“In a smoldering letter to lawmakers,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Congress failed to enact a long-term plan to pay the cost of fighting forest fires, despite giving the Forest Service a healthy increase in funding this year, reports the Washington Post. “He issued what amounts to a threat, saying he will no longer rob from other departments to pay for firefighting efforts that Congress doesn’t fund.”
A USDA spokesman told the Post that the agency will ask for emergency funding in the future when there is an intense fire season. The administration has pressed repeatedly for access to emergency funding rather than having to find offsets elsewhere.
This year could be the worst fire season ever, said the Post. With two weeks left in 2015, fires have consumed only a few thousand acres fewer than the record 9.87 million acres of 2006. “Another record was broken in August when the agency paid $243 million to suppress fires in only one week,” said the Post.