Rising costs related to firefighting efforts in the United States have resulted in a number of cutbacks in other U.S. Forest Service (USFS) programs, including some that prevent and limit the impacts of wildfires, according to an opinion piece by Tom Vilsack, secretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Shaun Donovan, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). The Forest Service uses a fleet of helicopters and water bombing fixed-wing aircraft to battle wildfires across the U.S.
The portion of the USFS budget that covers firefighting “has rapidly increased as a proportion of the overall budget, from 16 percent in 1995 to 42 percent today,” Vilsack and Donovan noted. “As the costs of wildfires have spiraled out of control, it has shrunk the budget of other Forest Service programs, taking millions of dollars from other critical forest health and land management priorities in order to pay for them. What’s more, often the programs we are forced to divert funds from are the very programs [that] help to mitigate the impact of wildfires.”
The Department of Agriculture released a document that details a state-by-state rundown of the effects in 2013 and 2012 related to the run-up in firefighting costs. Among the items removed from the budget are projects that could have helped prevent wildfires.
“If we see the kind of severe fire activity that we currently project, the Forest Service will soon run out of money and will be forced to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars from other programs in order to put out the fires,” Vilsack and Donovan wrote in a blog post on the USFS website.
