Top Obama Administration Officials Push Congress on Wildfire Funding Changes

As the cost of fighting this year’s wildfires continues to burn through hundreds of millions of dollars in public money, top Obama administration officials on Tuesday urged members of Congress to support changes in the way the federal government pays to battle the blazes.

The officials weighed in by sending a letter to lawmakers. The move came just one day after the U.S. Department of Agriculture notified Congress that it would need to redirect $250 million in funds to cover this year’s wildfire suppression costs. Since August, such transfers from non-fire programs have totaled $700 million.

Similar transfers have occurred in seven of the last 14 years.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and White House Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun Donovan sent the letter.

The funding change they voiced support for would involve allowing spending on wildfire-related activities to exceed discretionary budget caps in bad fire years, in an effort to avoid situations where agencies need to transfer funds away from other programs.

Exceeding the caps would be allowed in years when fire suppression spending is more than 70 percent of the 10-year average.

Over half of the U.S. Forest Service’s budget is now spent on firefighting and other fire-related activities, up from one-sixth in 1995, according to figures the agency released in August. By 2025, the agency, which is part of the Department of Agriculture, estimates that it will spend two-thirds of its budget on these costs.

“This shift in resources from non-fire programs to firefighting has enormous implications on all agency activities, including recreation, research, watershed protection, rangeland management, and, importantly, forest restoration,” the administration officials wrote in their letter to lawmakers.

They added: “The Forest Service's firefighting budget has been exhausted, forcing USDA to transfer funds away from forest restoration projects that would help reduce the risk of future fires, in order to cover the high cost of battling today's blazes.”

Several wildfire bills are currently under consideration in Congress. In their letter, the Obama administration officials knocked one of them, which passed the House in July with mostly Republican votes and has since been referred to the Senate Agriculture Committee.

Known as the Resilient Federal Forests Act, that legislation has drawn the ire of some environmental groups over provisions related to logging and other land management issues, including new requirements for court challenges over Forest Service decisions.

How the debate over wildfire legislation plays out in Washington, D.C., could have implications for the amount of federal money available to assist states that are hit by the blazes.

Donovan, the Office of Management and Budget director, indicated that the administration’s proposal might help in this regard.

In a statement Tuesday, he said: "We urgently need to address the runaway growth of fire suppression at the cost of other critical programs—instead of leaving our agencies and the States scrambling to plug budget gaps while they are literally putting out fires."

And in criticizing the Republican-backed House bill in their letter, the administration officials said that by reallocating funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Disaster Relief Fund to firefighting activities, the legislation would hinder the federal government's “ability to adequately budget for, and fund responses to, other natural or man-made disasters such as the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.”

Rep. Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican who chairs the House Committee on Natural Resources, backed the Resilient Federal Forests Act, and touted it as an important land management tool during remarks he made to county officials at the U.S. Capitol last week.

“When it comes to solving the wildfire problem, it’s not just the amount of money that’s being borrowed to fight them. If that’s all we’re doing it’s like putting a bucket brigade line together using Dixie Cups,” he said. “There has to be a management aspect along with it.”

But critics dispute some of the claims that have been used to back up the bill. 

"Supporters of this legislation are using the public’s fear of forest fires to advance their agenda. They argue that overgrown and 'unhealthy' forests raise the risk of wildfires, and that the government has been hampered by litigation and environmental reviews from allowing timber companies to thin forests to reduce the risk of fire," Chad T. Hanson, an ecologist with the John Muir Project, and Dominick A. DellaSala, chief scientist at the Geos Institute, wrote in an op-ed published in The New York Times in late July. "The legislation is rooted in falsehoods and misconceptions."

According to the letter from the Obama administration officials, the president’s approach is more in line with a pair of bills that have been introduced in the House and Senate, which are both known as the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act. The House version, introduced by Rep. Mike Simpson, an Idaho Republican, has 132 co-sponsors, of which 58 are Republicans and 74 are Democrats. The Senate version introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has 17 co-sponsors—four Republicans and 13 Democrats.

In contrast, when the Resilient Federal Forests Act passed out of the House only 19 of the 243 yes-votes came from Democrats, whereas only one Republican voted no on the bill.

As debate about wildfires smolders in the nation’s capital, the blazes themselves continue to rip across western states.

A fire burning about 90 miles north of San Francisco in parts of Lake and Napa counties had destroyed at least 585 homes as of Tuesday morning and was threatening another 9,000 structures, according to the state’s CalFire. Known as the Valley Fire, it had scorched at least 67,000 acres and had forced about 17,000 people to evacuate.

Nationwide, wildfires had burned 8,807,487 acres of land this year as of Monday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.

“This has been a very hard summer,” Ron Walter, a commissioner in Chelan County, Washington, said during a visit to the nation’s capital last week. In August, three firefighters were killed in Washington state as they worked to fight a wildfire in Okanogan County, which is near Chelan. Walter choked up as he explained that Chelan had seen 80 homes lost in two separate fires. “These are my friends, my neighbors, people I know. And I see them suffer.”

“We’ve burnt up in the last month, in just eastern Washington, and this is happening throughout the west, we’ve burnt up more than the entire land mass of the state of Rhode Island,” he added. “We can’t continue to do that.”

(Photo by mikeledray / Shutterstock.com)