In a recent report release by the Center for Western Priorities, U.S. Forest Service confirmed that it treated approximately 2.6 million acres for hazardous fuels in 2025, down 35 percent from roughly 4.1 million acres in 2024.
The steepest drops occurred across the West and Southeast in controlled burns, which plummeted by nearly 44 percent. For example, hazardous fuel treatments in Montana plummeted by 63 percent, while Oregon, Idaho, and California also saw significant declines, according to the U.S. Forest Service (USFS).
The USFS cited ongoing operational challenges, including staff being actively diverted to fight active wildfires in the U.S. and assisting with major blazes in Canada. According to critics and workforce advocates, the Trump administration’s personnel cuts and early retirement buyouts caused a loss of16 percent of its workforce (5,860 employees) in the first half of 2025 alone, leaving major gaps in the personnel needed to safely plan and execute prevention work.
“Agriculture Secretary Booke Rollins and Undersecretary Michael Boren had two critical responsibilities heading into fire season: take care of America’s forests and help build fire-resilient communities,” Aaron Weiss, executive director at the Center for Western Priorities, said. “The chaos at the Interior department makes it worse. Secretary Doug Burgum has gutted his firefighting workforce while he tries to combine five agencies into a half-built Wildland Fire Service, and has ordered fire crews back to a failed full-suppression posture that fire scientists spent decades trying to escape. The ‘10 a.m. policy’ is what got us into this mess. Doubling down on it, while the Forest Service falls a million and a half acres behind on the prevention work that keeps communities safe, is a recipe for disaster this year.”
The U.S. Forest Service’s official accomplishments portal focused on the fiscal year (FY) 2025 metric in which the agency highlights 3.3 million acres of active management, defending its recent sweeping structural reorganization as a “chainsaw for bureaucracy” aimed at sending more decision-making power directly to local ranger districts.
“In FY25, the U.S. Forest Service generated more than $1.1 billion from program activities on national forests and grasslands,” Tom Schultz, Forest Service chief, said. “We use these funds to support mission delivery, reinvest in states and counties, while directing hundreds of millions back to the U.S. Treasury—reinforcing the nation’s fiscal strength and supporting communities across America, a commitment we will continue to build on in the years ahead.”
But forest ecologists and wildland fire organizations warn that skipping this essential fuel-reduction work creates a dangerous backlog of dry vegetation because of the drought.
“Instead, they cut treatment acres by more than a third in a single year, leaving fuel on the ground from Montana to Florida heading into a drought-fueled fire season,” Weiss said.
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