million acres of the roughly 200 million acres it manages have been burned so far this year. Experts and former agency personnel warn that suppressing fire rather than using it where appropriate can increase long-term fuel buildup and raise the risk of larger, more destructive wildfires.
Current and former firefighters and forestry professionals interviewed for this report say the suppression-only approach contradicts decades of fire ecology research and Indigenous stewardship practices that show periodic, low-intensity burns reduce future fire severity. A 2025 study cited by researchers found that areas burned before the 2020 California fire season experienced, on average, less severe wildfire impacts.
Agency staffing and morale compound the problem. The Forest Service lost more than 5,000 workers last year to layoffs, resignations and early retirements, including many personnel with wildfire training. Officials have proposed a 25% pay boost for government firefighters who work on prescribed fires, announced in April, but some former employees say the uptick does not counteract the broader instability and operational changes that have driven people away from federal service.
The policy changes have also prompted legal pushback. In March, 20 states and the District of Columbia sued the USDA to block the new grant conditions, calling them coercive. State officials say the terms are forcing a choice between accepting federal money under conditions that may violate their laws or foregoing funds needed to protect communities.
Practitioners on the ground say the stakes are immediate. In the Columbia River Gorge, Lieberg points to overgrown brush and large Douglas firs standing near homes perched below steep slopes. He says if a wildfire travels down from those ridgelines when fuels are dense, many houses would be unlikely to survive. The prevention work—small, controlled burns done in the right weather windows—reduces that risk but requires predictable funding and policies that allow prescribed fire to proceed.
Those advocating for continued use of prescribed burning argue it is both a science-backed and time-tested approach to reducing catastrophic wildfire risk. They warn that constraining burns and broadly adopting a suppression-first doctrine will leave landscapes fuel-rich and communities more vulnerable in coming seasons.
The delays and policy shifts raise broader questions about how federal agencies balance political directives, state law, scientific guidance and operational capacity during an increasingly intense fire era. For land managers and local crews whose work depends on timely funding and permissive directives, the concern is immediate: missed seasons of preventive burning will make future fires harder to control and more dangerous for people and ecosystems.
NPR asked the Forest Service and USDA for comment on the grant delays and the new conditions; responses were not provided by publication. State officials, conservation groups and frontline firefighters say they are watching closely as courts and policymakers sort out the legal and operational implications—while wildfire seasons roll on and the fuels that feed them continue to accumulate.