More than 600 resource requests went unfilled in a 72-hour stretch
Nine federal firefighters have told the Guardian that the US Forest Service is operating well below the staffing levels needed to respond to the current wildfire season, contradicting public statements from the agency’s chief that the workforce is at full capacity. The accounts, given anonymously because the firefighters are barred from speaking publicly, come as the national fire response has been at its highest alert level since July 18 and more than 49,200 wildfires have burned across 7.2 million acres nationwide since the start of the year.
In testimony before a congressional subcommittee in July, USFS chief Tom Schultz said the agency’s “firefighting workforce is stronger than at any point in recent years” and that the agency is “fully staffed and equipped to respond aggressively to every unplanned ignition.” USFS spokesperson John Winn, asked about the firefighters’ accounts, declined to answer questions about the staffing challenges and doubled down on Schultz’s claims, writing in an email that the agency is “fully staffed at the level we are funded for, and our posture allows us to respond effectively – just as we have for decades.”
A federal fire captain who works in the Pacific north-west, where wildfires recently devastated neighborhoods in Spokane, Washington’s second-largest city, disputed that characterization. “We just do not have enough people,” the captain said. “Every firefighter is engaged at the highest priority we can possibly engage them, but houses are burning. When it’s not Spokane, it’s going to be the next town, and the next town.”
Another fire captain, comparing the agency to a soccer team taking the field with too few substitutes available, put it this way: “Showing up to a game with 13 people is insane. Playing a whole season with 13 people is abuse. That’s how we fight fire – and nobody gets to take a day off.” A third captain connected the staffing question to personal safety: “Having more firefighters means I have a higher probability of coming home. How are we supposed to feel when our leaders – the same people who get up and speak to the mourning families when firefighters die – are lying about our capacity?”
The firefighters were most concerned about the widening gap at the management level. Specialized positions needed to run large-scale fire suppression operations – taskforce leaders, division supervisors, heavy equipment bosses – require decades of experience, and losses in those ranks have become extremely difficult to replace. Inter-agency complex-incident management teams, the specialized groups that organize responses to large-scale disasters, numbered 46 in 2023; today there are 38, according to the firefighters and outside officials who confirmed the figure.
Seth McKinney, a fire management officer with the Boulder county sheriff’s office in Colorado who spent 12 years with the USFS before leaving the agency, returned this summer because the forest he previously worked for was short on chief officers. “It shouldn’t really surprise anybody that we’re in the situation that we are in, because we haven’t invested in our federal firefighters,” McKinney said. He added that the workforce has become a shadow of what it once was.
A firefighter familiar with the shortages said the management gaps compound into broader operational failures. “Without experienced middle management you don’t have anything resembling effective coordination,” the firefighter said. “It’s no small thing to be short in those areas and it is a significant safety issue.” Another firefighter put it differently: “We are now completely unequipped to deal with the sort of fire seasons we will see more and more of.”
The USFS, housed under the Department of Agriculture, employs the bulk of the federal government’s fire workforce and manages more than 193 million acres across the country. The agency points publicly to a hiring goal of 11,300 positions – a number that has remained flat for years – as the benchmark for operational staffing levels. Several firefighters said the actual number of personnel available for deployment when large blazes erupted was likely far smaller than what the agency has reported to the public. The agency has avoided disclosing breakdowns in its staffing totals even after repeated requests from journalists and members of Congress.
The USFS has struggled with recruitment and retention for years, an issue that has come to a head as climate change drives more dangerous fire conditions. The agency lost nearly half of its permanent employees between 2021 and 2024 alone, and roughly 20 percent of its workforce during the Trump administration’s mass-firing spree in 2025, according to a recent government report. While the 2025 cuts were not directed at firefighters, they affected support roles that crews are now searching to fill. Last year, many firefighters worked more than 1,000 hours of overtime – the equivalent of cramming an extra five months of work into an already busy season. This year is expected to be worse.
Oregon state senator Mike McLane said private contract firefighting resources sat idle earlier this summer when fires tore across the state because there were not enough qualified managers available to supervise them. McLane said he learned of the issue from constituents and confirmed it with incident management team staff and the Oregon department of forestry. Oregon is now in the midst of a historic season, with more acres burned than in any other recorded year.
Dave Upthegrove, Washington’s elected commissioner of public lands, who directs statewide wildland firefighting efforts across the state’s roughly 6 million acres of public lands, said he raised the alarm early in the year about the USFS’s diminished capacity. “There are fewer teams, which was true in 2025 as well,” Upthegrove said. “The difference this year is the extreme weather conditions, dangerously high winds at times, very dry fuels and a fourth year of drought. All of that has combined to make us highly vulnerable to large and catastrophic fires like we have seen throughout the state, especially in Spokane.”
The national fire response has been at “preparedness level 5” – the highest level of resource deployment and a signal that new requests for support may go unanswered – since July 18. As of Tuesday, more than 49,200 wildfires had erupted and burned more than 7.2 million acres nationwide since the year began, eclipsing 10-year averages. In many regions, fire risks will remain high through autumn and could linger into winter. More than 600 requests went unfilled during a 72-hour period last week, according to an internal dataset shared with the Guardian, the bulk from the Pacific north-west. Requests for aircraft, crews and equipment went unfilled 265 times over the three-day period, and dozens of requests for experienced managers and supervisors also went unfilled.
A March survey of federal firefighters by the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters and the National Federation of Federal Employees union found that more than half of respondents said their unit had to cancel prescribed burning projects due to staffing shortages. Last year the USFS treated 35 percent fewer acres than in 2024, according to an analysis from the non-profit Center for Western Priorities; in Oregon, treatments fell by 47 percent. Only a quarter of federal firefighters who responded to the survey said their unit was fully staffed; a fifth reported that unqualified personnel were filling the vacant positions.
The staffing strain comes as the federal firefighting workforce is being consolidated under a new agency, the Wildland Fire Service, housed within the Department of the Interior. Officials say the centralization will improve coordination and cut costs. Many firefighters are supportive of the approach but concerned about how it will be carried out and whether officials will make good on promises to improve working conditions for crews who undertake a severe mental and physical toll trying to protect communities year after year.
One fire captain, reflecting on years of raising the alarm about widening gaps between capacity and catastrophe, said the contradictions now surfacing were prompting a harder question within the ranks. “What’s the purpose of the fire service?” the captain said. “Is it actually to manage fire and to do what we’re telling the public we’re intended to do? Or is it simply to sell the public a belief so that they can sleep at night?”