As blazes rage out West, federal firefighters describe a mounting strain

As wildfires rip across the parched American West, federal firefighters say they are facing immense pressure and grappling with a shortage of resources that has worsened following the Trump administration’s staffing cuts.

A collision of risky conditions have made things harder as the summer gets underway: a warm, dry winter; prolonged drought; snowless mountains; thick fuels that have had time to cure — elements that have set the stage for what could be a hellish fire year. The scenario started rearing its head in March and intensified over the last few weeks, with about 50 large fires now burning across the United States, and Utah and Colorado experiencing particularly large or destructive blazes.

Before these factors aligned, strain on federal firefighting capacity had been building for years, leaving many feeling short-strapped and exhausted as they respond to prolonged and erratic fires, according to interviews with 26 current wildland firefighters, state officials, experts, and former federal officials.

In interviews, emails, and message exchanges with the Washington Post this week, 15 federal firefighters said that what goes on behind the scenes can be more challenging than the blazes themselves. They spoke of organizational gaps across agencies, smaller crews with fewer seasoned leaders, prolonged exposure to dangerous conditions, and major changes to the way the nation fights fires. They all spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

The crisis, firefighters say, hit a crescendo when the Trump administration slashed federal agencies last year. Multiple states and forest stations lost workers who could support fire response. Many senior leaders and veterans also took deferred resignations or retired early.

The U.S. Forest Service, housed within the Agriculture Department, is the nation’s largest wildfire firefighting force, managing more than 193 million acres across the country, as well as partnering with state and local fire departments to help respond to large blazes.

In 2024, there were 18,700 federal employees who could fight fires. Now there are a little over 17,000, according to the U.S. Forest Service and Interior Department. In a recent June report, the Government Accountability Office noted that the U.S. Forest Service’s workforce “decreased by about 20% in response to a February 2025 executive order for large-scale workforce reductions.”

The administration is also in the middle of reshaping how the country responds to wildfires. Earlier this year, officials announced the formation of a new unified U.S. Wildland Fire Service and a shift back to a strategy that prioritizes “suppression,” which seeks to put out all fires quickly. Firefighters in the field say that transition — which they say commands more of their time and resources — is taking place in real time as they respond to ongoing fires.

While firefighters have been raising the alarm on staffing concerns for years, they say the current climate — the exceptionally fire-prone conditions and the administration’s assault on federal workers — has fueled intensified levels of burnout and concerns over the preparedness of less-experienced crews.

In response to questions about wildland firefighter staffing and resources, the U.S. Forest Service said it is “stronger than ever, fully staffed, and equipped to respond aggressively to every unplanned ignition.”

The agency added that it has “reached and exceeded our hiring goal of 11,300 firefighters. This is the earliest we have reached our 11,300-target since 2022.”

Experts and firefighters say the Forest Service has had that same hiring goal of 11,300 since April 2022, according to public memos. Some argue the number has not kept up with demand, in part because the agency includes what are known as secondary fire employees, such as dispatchers and administrative positions, in that number, according to congressional budget requests, internal data viewed by the Post, and two people familiar with the situation.

While the Forest Service said it surpassed its hiring goal and brought on “11,719 wildland firefighters onboard nationwide,” the number of primary firefighters, workers whose main duty is to fight fire, is about 9,000, according to staffing data from late June reviewed by the Post.

The Forest Service confirmed the yearly hiring figure does include secondary positions, including dispatchers, describing them as “critical to successful daily operations.”

“Between our operational firefighters, our non-fire carded employees and administratively determined hires — the Forest Service can mobilize more than 28,000 responders,” the agency said.

“I’m so frustrated I could cry,” said one federal firefighter currently fighting Utah’s Cottonwood Fire, the largest active blaze in the country. In a message to the Post, he said firefighters knew what dangers could emerge “while watching the snowpack all winter.” But he said the Forest Service has had less staff to reduce fuels in drought-stricken forests and do other fire prevention work.

He described a cratering morale and said firefighters are “treated like we’re dispensable.” Last week, three of his federal colleagues died after helicoptering into fires burning on remote parts of the Utah-Colorado border. That kind of tragedy so early in the summer has added to the emotional heaviness.

“We are reeling, devastated, and still trying to come to terms with it,” he said.

And even though about 3.2 million acres have burned across the U.S. so far this year — nearly twice as many as this time last July — firefighters and experts caution that the fire current fire landscape isn’t that busy yet. California and the Pacific Northwest haven’t seen major blazes; there haven’t been the kind of megafires burning for weeks that require resources from other countries.

The Cottonwood Fire, which has burned nearly 100,000 acres, is the largest blaze burning in the U.S., fueling devastating loss across Southern Utah. Colorado is also grappling with a siege of wildfires that has forced about 6,000 residents in rural communities to evacuate.

These kinds of overlapping fires have stretched federal assets, experts and fire officials said.

On Monday night, Tim Ross, an incident commander with the U.S. Forest Service, said during a briefing on the Willow Fire that with all the activity across the state, “there is a battle for resources.”

In an interview Thursday, Gov. Jared Polis (D) and several fire and public safety officials said that while Colorado may have its hands full right now, they are managing. It’s what could come next that worries them. Decades of falling behind on fuel treatments and climate challenges have made their forests tinder boxes, they said.

“Our biggest worry right now are more major incidents,” Polis said from his car after getting an update on the Aspen Acres fire, which has burned more than 50,000 acres and has become the state’s top priority. “While we don’t have a shortage [of resources], our concern is that we would have a shortage in our state and other states if there were additional incidents.”

Colorado has been bolstering its firefighting apparatus over the past few years, Polis said, buying more aircraft and engines, and changing policies so they can put out fires before they get too big. Other states that are becoming more fire-prone might not have made those changes. But the reality is, when fires explode, even the most well-resourced states still need the federal government’s help.

For about the past 15 years, the Rocky Mountain region has had the same number of incident management teams — three. Right now, they’re all dispatched in Colorado. In need of further assistance, officials brought in what’s known as a complex incident management team to help out, a crew that came all the way from Alaska.

Experts said that suggests most of these teams are already committed to other fires.

“They are hitting the limits of available resources across the Lower 48 because of this recent outbreak of fires across the entire Southwest,” said Michael Wara, the director of Stanford University’s Climate and Energy Policy Program who specializes in wildfires. “There are only so many firefighters to go around. Our militia is smaller than it used to be because so many people got laid off or left. At some point you start to get into difficult competition for resources when things get really busy and there are so many battles happening at same time.”

Colorado fire officials also acknowledged they’ve seen some loss of experienced incident command officials who really know how to fight fires.

The Forest Service said it has sufficient resources to battle wildfires. As of July 1, the federal government has mobilized more than 9,000 personnel, the agency said, adding that “over the past week the Rocky Mountain and Great Basin areas processed 9,623 resource requests with about 1.5% of those requests being unfilled. This demonstrates that incident management teams are receiving the support they need.”

Staffing the nation’s federal wildfire response infrastructure has long been difficult and opaque, according to experts and previous federal investigations. And federal wildland fire staffing levels are complex — agencies often have a mix of permanent full-time employees, seasonal, and emergency hires that ebb and flow throughout the year.

A 2022 report from the Government Accountability Office highlighted that “recruiting and retaining federal wildland firefighters has been difficult” due to “low pay, poor work-life balance” as well as a lack of mental health support and other issues. Other GAO assessments from 2024 and 2025 found that low staffing was hampering goals such as prescribed fire targets.

Those are some of the same struggles firefighters are now describing as the summer ramps up.

A Forest Service official in Colorado who leads a team focused on suppression said a lack of funding meant he could no longer hire the standard number of seasonal workers. There are important leadership spots still open, he added, and his forest may have to stop using one of their engines because they don’t have enough crew members to staff it. That means their fire response will be less robust, he said.

And at a time when “the fires are larger and more complex,” they have lost officials who’ve been around for decades, and who know best how to respond to dicey situations or rugged terrain.

“We simply don’t have the experience and qualifications to backfill them,” he said. “They say ‘don’t do more with less’ but the reality is that we must.”

These experiences echo hundreds of others who took a recent survey for the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit advocacy group, according to Riva Duncan, president of Grassroots and a retired firefighter currently helping out on assignments as an officer making strategic decisions when new fires flare up.

“Over the past several years as the climate crisis worsens, it feels like we keep asking fewer firefighters to do even more and morale is suffering,” she said. “And a very challenging fire season, like this one is shaping up to be, will probably only affect that even more.”

Zeke Lunder, a 30-year wildfire expert who specializes in mapping and wildfire science, said the loss of senior, qualified leadership can have a tangible effect on crews when they are in the field, because fire — when, where, and how it burns — is often cyclical.

As an example, Lunder pulled up maps showing how a wind-driven fire in the 1990s hit the same area where the three firefighters died last week. That fire, he said, spread 10 miles in one day, “and these fatalities happened under similarly explosive conditions.”

Federal officials are investigating the conditions during which the firefighters responded.

“History tells you the potential, the possibility of a fire. When you forget those stories we repeat those mistakes,” Lunder said. “The right question isn’t are your positions fully staffed. It’s how many people do you have who have been working over 20 years?”

For the past several months, firefighters and officials have also been undergoing a significant reorganization. While many firefighters think a unified federal firefighting force is a good idea, they described a transition that’s been disruptive and has added even more pressure to all-consuming jobs. As one high-level supervisor with the new service explained, they are trying to rebuild long-established protocols “in real time, during fire season.”

“Winter is normally when we recover from the previous season, take leave, complete hiring, conduct training, and prepare for the year ahead,” the supervisor said. “That opportunity largely disappeared this year. Permanent fire staff have spent the offseason consumed by organizational unification efforts instead of preparing for fire season. Many people are already exhausted, and it’s only July 1.”

A new directive to put fires out as fast as possible also means there’s more risk, firefighters said.

In one Mountain West state, a member of a specialized helicopter-based crew detailed how his team was already missing critical positions, known as spotters, and that he has had to shift people around to fill the gaps.

These kind of firefighters land near or rappel from helicopters in remote terrain engines often can’t drive into. The firefighters who died last week in Colorado were part of a helitack crew.

Focusing on full suppression will require these teams to be in the air more — flying further and shuttling food and protective gear back and forth — as well as responding to more dangerous situations.

On one recent assignment, the helitack firefighter said the pilot he was with didn’t feel safe because the area was so congested with other air traffic. He said the helicopter decided to pull out of the assignment despite officials asking them to keep dumping water on flames.

“We said no,” the firefighter said. “All this pressure to put everything out is adding to the workload; that is unequivocally what is happening.”