The U.S. Forest Service has increased the pace and scale of forest restoration by nine percent since 2011, according to a recent report. Despite the gains, at least 65 million National Forest System acres are still in need of restoration work. The rising cost of wildfire suppression, as fires have become more intense and more expensive to fight in recent years, has taken funding away from restoration, watershed and wildlife programs, limiting the Forest Service’s ability to do the work that would prevent fires in the first place. With a record 52 percent of the Forest Service’s budget dedicated to fighting wildfire in 2015, compared to just 16 percent in 1995, the Forest Service’s ability to do more restoration work within the current budget structure is severely constrained by the increasing proportion of resources spent on fire. Before a single fire broke out in 2015, the Forest Service started the Fiscal Year with a budget of $115 million less for all work not related to fire than the previous year. Budget constraints have also reduced staffing for restoration, watershed and recreation by nearly 40 percent, from about 18,000 in 1998 to fewer than 11,000 people in 2015. “The Forest Service has made tremendous progress in conducting restoration work to keep our forests healthy and resilient. However, because of the growing cost of fighting more frequent and dangerous wildfires, much of the work that supports healthy forests is being starved”, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack said. “The magnitude of the crisis demands that we cannot go another year without a solution to the Forest Service’s broken fire budget.”
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