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The 2026 fire season has been devastating for the U.S. On September 1, the National Interagency Fire Center released data showing that, year-to-date, more than 52,000 wildfires had, cumulatively, burned 8.2 million acres of land in the U.S. That’s 126 percent of the 10-year rolling average for the number of annual fires, and 163 percent of the average acreage burned each year.In Oregon alone, well over 2 million acres have turned to ash.

This is what happens when a government no longer works to reduce climate change and its consequences, and at the same time no longer invests adequately in the workers and agencies that have the skills to corral the increasingly frequent fires breaking out in parched, drought-stricken regions.

As DOGE’s assault on the U.S. government picked up steam last year, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) ended up in the crosshairs. By year’s end, more than 6,000 employees, many of them highly skilled firefighters and fire prevention specialists, had been severed from federal employment. Astoundingly, the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) estimated that 57 out of 77 research labs, whose employees were doing vital work both preparing for fires and responding once they broke out, were shuttered.

The Trump administration claims it is simply streamlining resources and getting rid of redundancies. It has consolidated four separate federal fire-fighting systems into a new agency, the U.S. Wildland Fire Service; but, in doing so, it has ended up with fewer personnel and resources. The U.S. Forest Service, which previously provided the core of the federal firefighting system, has lost 16 percent of its workforce since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 and has drastically reduced, by 35 percent, the acreage in the American west that it is managing through prescribed burns and other treatments to reduce the likelihood of fires breaking out.

In an effort that critics argue deliberately dilutes the power of the Forest Service in favor of the logging industry, the........

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