Wildfires Are Sweeping North America. Trump Fired the People Who Fight Them.

The 2026 fire season has been devastating for the U.S. On September 1, the National Interagency Fire Center released data showing that, year-to-date, more than 52,000 wildfires had, cumulatively, burned 8.2 million acres of land in the U.S. That’s 126 percent of the 10-year rolling average for the number of annual fires, and 163 percent of the average acreage burned each year.In Oregon alone, well over 2 million acres have turned to ash.

This is what happens when a government no longer works to reduce climate change and its consequences, and at the same time no longer invests adequately in the workers and agencies that have the skills to corral the increasingly frequent fires breaking out in parched, drought-stricken regions.

As DOGE’s assault on the U.S. government picked up steam last year, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) ended up in the crosshairs. By year’s end, more than 6,000 employees, many of them highly skilled firefighters and fire prevention specialists, had been severed from federal employment. Astoundingly, the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) estimated that 57 out of 77 research labs, whose employees were doing vital work both preparing for fires and responding once they broke out, were shuttered.

The Trump administration claims it is simply streamlining resources and getting rid of redundancies. It has consolidated four separate federal fire-fighting systems into a new agency, the U.S. Wildland Fire Service; but, in doing so, it has ended up with fewer personnel and resources. The U.S. Forest Service, which previously provided the core of the federal firefighting system, has lost 16 percent of its workforce since Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 and has drastically reduced, by 35 percent, the acreage in the American west that it is managing through prescribed burns and other treatments to reduce the likelihood of fires breaking out.

In an effort that critics argue deliberately dilutes the power of the Forest Service in favor of the logging industry, the administration has decided to relocate the USFS headquarters from D.C. to Salt Lake City — all but guaranteeing that many top officials, unwilling to uproot their lives and move 2,000 miles across country, will leave the agency. It has also decided to shutter nine regional USFS offices, leaving a dearth of expertise on the ground in communities that need it most.

In reporting last year for my book on the DOGE cuts, American Carnage: How Trump, Musk, and DOGE Butchered the US Government, I interviewed a recently fired Fire Service employee, whose work had involved coordinating with ranchers in Kansas and Colorado to implement fire-prevention strategies in an increasingly arid American West, who despaired at the logic of such mass firings on the cusp of fire season. He and his colleagues saw an experiment in government dysfunction unfolding; screw around with major government systems, find out the consequences. Their commonsense conclusion: if there are far fewer fire specialists and firefighters on hand, more fires will break out, and the damage those fires do will be greater.

Read more El Niño-Induced Drought Will Reduce Shipping Through Panama Canal

On the ground, the United States is now seeing the impact of a gutted fire response system. During the recent destructive Hawk Fire near Reno, Nevada, this August, the neighboring state of California’s Office of Emergency Services mobilized personnel and resources from 28 local government fire agencies to provide assistance; Australia and New Zealand also provided hundreds of firefighting personnel to fight the Hawk Fire and others in the region. Meanwhile, at the federal level, while FEMA did authorize funds to fight the fire, U.S. Forest Service firefighters have reported extraordinary shortages of staff, with many firefighters this year having to put in 1,000 hours of overtime to try to plug gaps when major fires break out. Put simply, the federal government is letting down millions of Americans on the front lines of climate change whose properties, and lives, are increasingly at risk as megafires become the new norm.

And the U.S. federal government isn’t just AWOL in its domestic firefighting strategy. Increasingly, it is also an absent partner internationally. While historically the U.S. sends large numbers of its firefighting specialists oversees to help other countries, including Canada, this year U.S. federal firefighters were almost totally absent in the efforts to contain mega-fires in Canada; the firefighters from the U.S. who did head north to help were mainly state firefighters in the northeast from states such as New Hampshire and Maine.

While online MAGA influencers claimed that 2,000 federal firefighters were on the front lines of Canadian wildfire fights, that was untrue; an AFP analysis of the press release upon which this data was based found that it in fact referred to U.S. involvement in the 2023 firefighting season in Canada — when Biden, rather than Trump, was president.

This year, by contrast, the U.S. federal firefighting system has been largely a non-player in Canada. True, the U.S. ambassador to Canada released a brief statement about the need for U.S.-Canada cooperation in fighting megafires. But the U.S. response that will be remembered about these fires is, surely, Donald Trump’s inane social media post threatening tariffs against Canada for “invading” the U.S. with its wildfire smoke.

There are still weeks to go before the end of North America’s fire season, and nothing suggests that the feds are about to get serious in their response. As with so many other examples in the Trump era, it has proven easy to break these vital parts of government; but, now that the scale of DOGE’s failure is becoming clear, it is turning out to be far harder to get these systems up and running properly again.

Read more Trump Administration Secretly Working to Divert Billions From NIH Budget to Fund Iran War