Bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act would bring big changes to national wildfire policy
The U.S. Senate version of the Fix our Forests Act (FOFA) is advancing with strong bipartisan support. If signed, it would bring big changes to the country’s approach to wildfires.
In the fall of 2023, the congressionally created Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission released a major report with nearly 150 recommendations. Its purpose was to “change our relationship with fire, restore ecosystems, and protect communities.”
Many of those recommendations are reflected in the Senate’s Fix Our Forests Act. Its main sponsor is Utah Republican John Curtis, while Colorado Democrat John Hickenlooper, Montana Republican Tim Sheehy and California Democrat Alex Padilla are co-sponsors.
“The status quo isn’t working when it comes to tackling the growing wildfire crisis,” Hickenlooper commented after the legislation was passed out of the Senate’s Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry with a majority of his fellow Democrats’ support. “[FOFA is] also a blueprint for how Washington should run. Commonsense legislation for our constituents is what we came to the Senate to do.”
“Better stewardship of our forests is not a partisan issue,” Sheehy said in a separate statement. “It’s an imperative to securing a stronger economy, healthier forests, and safer communities.”
Recommendations becoming law
Reforms in FOFA would include the creation of a multi-agency Wildfire Intelligence Center and Community Wildfire Risk Reduction Program, and a number of changes to prescribed fire policies, including expanding training opportunities for non-federal partners.
“We are excited to see so many of the Commission's recommendations moving forward,” said Annie Schmidt, who was a coordinator for the commission before co-founding the Alliance for Wildfire Resilience (AWR), a research organization that endorsed the Senate bill. “We're excited to see a holistic approach to fire.”
AWR analyzed the bill’s many provisions and compared them to commission recommendations, finding that the bill touches on 50 of them, 17 of which they determined were in “strong alignment.”
‘Categorical exclusion’ concerns
One element of the legislation in particular has raised concerns among a number of environmental and wildfire groups. As written, the bill would raise the maximum size from 3,000 to 10,000 acres for certain projects that can be exempted from some requirements of the National Environmental Protection Act. That’s known as categorical exclusion, which is when federal agencies determine that certain actions “do not individually or cumulatively have a significant effect on the human environment” and do not require an environmental assessment or impact statement. In FOFA’s case, those projects include timber harvesting and other hazardous fuel management practices, like prescribed fire and thinning.
Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (FUSEE) said that part of the bill “expands categorical exclusions and emergency authorities that weaken analysis, public engagement, and environmental safeguards” and “encourages logging-centric approaches that are not ecologically sound or fire-resilient.”
FUSEE supports other parts of FOFA, like those aiming to facilitate prescribed fire and make communities more resilient to blazes. The group encourages Congress to improve the bill through amendments, but does not endorse it in “its current form.”
“The Act, as drafted, prioritizes expedited logging over ecological fire management and lacks funding for the reforms wildland firefighters need,” the group wrote in a recent message to legislators.
AWR’s Schmidt acknowledged that the bill would raise the maximum acreage for categorical exemptions to 10,000, but said: “That's a ceiling, not a floor.”
“Not all projects need to be 10,000 acres, some will continue to be much smaller than that,” she said. “And that doesn't mean that for any project up to that size, you get to skip all environmental analysis.”
“Those projects will ultimately be necessary in many places to increase our wildfire resilience,” she added. “We know we need to take active steps on the landscape and in our communities to reduce our risk of fire. We're losing too much.”
Next steps
The full Senate has yet to consider the bill, and it would then need to be reconciled with a similar U.S. House bill. Pointing to significant bipartisan support, Schmidt said, “I am as optimistic as I have ever been about a Commission-related bill.”
“We know that there's been a lot of collaboration, both from a bipartisan standpoint and a bicameral standpoint when it comes to this bill,” she added. “And honestly, that's the kind of legislating that I think most people want to see.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
