Skip to main content
Menu

Main navigation

  • About
    • Annual Reports
    • Leadership
    • Jobs
    • Student Programs
    • Media Information
    • Store
    • Contact
    LOADING...
  • Experts
    • Policy Scholars
    • Adjunct Scholars
    • Fellows
  • Events
    • Upcoming
    • Past
    • Event FAQs
    • Sphere Summit
    LOADING...
  • Publications
    • Studies
    • Commentary
    • Books
    • Reviews and Journals
    • Public Filings
    LOADING...
  • Blog
  • Donate
    • Sponsorship Benefits
    • Ways to Give
    • Planned Giving

Issues

  • Constitution and Law
    • Constitutional Law
    • Criminal Justice
    • Free Speech and Civil Liberties
  • Economics
    • Banking and Finance
    • Monetary Policy
    • Regulation
    • Tax and Budget Policy
  • Politics and Society
    • Education
    • Government and Politics
    • Health Care
    • Poverty and Social Welfare
    • Technology and Privacy
  • International
    • Defense and Foreign Policy
    • Global Freedom
    • Immigration
    • Trade Policy
Live Now

Blog


  • Blog Home
  • RSS

Email Signup

Sign up to have blog posts delivered straight to your inbox!

Topics
  • Banking and Finance
  • Constitutional Law
  • Criminal Justice
  • Defense and Foreign Policy
  • Education
  • Free Speech and Civil Liberties
  • Global Freedom
  • Government and Politics
  • Health Care
  • Immigration
  • Monetary Policy
  • Poverty and Social Welfare
  • Regulation
  • Tax and Budget Policy
  • Technology and Privacy
  • Trade Policy
Archives
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2020
  • July 2020
  • June 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010
  • July 2010
  • June 2010
  • May 2010
  • April 2010
  • March 2010
  • February 2010
  • January 2010
  • December 2009
  • November 2009
  • October 2009
  • September 2009
  • August 2009
  • July 2009
  • June 2009
  • May 2009
  • April 2009
  • March 2009
  • February 2009
  • January 2009
  • December 2008
  • November 2008
  • October 2008
  • September 2008
  • August 2008
  • July 2008
  • June 2008
  • May 2008
  • April 2008
  • March 2008
  • February 2008
  • January 2008
  • December 2007
  • November 2007
  • October 2007
  • September 2007
  • August 2007
  • July 2007
  • June 2007
  • May 2007
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • August 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • Show More
December 22, 2015 11:37AM

Vilsack to Congress: Give Me More Money or I’ll Let the West Burn

By Randal O'Toole

SHARE

Congress rejected the Forest Service plan to give the agency access to up to $2.9 billion a year to suppress wildfires. In response, Secretary of Agriculture threatened to let fires burn up the West unless Congress gives his department more money. In a letter to key members of Congress, Vilsack warned, “I will not authorize transfers from restoration and resilience funding” to suppress fires. If the Forest Service runs out of appropriated funds to fight fires, it will stop fighting them until Congress appropriates additional funds.

This is a stunning example of brinksmanship on the part of an agency once known for its easygoing nature. Since about 1990, Congress has given the Forest Service the average of its previous ten years of fire suppression funds. If the agency has to spend more than that amount during a severe fire year, Congress authorized it to borrow funds from its other programs, with the promise that Congress would reimburse those funds later. In other words, during severe fire years, some projects might be delayed for a year–hardly a crisis.

Yet Vilsack and the Forest Service are intent on turning it into a crisis. In a report prominently posted on the Forest Service’s web site, the agency whines about “the rising costs of wildfire operations”–that cost not being the dollar cost but the “effects on the Forest Service’s non-fire work.”

Numerous graphs in the report show declines in inflation-adjusted funding for various line items–but, deceptively, none of the graphs have the Y-axis set to zero, thus exaggerating those declines. Moreover, many of those line items are ridiculous anyway: who cares of land-management planning budgets have declined? The Supreme Court decided in 1998 that land-management planning was a waste of time, so why are they still spending any money at all on it? In any case, most of the items tracked by the charts aren’t programs the Forest Service borrows against for fire, so creating the proposed $2.9 billion emergency fund would do nothing to stop the funding declines.

The question Vilsack should ask is not “Why won’t Congress give his agency a blank check?” but “Why does the Forest Service spend so much on fire anyway?” The answer to that question is complex but comes down to one simple thing: the Forest Service has no incentive to control costs as long as Congress keeps reimbursing them.

As wildfire historian Stephen Pyne wrote in 1995, Forest Service fire managers have long been known for “creative accounting,” transferring “as many costs as possible” to the emergency fire funds. One of these is the “presuppression fund” that becomes available when fire danger is high; the other is the suppression fund that becomes available when a fire isn’t controlled by the first responders. When either of these conditions takes place, Pyne notes, “everything imaginable is charged to fires.” This situation has only gotten worse in the last two decades.

So it’s not surprising that many Forest-Service-fed news articles have reported that 2015 was the costliest fire year ever, citing Forest Service costs of $1.7 billion. But none of the articles mention costs to the Department of the Interior, and while I can’t find that number anywhere, I suspect it was not a lot more than half a billion dollars, as the most it has ever spent in the past was around $470 million.

The reason why this is important is that most fires this year were on Interior lands, not national forests. The Forest Service and its parent, the Department of Agriculture point to the near-record number of acres burned in 2015, about 9.8 million. But less than 20 percent of those acres were on national forest lands, while 54 percent were on Interior lands. 

Firefighting Costs Per Acre Burned

  Forest Service Interior
2010 2,834 177
2011 818 200
2012 564 105
2013 983 252
2014 1,371 264
2015 922 ?
Average 916 171

As the table above shows, the Forest Service habitually spends more than five times as much as the Department of the Interior per acre burned on their respective lands. Unlike the Forest Service, Interior agencies have never had a blank check for suppressing fire, so they have had little incentive to wildly overspend. 

Worse, Congress’ policy of giving the Forest Service the average of its previous ten years’ of fire suppression costs gives the agency an incentive to spend more each year so that its ten-year average spirals upwards. Meanwhile, in mild fire years, Congress says that the appropriated fire suppression funds that the agency doesn’t need “may be transferred to the National Forest System, and Forest and Rangeland Research accounts to fund forest and rangeland research, the Joint Fire Science Program, vegetation and watershed management, heritage site rehabilitation, and wildlife and fish habitat management and restoration.” 

Thus, it’s heads the Forest Service wins; tails the taxpayers lose. When fire years are mild, the agency gets a windfall to spend on non-fire programs. When fire years are severe, it gets to borrow from those non-fire programs to spend all it wants on fire suppression, knowing it will be reimbursed–and then complains that its non-fire programs are hurt by the borrowings.

One of the reasons why the administration and some environmental groups are behind the Forest Service proposal to give it $2.9 billion a year to draw upon is that increasing fire costs fit neatly into their global climate apocalypse. Yet the data don’t show that the United States is suffering worse droughts today than in the past. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the percentage of the nation that was severely or extremely dry during summer months (July-September) averaged about 15 percent in 2015. That’s high, but hardly a record.

In recent years, this percentage has ranged as low as 3 percent in 1992 to as high as 24 percent in 1953. It was 20 percent in 2012 and 22 percent in 2000. There was a six-year period in the 1950s when it was 15 percent or more in all but one year (when it was 13 percent), and reached as high as 24 percent. So far, both the 1930s and the 1950s were dryer than the 2010s. This suggests that droughts are cyclical, not growing.

What is growing is the Forest Service’s spending on fire. It will continue to grow until Congress gives the agency incentives to contain its costs rather than incentives to spend more each year.

Related Tags
Energy and Environment

Stay Connected to Cato

Sign up for the newsletter to receive periodic updates on Cato research, events, and publications.

View All Newsletters

1000 Massachusetts Ave, NW,
Washington, DC 20001-5403
(202) 842-0200
Contact Us
Privacy

Footer 1

  • About
    • Annual Reports
    • Leadership
    • Jobs
    • Student Programs
    • Media Information
    • Store
    • Contact

Footer 2

  • Experts
    • Policy Scholars
    • Adjunct Scholars
    • Fellows
  • Events
    • Upcoming
    • Past
    • Event FAQs
    • Sphere Summit

Footer 3

  • Publications
    • Books
    • Cato Journal
    • Regulation
    • Cato Policy Report
    • Cato Supreme Court Review
    • Cato’s Letter
    • Human Freedom Index
    • Economic Freedom of the World
    • Cato Handbook for Policymakers

Footer 4

  • Blog
  • Donate
    • Sponsorship Benefits
    • Ways to Give
    • Planned Giving
Also from Cato Institute:
Libertarianism.org
|
Humanprogress.org
|
Downsizinggovernment.org