Following the most expensive year ever for fighting wildfires, the Senate Appropriations Committee included $507 million in emergency wildfire funds in a funding bill for the Interior Department and related agencies. The emergency funding was part of an overall $1.95 billion allocated for wildfire suppression with the budget for firefighting, as usual, set at the 10-year average cost.
For the past few years, the Forest Service has had to raid its fire prevention accounts — a practice called fire borrowing — because it has had no other way to offset the rising cost of fighting wildfires. “That’s no way to manage the Forest Service,” said Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue in mid-September when fire costs hit a record $2 billion for fiscal 2017. “We can’t do the prescribed burning, harvesting, or insect control to prevent leaving a fuel load in the forest for future fires to feed on.”
Under the Senate proposal, the emergency funds will be available if the regular fire suppression budget is exceeded. The legislation would also amend a 2011 budget law so that extraordinary firefighting costs will be counted as disaster expenditures and so that offsetting cuts at the Forest Service will not be required. “The funding provided in this bill, the disaster cap proposal, and the $506,776,000 in additional suppression funds should allow the agencies to execute their budgets more effectively because the threat of fire borrowing has been reduced,” said the committee in an explanation of the bill.