A new investigation from ProPublica and Re:Public reveals that Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana was pushing to eliminate Forest Service airworthiness inspections for firefighting aircraft at the same time his former company, Bridger Aerospace, was failing one.
In April 2025, a Forest Service inspector found a crack in the wing of a Bridger scooper the company had presented as ready for fire season. That same month, a draft executive order eliminating the inspection program leaked from Sheehy’s Senate office. Metadata on the document showed it had been edited by one of Sheehy’s policy advisers and a lobbyist for Bridger. At the time, Sheehy held between $13 and $15 million in Bridger stock. The Forest Service has paid Bridger more than $235 million for scooper contracts since 2021.
The crack discovered by the inspection could have been catastrophic had it not been discovered. In fact, the Forest Service’s modern inspection program, which Sheehy proposed to eliminate, was built in response to two fatal tanker crashes in 2002 that were caused by similar undetected wing cracks. Current and former Forest Service officials told reporters that Bridger has resisted the agency’s inspections. A Sheehy spokesperson called the inspection program “a relic of a bygone era and an unnecessary barrier to asset availability.”
The draft executive order was also shaped by the United Aerial Firefighters Association, an industry group Sheehy helped found in 2022. When Sheehy moved his Bridger stock into blind trusts earlier this year, he entrusted them to executives at an energy infrastructure company formerly run by his brother, also a significant Bridger investor. Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told ProPublica that selecting a family member’s company “appears to do that exact thing that the rules mean to prohibit.”
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Quote of the day
This is a dangerous arena to get into, where the forever business of NASA, NOAA or NPS are all now on the whims of political appointees and the shifting political tides. This is not how things were intended to be done.”
—Jesse Chakrin, executive director of Fund for People in Parks, KQED
Picture This
Interior be like “I know a spot,” and then take you somewhere that looks like another planet.
Moonscape Overlook in Utah sits high above a maze of colorful badlands, ridges, and winding desert terrain managed by @mypubliclands. It’s the kind of place that reminds you just how wild and vast America’s public lands really are.
We manage millions of acres of public lands across the country, including places that still feel completely untamed. Some are famous. Others are hidden at the end of dusty backroads somewhere out in the middle of the desert. Those are usually the spots worth remembering.
Photo by Susan Hartman
Featured photo: Scooper plane dumps water on wildfire, Washington DNR