The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

The out-of-control conflagration tearing through Los Angeles County has brought public attention once more to how multiple factors shape wildfire severity, including wind, development in fire-prone areas, as well as the climate crisis and its intensification of droughts and heat waves.

But there’s another, less-noticed factor influencing wildfire potency: federal budget austerity. As a recent New York Times article on the worsening home insurance crisis in the United States notes, the U.S. Forest Service’s budget has a direct effect on efforts to reduce wildfire risk. Meanwhile, the relatively obscure agency is a likely candidate for retrenchment, as President-elect Donald Trump and congressional Republicans eye spending cuts.

Most of the Times article focuses on how insurers are abandoning homeowners across the country amid intensifying climate disasters—all while continuing to profit from investments in fossil fuels, the primary driver of global warming. The waning availability and affordability of insurance, which comes in the thick of an already dire housing crisis, threatens to paralyze mortgage markets, devalue large swaths of real estate, tank municipal budgets, and wreak economic havoc more broadly, as made clear in a new congressional staff report and hearing that took place in mid-December. (Insurers’ rate hikes also jeopardize affordable rental housing.)

However, the article also draws attention to how previous rounds of austerity make an already difficult problem even tougher to tackle. To combat increased wildfire risk—the result of climate change as well as unconstrained property development in exceptionally hazardous areas—the Forest Service is trying to clear out decades’ worth of excess vegetation that, amid hotter and drier conditions, acts as kindling for catastrophic infernos. But years of insufficient funding has meant the agency simply doesn’t have the resources to do this properly.

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The overaccumulation of fire fuel stems from an earlier, discredited commitment to total fire suppression—inseparable from public officials’ deference to private real estate industry interests. Today, there are competing approaches to “fuel reduction,” ranging from ill-advised clear-cutting to ecologically healthier methods aligned with comprehensive landscape restoration goals.

The problem is not just about raw dollars. The agency’s funding has generally tended to increase over time, but there were substantial cuts in 2015, 2017, and 2024, making long-term investment in plans, equipment, and staff harder. Worse is how the number of large, expensive wildfires has greatly increased thanks to climate change. Way back in 2015, the agency released a report noting that for the first time in its 110-year history it was spending more than half of its budget on firefighting. This responsibility has only gotten heavier, and recruiting firefighters harder.

Adam Mendonca of the Forest Service told the Times that “it’s a constant struggle for the agency to try to address,” citing a shortage of workers, money, and time. For instance, out in southwestern New Mexico, the agency is able to “treat” just 25,000 to 30,000 acres per year of the 3.3 million-acre Gila National Forest.

Enter Trump, a Republican-controlled Congress, and their anticipated assault on government capacity.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the second Trump administration, does call for fuel reduction, though its endgame is increased logging, not restorative land management. The document urges the Forest Service to focus on “addressing the precipitous annual amassing of biomass in the national forests that drive the behavior of wildfires. By thinning trees, removing live fuels and deadwood, and taking other preventive steps, the Forest Service can help to minimize the consequences of wildfires.”

The document goes on to unfairly criticize existing regulatory and consultation requirements, rather than decades of austerity and industry influence, for the lackluster status quo. It then erroneously suggests that further weakening the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act to facilitate more timber sales will solve the issue. However, there is no evidence that felling trees en masse decreases fire intensity—on the contrary, it has been shown to make blazes worse, as secondary forest with dispersed trees is replaced by a dense tangle of undergrowth.

What’s needed is not deregulation and easier clear-cutting of mature and old-growth forests but increased funding that enables the Forest Service to manage public lands equitably and sustainably. And yet that doesn’t look likely in the near future. Instead, the GOP is mulling cruel ways to offset the $5 trillion cost of extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, from repealing clean-energy programs and imposing work requirements on Medicaid recipients to slashing federal nutrition assistance.

Staff at the Forest Service, which has already been forced to suspend seasonal hiring due to expected budget cuts, recently warned that the Trump administration’s plans to reduce federal employment and beneficial social spending means the agency will have to depend more on private donors, contractors, and volunteers to maintain public lands.

Such outsourcing, which comes with much uncertainty and instability, is going to negatively affect those public lands, from the quality of hiking trails, campgrounds, and bathrooms to biodiversity monitoring and wildfire risk mitigation. That last item will almost certainly lead to greater desertion of vulnerable communities by insurers along with more devastating wildfires. When people’s lives are destroyed, blame must be placed where it belongs: on corrupt policymakers who support gutting and privatizing the federal government on top of unceasing fossil fuel expansion.