Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told a House subcommittee in July that the agency’s firefighting workforce is “stronger than at any point in recent years” and “fully staffed and equipped to respond aggressively to every unplanned ignition,” but a survey of the wildland fire workforce tells a different story.
In his July 22 testimony before the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Forestry and Horticulture, Schultz said the Forest Service had hired more than 11,800 firefighters, reaching its staffing goal ahead of peak fire season, and reported it had treated nearly 2.5 million acres of hazardous fuels so far in FY2026, with a target of 3.6 million acres for the year.
He cited a reduction in acres burned in FY2025, the agency’s highest initial-attack success rate in 12 years, and an ongoing reorganization that includes relocating agency headquarters to Salt Lake City. Schultz also addressed the deaths of three firefighters in a June burnover incident in western Colorado, calling safety the agency’s top priority.
A separate account comes from a March 2026 survey of 825 federal wildland fire employees, three-quarters of them Forest Service personnel, conducted by the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters in partnership with the National Federation of Federal Employees.
The survey found that 23.9 percent of units reported being staffed at 90-100% of authorized strength, while 62.2% were below full strength and 25.2% were below 75% strength. More than half of respondents said their units had inadequate staffing for extended attack and mitigation work, and 57.6% said their unit had canceled or postponed prescribed fire projects due to inadequate staffing.
The same survey found that 82% of respondents worked more than 500 hours of overtime in the past year, and 24.1% worked more than 1,000 overtime hours. Seventy-four percent said they had considered leaving federal wildland fire work in the past 12 months.
Average trust in agency leadership, on a 0-10 scale, was 4.88. Because experienced personnel are the hardest to replace, the survey’s authors noted that attrition among senior firefighters compounds staffing shortfalls, even when vacant positions are eventually filled, since new hires require years to reach the same level of qualification.
The Guardian reported August 19 that nine current and former federal firefighters, speaking anonymously because they are not authorized to discuss the matter publicly, described gaps in staffing and leadership positions during the 2026 season. According to an internal dataset reviewed by the paper, more than 600 requests for personnel, aircraft, and equipment went unfilled during a 72-hour period in mid-August, concentrated in the Pacific Northwest.
The number of interagency complex-incident management teams, which coordinate response to large fires, has fallen from 46 in 2023 to 38 this year, according to the report. In Oregon, a state legislator said contracted crews were left idle at points this summer because qualified supervisors were not available to oversee them.
Forest Service spokesperson John Winn told The Guardian the agency was “fully staffed at the level we are funded for” and that its “posture allows us to respond effectively — just as we have for decades.” The agency did not provide a detailed breakdown of staffing totals in response to the paper’s requests.
The gaps described are concentrated in specialized leadership roles that oversee large-scale suppression operations and typically require years of experience, including taskforce leaders, division supervisors, and heavy equipment bosses. Seth McKinney is a fire management officer with the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office who spent 12 years with the Forest Service. He told The Guardian he returned to the agency this summer because a forest he had previously worked for was short on chief officers.
“Without experienced middle management, you don’t have anything resembling effective coordination,” one firefighter told the paper, calling it “a significant safety issue.” The reporting noted that when those coordination roles go unfilled, other parts of the response system, such as contracted crews and equipment, can go unused even as fires burn nearby. It also came as the country reached “Preparedness Level 5,” the federal government’s highest tier of wildfire resource commitment.
Photo: A prescribed fire in Yosemite National Park removes flammable undergrowth to mitigate the risk of catastrophic wildfire. According to a report published by the Center for Western Priorities, firefighter staffing shortages contributed to a drop in prescribed fire treatments.
