"Fix Our Forests Act" may be enough to fix the backlog

Decades of federal forest managers pursuing suppression-focused tactics led to a logjam of unmanaged forests waiting to ignite. Current federal policies barely chip away at the buildup, with only 0.08% of public lands treated with prescribed fire. A rate far below the accumulation of vulnerable fuels on public lands in the mountain states.

The U.S. Forest Service manages 193 million acres and 80 million acres need to be restored. Accounting for all management practices, like selective logging and prescribed fire, it will take 40 years to restore the forests needing remediated today. This does not account for the millions of acres that will become vulnerable in the future. It is little wonder that catastrophic wildfires continue to burst from this ever-growing logjam.

The bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA) (HR 471 and S.1462), moving quickly through Congress, has the potential of ending this logjam. The strategy of FOFA, authorizes more forest management tools and accelerates projects, lowering the frequency of deadly forest fires in the western United States. In January, House Committee on Natural Resources Chairman Bruce Westerman (AR) testified on FOFA saying:

“FOFA codifies emergency authorities used by both Democrat and Republican administrations to increase the pace and scale of management. Without these tools, completing a single forest management project takes 3 to 5 years. With them, land managers can act immediately.”

FOFA creates these changes through four titles, attempting to solve this crisis with a solution whose breadth matches the problem. Below are some of FOFA’s policies that could remediate this government-created tinderbox:

• Designates Fireshed Management Areas (FMAs), which consist of the top 20% of firesheds for wildfire risk exposure based on threat to communities, municipal watersheds, and vegetation type.
  

• Establishes the Wildfire Intelligence Center to assess and predict fire and provide data related to each fireshed and increase public interface to improve community wildfire resilience.
  

• Expands collaborative tools to reduce wildfire risk and improve forest health by extending stewardship contracts from 10 to 20 years, increasing project scale from 3,000 to 10,000 acres, and utilizing grazing.
  

• Reforms and streamlines the litigation process.
  

• Prioritizes prescribed fire as a management tool and expedites the environmental review process under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
  

• Adopts vegetation management and reforestation efforts that improve wildfire resiliency.

2024 saw more acres burned than the 5- and 10-year averages, with large fires (100+ acres in timber and 300+ acres in grass) accounting for less than 2% of fires nationally. However, 37 of these large fires were over 40,000 acres. Averaging over 136,000 acres per fire, these 37 large fires accounted for more than 50% of the almost 9 million acres burned in 2024. The complexity and threat of large fires will never be treated by the small efforts of 3,000 acres. Increasing the project scale of expedited projects to 10,000 acres may be enough to control the deluge. 

The federal government’s slothfulness in managing fuels on federal land extends beyond potential wildfire threats. In post-fire landscapes, fire remediation on federal lands is minimal and hindered by litigation. Oregon’s 2020 Labor Day wildfires burned more than 1 million acres, consuming about 280,000 acres of federally managed lands. Less than 3% of this federal land received treatment to remove snags to improve safety from falling trees and prevent future reburns, which sterilize the land.

FOFA’s efforts to increase the size and scope of projects are only possible because the legislation reins in the litigious abuse of special interest groups. Without changing existing environmental protections, FOFA will provide much-needed flexibility, expediting projects through the review processes. No longer will special interest groups be able to assert unilateral control over the process when fire-threatened communities are begging for prevention tools.

Our forests have outgrown small management projects and the weaponization of litigation to stop needed projects. Millions of acres of overgrown forests need a policy of this magnitude. Expanding the size and length of stewardship contracts and increasing the ease with which projects can be approved are needed steps in collaborating with private industry to increase the resiliency of American forests.