Guest opinion: Wildfire policy based on facts – not emotion

Wildfire has become one of the defining challenges facing the Mountain West. It is no longer a seasonal inconvenience, but a recurring public safety threat and growing fiscal burden, especially entering another dry summer. Yet despite the increasing scale and cost of wildfire, governments continue to spend far more on suppression than on prevention.

The current system is built largely around response. Prevention measures such as forest thinning, prescribed burns, fuels reduction projects, and infrastructure hardening receive far less attention than suppression measures, even though they can reduce the severity and cost of future fires.

In 2023, the Montana Legislature significantly expanded the state's wildfire suppression capacity through House Bill 883, depositing approximately $152 million into the state's wildfire suppression account and establishing a mechanism designed to maintain a balance approaching $200 million. The legislation also increased funding available for wildfire mitigation, preparedness, and equipment purchases from $5 million per biennium to $30 million per biennium. 

At the same time, state officials have increasingly recognized the importance of prevention. During Montana's 2026 Fire Season Briefing, Governor Greg Gianforte highlighted the state's 20-year Shared Stewardship Agreement with the U.S. Forest Service, a first-of-its-kind partnership designed to dramatically increase the pace and scale of active forest management across Montana's federal forests. Since the agreement was signed in 2025, state and federal officials have identified three priority landscapes spanning portions of the Flathead, Kootenai, Bitterroot, and Lolo National Forests. 

With the addition of a third landscape in 2026, the agreement now covers roughly 745,000 acres and is expected to expand toward nearly one million acres. Through tools such as the Good Neighbor Authority, the partnership allows Montana and the Forest Service to coordinate forest thinning, fuels reduction, timber harvests, and restoration projects intended to reduce wildfire risk before fires ignite.

These efforts demonstrate that Montana has begun shifting more attention toward prevention. However, the state's overall spending priorities remain heavily tilted toward suppression. Even with expanded mitigation programs and new collaborative forest management initiatives, prevention funding still represents only a fraction of the resources reserved for wildfire response. Even after the increase, Montana's dedicated suppression reserve remained roughly six to seven times larger than the amount allocated for mitigation and preparedness activities.

The disparity highlights a larger policy challenge. Montana has obviously recognized the growing wildfire threat and has taken meaningful steps to strengthen both response and prevention efforts. But the state’s financial priorities still reflect a system built primarily around fighting fires after they ignite rather than reducing the conditions that allow them to become catastrophic in the first place.

This does not mean suppression funding is unnecessary. Large fires require extensive resources, including aircraft, firefighters, equipment, emergency logistics, and recovery efforts. When communities are threatened, rapid response is essential. The issue is not that Montana spends too much on suppression; it is that prevention remains underfunded relative to the scale of the risk the state faces.

The fiscal implications are significant. Wildfire costs do not increase gradually. Once a fire escapes initial containment, expenses can escalate rapidly as suppression efforts expand and structures, infrastructure, and communities come under threat. Prevention functions as a form of risk management, reducing fuel loads and limiting the conditions that drive catastrophic fire behavior. From a budgetary perspective, every successful mitigation project has the potential to avoid much larger suppression costs in the future.

Federal prevention efforts have faced additional challenges beyond funding alone. In 2025, the U.S. Forest Service eliminated approximately 3,400 positions, roughly 10 percent of the agency's workforce. Although frontline firefighters were largely exempt from the cuts, many affected employees worked in timber management, fuels reduction, watershed restoration, environmental planning, and other programs that support long-term wildfire prevention. 

Critics argued that the workforce reductions could slow forest-thinning projects, prescribed burns, and other mitigation efforts designed to reduce wildfire risk before fires ignite. According to a 2026 analysis, the U.S. Forest Service treated 35 percent fewer acres for wildfire risk reduction in 2025 than in 2024, highlighting concerns that reductions in agency capacity could undermine efforts to address hazardous fuel loads before fires ignite.

Because the federal government manages roughly 30 million acres in Montana, reductions in federal land management capacity can have significant consequences for the state's ability to address the conditions that contribute to catastrophic wildfires.

For many Montanans, this is not an abstract budget debate. Communities in the Gallatin Valley, Bitterroot Valley, Flathead Valley, Helena area, and other rapidly growing regions increasingly sit at the intersection of expanding development and fire-prone landscapes. As more homes, businesses, and infrastructure are built in the wildland-urban interface, the financial and public safety consequences of large wildfires become even greater, making prevention investments increasingly important for protecting both lives and taxpayer resources.

The question facing Montana is not whether it should continue funding wildfire responses, but whether a state that maintains nearly $200 million for suppression while allocating only a fraction of that amount to mitigation is making the most economically rational investment over the long term. 

As wildfires become an increasingly permanent feature of life in the West, prevention should be viewed less as a discretionary environmental program and more as a core infrastructure investment. If current drought conditions are a preview of future fire seasons, the cost of underinvesting in prevention will likely be measured not only in dollars, but also in lost forests, damaged communities, and growing pressure on state finances.

Emily Strasburg is a Policy Analyst for the Mountain States Policy Center, an independent research organization based in Idaho, Montana, Washington and Wyoming. Online at mountainstatespolicy.org.