Montana, Idaho, Oregon, California among the states with the largest declines
DENVER—A new analysis by the Center for Western Priorities finds that the U.S. Forest Service treated roughly 35 percent fewer acres for hazardous fuels in 2025 than in 2024, a sharp decline that leaves communities across the West and Southeast more exposed to the risk of catastrophic wildfire. CWP’s analysis covers the full calendar year 2025, updating earlier findings from Grassroots Wildland Firefighters that tracked the decline through September. CWP’s analysis also reveals for the first time which states saw the largest declines in fuels treatment year-to-year.
Hazardous fuels treatments — including prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and brush clearing — reduce the amount of vegetation that feeds dangerous wildfires. Thinning and controlled burns are known to significantly moderate the intensity and severity of wildfires that increasingly threaten Western communities and the forests and watersheds they depend on.
According to CWP’s analysis of publicly available USFS data, the Forest Service treated approximately 2.6 million acres for hazardous fuels in calendar year 2025, compared with roughly 4.1 million acres in 2024.
“Agriculture Secretary Booke Rollins and Undersecretary Michael Boren had two critical responsibilities heading into fire season: take care of America’s forests and help build fire-resilient communities,” said Center for Western Priorities Executive Director Aaron Weiss. “Instead, they cut treatment acres by more than a third in a single year, leaving fuel on the ground from Montana to Florida heading into a drought-fueled fire season.”
“The chaos at the Interior department makes it worse. Secretary Doug Burgum has gutted his firefighting workforce while he tries to combine five agencies into a half-built Wildland Fire Service, and has ordered fire crews back to a failed full-suppression posture that fire scientists spent decades trying to escape,” Weiss added. “The ‘10 a.m. policy’ is what got us into this mess. Doubling down on it, while the Forest Service falls a million and a half acres behind on the prevention work that keeps communities safe, is a recipe for disaster this year.”
National findings
- The U.S. Forest Service treated approximately 2.6 million acres for hazardous fuels in 2025, down from roughly 4.1 million acres in 2024 — a decline of about 35 percent.
- The drop represents a significant reversal from recent years, with 2024 having been one of the strongest years on record for fuels treatment work.
- The decline comes amid ongoing concerns over staffing shortfalls across the Forest Service workforce.
- While it is too early to make definitive statements about fuel treatments in 2026, early data suggest that 2026 is still tracking far behind the historical average, and nowhere close to digging out of the hole that the Trump administration dug for itself last year.
State findings
The analysis found severe declines in many of the states at greatest wildfire risk.
West
- Montana, which faces persistent high wildfire risk, treated just 87,845 acres in 2025 — down 63 percent from 239,112 acres in 2024.
- Oregon, which led the nation in acres treated in 2024, completed hazardous fuels work on 228,411 acres in 2025 — down 47 percent from 430,586 acres the year before.
- Idaho treated 230,788 acres in 2025, down 45 percent from 418,339 acres in 2024.
- California, which has experienced devastating wildfire seasons in recent years, treated 205,358 acres in 2025 — down 40 percent from 341,970 acres in 2024.
Southeast
The declines are not limited to the West. Some of the sharpest year-over-year drops occurred across the Southeast, where prescribed fire is a critical tool for managing fire-prone longleaf pine ecosystems.
- Florida treated just 124,372 acres in 2025 — down 68 percent from 385,017 acres in 2024. Florida routinely leads or nearly leads the nation in prescribed fire acres, making this collapse in treatment activity particularly alarming.
- Georgia treated only 20,827 acres in 2025, also down 68 percent from 65,352 acres in 2024.
- South Carolina treated 41,452 acres in 2025, down from 128,461 acres in 2024 — another 68 percent decline.
- Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee also saw significant drops in year-to-year fuels treatment.
About the Analysis
The Center for Western Priorities, in partnership with Redstone GIS Consulting, analyzed publicly available data from the U.S. Forest Service’s Natural Resource Manager (NRM) Forest Activity Tracking System (FACTS), the agency’s standard system for managing information about activities related to fire/fuels, silviculture, and invasive species. The data covers hazardous fuels treatment activities completed in calendar year 2025. This analysis uses the same dataset and methodology as the October 2025 Grassroots Wildland Firefighters memo on wildfire preparedness, updated to reflect the full calendar year. The underlying data, including metadata, is available through the FSGeodata Clearinghouse.