What Teddy Roosevelt Knew and Trump Doesn’t Get: Public Lands Need Science

This is policy news about federal land management, not something that changes what a homeowner can do at home, but it touches on wildfire risk, which matters if you live near forest or wildland areas. The Trump administration has cut staff and research programs at the US Forest Service, including work on wildfire behavior, fire and smoke modeling, and long-term forest health monitoring. The Forest Inventory and Analysis program, which tracks forest health nationwide using more than 300,000 monitoring plots, has also been affected by staffing cuts. Separately, the Bureau of Land Management cut staff by 20% over the past year, straining a rangeland monitoring program that had already recorded a 19% drop in healthy rangeland between 2022 and 2024.

The administration also shrank Bears Ears National Monument in Utah by 91% (about 1.3 million acres) and proposed rescinding the 2001 Roadless Rule, which currently limits road-building, logging, and drilling on millions of acres of wilderness. Because most wildfires in the continental US are human-caused, opening more roadless land to activity could raise ignition risk in those areas. The BLM also moved to fast-track oil and gas drilling in Alaska's North Slope with fewer environmental reviews.

None of this requires action from homeowners directly, but for anyone in or near wildfire-prone areas, reduced federal wildfire research and monitoring could mean less data available to communities and local agencies making decisions about fire risk in the coming years.