Citing “the devastation of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires,” President Donald J. Trump issued Executive Order (EO) 14308 on June 12, 2025, mandating the consolidation of federal firefighting under a single agency. Trump’s EO echoes his “Big, Beautiful Budget” for 2026, which calls for the creation of a new Federal Wildland Fire Service within the Department of Interior. Currently spread across five agencies in two Cabinet-level departments, firefighting efforts are already well underway for the current fire season.
Trump’s EO gives the secretaries of Agriculture and Interior until Sept. 10 to “consolidate their wildland fire programs to achieve the most efficient and effective use of wildland fire offices, coordinating bodies, programs, budgets, procurement processes, and research.” Yet Trump has already set back fire mitigation and suppression efforts with a funding freeze for the work and by reducing the ranks of Forest Service firefighters through layoffs and buyouts.
The EO echoes legislation proposed by U.S. Sen. Tim Sheehy, a Montana Republican, and U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat. In light of Trump’s budget proposal for a fire agency in the Interior Department, the Forest Service is on the losing end of this deal. More than half of the Forest Service budget is dedicated to firefighting and fire mitigation activities. The Forest Service was already a shell of its former self thanks to chronic under-staffing. Combined with recent buyouts, layoffs, and firings, Trump’s move to eliminate wildland fire duties from the Forest Service mission does not bode well for the agency’s future.
“The executive order is mostly political posturing…. It won’t change anything,” FSEEE Executive Director Andy Stahl told the Daily Montanan. “Nothing in this executive order is going to move that 98% needle,” Stahl said, referring to the Forest Service’s success rate for containing fires before they burn 100 acres.
As Associated Press journalist Michael Brown reports, “Organizations representing firefighters and former Forest Service officials say it would be costly to restructure firefighting efforts and cause major disruptions in the midst of fire season.” A letter from former Forest Service chiefs states that consolidating firefighting work could “increase the likelihood of more large catastrophic fires, putting more communities, firefighters and resources at risk.”
Trump’s EO also sets a Sept. 10 deadline for “modifying or rescinding … Federal rules or policies hindering the appropriate use of fire retardant to fight wildfires.”
