Ban Campfires Now

Cuts to the federal workforce will make wildfires more likely, ensure they’ll spread quicker, and make fighting them deadly. This solution isn’t perfect, but it is easy.

This is an open letter to Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, national park superintendents and national forest supervisors nationwide, and all other managers in charge of state and federal public lands. Ongoing cuts to the workforces at your agencies, funding cuts across federal programs and contracts, and the politicization of science are combining to create unprecedented wildfire risks. In order to protect our public lands, private property and save lives, you must ban campfires indefinitely, starting now.

Included in the 1,000 full-time employees fired from the National Park Service, 3,400 cut from the U.S. Forest Service, and the thousands of seasonal positions lost to hiring freezes at both agencies are staff responsible for conducting wildfire fuel mitigation, extinguishing abandoned campfires, spotting new wildfires when they start, and conducting research critical to understanding fire behavior.

Here in southwest Montana, only three full-time employees remain to manage one million acres of national forest just north of Yellowstone National Park. The Custer Gallatin National Forest sees 3.1 million visitors each year.

NPR tells the story of Lanny Flaherty, an ecologist working for USFS who was fired last week. Their job was to collect data around the type, distribution and density of plants growing in Oregon, data that then informed wildfire modeling.

“When you bring in 5,000 firefighters from all over the country, you need local specialization there to tell them where the stuff is,” Faherty explained to NPR. “Understanding where brush and trees grow on a landscape gives firefighters a better understanding of how a fire might move through it.”

That data will no longer be collected or modeled, reducing insights firefighters will have into potential fire behavior during any future incident, which will risk their lives and reduce their effectiveness.

Despite claims to the contrary, hiring freezes are also working to reduce the number of federal firefighters as the nation heads into fire season. According to a fire captain working in a national forest, this means the federal firefighting force will be operating at a “diminished capacity” for at least the rest of 2025.

“I have firefighters who I should be bringing on, and I’m not able to because our HR practices have stopped until the hiring freeze is lifted, or they’re given permission to continue,” Ben McLane, a fire captain based in Oregon’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest told NBC News.

Paused funding is also preventing controlled burns and other fuel reduction measures from being carried out. Those efforts must be conducted during the winter and spring, after new growth of grasses and brush has begun, and while ecosystems are still carrying enough moisture to prevent burns from spreading out of control.

ProPublica reports that a years-long plan to burn 151,434 acres—six times the size of Miami—in the Everglades had to be canceled last month after one of President Trump’s first executive orders canceled Biden-era funding for it.

“We will be more vulnerable to a catastrophic fire in the future as a result of not being able to do the prescribed burn,” an area firefighter told ProPublica.

Axios reports that cuts to the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration are next, and will target meteorologists at the National Weather Service, reducing our nation’s ability to forecast extreme weather. NOAA climate change research is also on the chopping block. Losing that will reduce our ability to understand and predict worsening fire conditions.

Cuts are also being made to staffing and budgets at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which coordinates training, fuel mitigation and firefighting efforts across federal agencies and state, local, and tribal governments. 200 employees have already been cut from that agency, which is also the target of significant disinformation efforts by the administration and its supporters.

Writing on FireRescue1, retired fire chief Marc S. Bashoor explains that fears over violating Trump’s Diversity Equity and Inclusion ban have caused agencies to cancel some firefighter trainings funded by FEMA.

“For example, the U.S. Fire Administration’s National Fire Academy announced cancellation of the National Weekend, sponsored by Women in Fire, which had been scheduled for May 17 and 18, 2025, at the National Emergency Training Center in Emmitsburg, Maryland,” Bashoor explains. “Additionally, the U.S. Forest Service announced cancellation of the annual spring bootcamp for women who are interested in becoming wildland firefighters.”

According to a 24-year study published by USFS in 2017, the ignition of 85 percent of all wildland fires is caused by humans, with campfires serving as the most common cause of those.

In the current political environment, with wildfire season rapidly approaching or already occurring in some areas of the country, and the May 1 start date for most seasonal work on public lands just over two months away, there are limited options for reducing fire risks this summer and fall. Banning campfires would effectively eliminate the most common controllable source of ignition, and can be achieved without the application of any additional budget or staffing requirements.

At a time when our public land management agencies no longer employ the staff necessary to educate the public around fire safety, keep them safe in the event of a fire, work to mitigate fire occurrence, or effectively fight the fires that already occur, and in which budgets for all the above efforts are, in a best case scenario, in a state of limbo, banning campfires is simply the responsible decision to make. Failing to do so will amplify risks and costs during a time in which our public lands are already going to be irrevocably damaged.

Until such a time as national parks and forests, BLM land, wildlife refuges et al can again be adequately staffed and funded, it’s simply common sense to remove the most common controllable cause of the greatest danger they face. Ban campfires now.

Top photo: Eirik Luka

Wes Siler is your guide to leading a more exciting life outdoors. You can read more about what he’s doing on Substack through this link. Want to read more articles like this one? Consider supporting independent journalism through a paid subscription.