Wildfire experts warn that the U.S. is entering a potentially extreme fire season while the U.S. Forest Service has scaled back fuel-reduction work that helps prevent catastrophic blazes.
An analysis of agency data by NPR and firefighting experts found the Forest Service treated almost 1.5 million fewer acres to remove hazardous vegetation in 2025 than it did in 2024. That is a sharp decline from the more than 4 million acres treated in the last year of the Biden administration. The steepest drop was in prescribed burns — intentional, low-intensity fires used to clear underbrush — which in 2025 covered roughly half the acreage accomplished in 2023 and 2024.
Many American forests historically experienced frequent, low-intensity fires that kept understory fuels in check. Native peoples practiced controlled burning for generations, while federal policy to suppress all fires became dominant in the 20th century. As the climate warms and fuels accumulate, the absence of regular, small fires has been linked to larger, hotter fires that leap into canopies and threaten ecosystems and communities.
The Forest Service attributes much of the reduction to personnel being redirected to active firefighting and to unsuitable conditions for burns in parts of the Southeast. The agency also lost about 16% of its workforce by last summer — roughly 5,860 employees left in the first six months of 2025 — amid administration efforts to downsize government. Senate Democrats and other critics have said those departures have undermined the agency’s capacity to prepare for wildfires.
“The clock is ticking,” said Matthew Hurteau, a forest ecologist at the University of New Mexico. Time windows to carry out fuels work are limited, he added, and delays can be costly.
A vivid example is California’s Teakettle Experimental Forest in the Sierra Nevada, a 3,200-acre research tract protected since the 1930s. Hurteau and collaborators planned a prescribed burn to address decades of fire suppression and an accumulation of drought- and beetle-killed trees. The project, supported with more than $5 million from California’s Cal Fire, required Forest Service environmental reviews that proponents say were slow and lacked urgency from district leadership.
Last August, lightning sparked the Garnet Fire nearby, and under dry, windy conditions it raced through Teakettle in a single day. The blaze burned at high intensity and killed many old-growth pines. Hurteau says he was overcome with grief while surveying the loss months later; managers point to the episode as a painful demonstration that controlled burning is still not being done at the scale needed.
The agency has long emphasized prescribed fire as a core tool and in 2022 set a goal to treat an additional 20 million acres over the following decade. In 2023 the Forest Service treated about 3.7 million acres; in 2024 it treated more than 4 million. That fell to roughly 2.6 million acres in 2025, according to an analysis shared with NPR by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and Redstone GIS Consulting. Prescribed burning specifically dropped from more than 1.6 million acres in each of 2023 and 2024 to about 900,000 acres in 2025; the Forest Service reports it burned roughly 1 million fewer acres in fiscal year 2025 than the prior year.
Agency leaders recently said they had hired about 9,700 firefighters as of early March, slightly more than the previous year, and proposed moving many firefighting personnel into a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service that consolidates Interior Department firefighting staff. But experts caution that frontline hires do not replace critical support roles lost in recent reductions—contracting officers, fuels specialists and other non-firefighter positions that enable fuels-reduction projects.
“There’s a lot of people who help the fire organization get the work done that aren’t firefighters,” said Bobbie Scopa, vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. She noted that removing a contracting officer, for instance, can halt large fuel-reduction efforts because necessary contracts can no longer be issued.
The Forest Service said most of the decline in burning in 2025 occurred in the Southeast, pointing to elevated wildfire activity and excessive fuel loads after Hurricane Helene and other environmental factors. But agency data show prescribed burning also fell in some states not affected by the storm. Over the past four years, Southern states have carried out roughly twice as much prescribed fire as Western states, reflecting long-standing policies, training and cultural acceptance of controlled burning in the Southeast.
Prescribed burns face other practical constraints: they must occur during narrow seasonal windows when weather is cool and damp enough; rare escapes have led to periodic, nationwide pauses; and many planned burns are delayed or canceled when staff are tied up on large wildfires. Experts warn that this creates a vicious cycle: extreme fires draw personnel away from fuels work, allowing more fuel to build up and increasing the likelihood of still larger blazes.
“We have conditions that are worse than they used to be and the seasons are longer,” Scopa said. “We need more people. We need more firefighters and we need folks to do the fuels work separately.”
The goal of reducing flammable fuels is not to eliminate every fire but to improve conditions so firefighters can work safely and effectively. Untreated forests make suppression and containment far more difficult and dangerous. With prevention work down and a risky season ahead, land managers and communities face heightened dangers unless fuel-reduction programs are restored and expanded.