In the 1970s, not long after Bobbie Scopa first started working as a federal wildfire fighter, she was dispatched to a blaze that—at the time—seemed extraordinary. It spanned 12,000 acres. “Our supervisor said, ‘This is the biggest fire you’re ever going to see in your career,’” recalled Scopa, who spent 45 years as a firefighter before retiring, including seven years as the assistant fire director for all of the U.S. Forest Service’s wildland fire operations in Oregon. Today, 12,000 acres is nothing. “Fires now, we don’t even call them big fires until they get over 100,000 acres,” the official qualification for a megafire, Scopa told me. When we spoke on July 21, Eastern Oregon’s Cram Fire had just crossed that threshold.

The reason for the dramatic change in scale isn’t hard to discern. “Anyone who can read graphs can see that it’s hotter and drier now than it was 10 years, 20, or 40 years ago,” Scopa told me. “Climate change is real, and it’s affecting the fire environment.” Warmer, drier conditions create more kindling, which allows fires to burn hotter and faster; less snow in fire-prone ecosystems similarly means less moisture. As a college student, when Scopa first started firefighting, she would “leave school and go directly to a crew,” just before the beginning of the fall semester. These days, that would be difficult to do. “The fire seasons are so much longer,” Scopa explained. “It starts sooner in the spring, the snow melt goes off earlier, and it doesn’t start raining and cooling off until later.” 

As rising temperatures change wildfires, they’re also changing what it means to be a firefighter. Fires today demand longer deployments and inflict more stress on the body and mind. And while these problems have been mounting for years, the Trump administration’s climate denial is now colliding with its quest to shrink and incapacitate the federal workforce. Federal firefighters—spread across government land management agencies—are on the front lines of both crises, facing dire staffing shortages and bureaucratic chaos on top of shockingly meager pay, benefits, and protections.

Amid disturbing headlines about firefighters being forced to scrub toilets because of staffing shortages, the White House has projected confidence. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins—whose department oversees the U.S. Forest Service’s 11,000- person firefighting workforce—boasted earlier this summer about “far outpacing the rate of hiring and onboarding over the past three years and in the previous administration.” The department now claims to have met 99 percent of its hiring goals for wildland firefighters.

The reality doesn’t remotely support her declaration. Last year, the U.S.........

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