With wildfires already burning and drought persisting across much of the U.S., fire experts are bracing for what could be an extreme fire season. The U.S. Forest Service is going into it having done far less work than in recent years to manage the dry, flammable vegetation that can fuel catastrophic fires.
In 2025, the Forest Service reduced vegetation on almost 1.5 million fewer acres than in 2024, according to an analysis of the agency's data by NPR and firefighting experts. It marks a significant drop from the more than 4 million acres of hazardous vegetation work done in the last year of the Biden administration.
The biggest decline was in prescribed burns, the low-grade fires intentionally set to clear dense underbrush, helping reduce the intensity of future wildfires. In 2025, the Forest Service burned only about half of the acreage that it did in both 2024 and 2023, according to an NPR analysis of agency records.
Despite the extreme wildfires of recent years, there's actually a fire deficit in most of the country. Many North American forests evolved over millennia with low-intensity wildfires that clear out dense undergrowth. Native Americans use controlled burns to shape the ecosystem, but those measures became far less common after tribes were forced from their lands. In the 1930s, the Forest Service also adopted a policy to extinguish all wildfires.
As conditions have gotten hotter, the buildup of dense vegetation has fed extreme fires that have torn through vast stretches of land and, increasingly, into communities.
The Forest Service said in a statement that the drop in prevention work is mostly due to staff being occupied with firefighting and because environmental conditions were not right for doing prescribed burns in the Southeast. The agency lost 16% of its workforce as of last summer, with 5,860 personnel leaving in the first six months of 2025 as part of the Trump administration's efforts to reduce the size of government. Senate Democrats have raised concerns that such cuts have hampered the agency's ability to prepare for wildfires.
Wildfire experts say the less prescribed burning is done, the more the Forest Service faces conditions that lead to extreme wildfires.
"The clock is ticking," says Matthew Hurteau, a forest ecologist at the University of New Mexico. "We've got relatively limited time to do the work that needs to be done."
Without small burns, there's a big burn
Last fall, Hurteau faced the toughest day of his career.
For 25 years, he's worked in a forest in California's Sierra Nevada, the Teakettle Experimental Forest, home to old-growth sugar and Jeffrey pine trees. As one of the Forest Service's experimental forests, it's like a living laboratory with 3,200 acres set aside by the agency in the 1930s as an area of special study and research.
The forest had gotten denser by not having a major wildfire since 1865. It was also dotted with dead trees, victims of California's extended drought a decade ago that allowed beetles to move in. Hurteau and his colleagues saw that the forest was at risk and, in 2020, started planning a prescribed burn.
"We all knew that this is what the forest needed in order to decrease the chance that a high-severity wildfire rolled through there and killed off all the old-growth pines," Hurteau says.
Working with a wildfire nonprofit, the Climate & Wildfire Institute, the project received more than $5 million from California's state fire agency, Cal Fire. Being in the Sierra National Forest, the Forest Service needed to complete environmental reviews before the burn could begin.
Hurteau says the process dragged on.
"It took a lot longer than it should have," Hurteau says. "We lacked the will from leadership on the forest and the ranger district to facilitate the implementation of this burn."
Then, last August, the Garnet Fire was sparked by lightning nearby. It spread, driven by dry conditions and erratic winds.
"The whole experimental forest burned in one day, and it burned quite hot," Hurteau says.
In October, Hurteau went back to Teakettle to survey the damage, finding that many of the old-growth trees he knew well had not survived.
"I'm not somebody who is prone to emotional outbursts, but I broke down and cried five times that day," he says. "It was a pretty rough thing to see."
Forest Service staff with the Sierra National Forest did not respond to questions about Teakettle's planned prescribed burn. Hurteau says while many land managers and fire experts have been working to restore forest health, there still isn't nearly enough controlled burning being done.
"There was a stretch there that I was somewhat hopeful that we'd make some real progress," Hurteau says. "When Teakettle burned the way it did, some of that optimism evaporated."
Prescribed fire falls off
The Forest Service has said for decades that prescribed burns are a priority. The agency set a goal in 2022 of reducing flammable fuels on an additional 20 million acres over the next decade. In April, current Forest Service chief Tom Schultz highlighted how that type of work made a difference in California's 2021 Caldor Fire.
"We had an area that we had managed within the last five years," Schultz said in testimony at a House budget hearing. "The fire went through there. It didn't go up in the crowns. It stayed on the ground. It had beneficial impacts. That was due to the management that occurred."
In 2023, the Forest Service reduced hazardous vegetation on about 3.7 million acres, and in 2024 did more than 4 million acres. That work fell during the first year of Trump's second administration to 2.6 million acres, according to an analysis shared with NPR by Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and Redstone GIS Consulting. That includes mechanically cutting and removing vegetation, in addition to burns.
Prescribed burning, which had reached over 1.6 million acres in both 2023 and 2024, fell to about 900,000 acres in 2025, according to an NPR analysis of agency data. The Forest Service, which analyzes its data based on a fiscal year that begins in October, says it burned 1 million fewer acres in fiscal year 2025.
Forest Service employees reported that agency work slowed after Trump took office, due to efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency to cut staff and programs. After thousands of personnel left the agency or were fired, Senate Democrats raised concerns that it was affecting the country's ability to handle wildfires.
Schultz recently testified that the agency hired about 9,700 firefighters as of early March, slightly more than last year. The agency is also proposing that Forest Service firefighters be moved to the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, which consolidates all Department of Interior firefighting staff.
Firefighting experts say those hires don't necessarily replace key support staff that was lost.
"There's a lot of people who help the fire organization get the work done that aren't firefighters," says Bobbie Scopa, vice president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit advocacy group for firefighters. "If you remove a contracting officer who is not a fire person, that can have unintended outcomes of reducing a tremendous amount of fuel reduction work because you can't put the contracts out."
The Forest Service said in a statement that the drop in burning in 2025 mostly occurred in the Southeastern U.S. "due to elevated wildfire activity and elevated fire behavior due to excessive fuel loads from Hurricane Helene and other environmental factors." The agency's data shows that prescribed burning also dropped in several other states not affected by Hurricane Helene.
While the majority of Forest Service land is west of the Mississippi, there has been twice as much prescribed fire in Southern states over the last four years compared to Western states. States in the Southeast have long-standing policies and training programs that encourage prescribed burns.
What gets in the way of prescribed fire
Even in most years, the Forest Service faces challenges using prescribed fire. Most burns are only done during short windows when conditions are cool and wet in the spring and fall. While the vast majority of burns occur with few issues, fires have escaped in rare cases, like in New Mexico in 2022, which led the Forest Service to pause burning nationwide.
More commonly, prescribed burning is halted because Forest Service staff are occupied fighting wildfires. Fire experts say this leads to a vicious cycle. As wildfires get more extreme, agency personnel have less time to reduce vegetation, known as hazardous fuels work, which sets the stage for even bigger blazes.
"We have conditions that are worse than they used to be, and the seasons are longer," Scopa says. "We need more people. We need more firefighters, and we need folks to do the fuels work separately."
Controlled burns aren't just about forest health. Scopa says reducing flammable fuels gives wildland firefighters a better chance at fighting forest fires in increasingly challenging conditions.
"We do the fuels reduction work not because it's going to stop a fire, but because it allows the firefighters a place to efficiently and effectively and safely fight the fire from," Scopa says. "If you send firefighters into a forested area that has not been treated, it's going to be much more difficult."
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