"With wildfires already burning and drought persisting across much of the U.S., fire experts are bracing for what could be an extreme fire season. The U.S. Forest Service is going into it having done far less work than in recent years to manage the dry, flammable vegetation that can fuel catastrophic fires.
In 2025, the Forest Service reduced vegetation on almost 1.5 million fewer acres than in 2024, according to an analysis of the agency's data by NPR and firefighting experts. It marks a significant drop from the more than 4 million acres of hazardous vegetation work done in the last year of the Biden administration.
The biggest decline was in prescribed burns, the low-grade fires intentionally set to clear dense underbrush, helping reduce the intensity of future wildfires. In 2025, the Forest Service burned only about half of the acreage that it did in both 2024 and 2023, according to an NPR analysis of agency records.
Despite the extreme wildfires of recent years, there's actually a fire deficit in most of the country. Many North American forests evolved over millennia with low-intensity wildfires that clear out dense undergrowth. Native Americans use controlled burns to shape the ecosystem, but those measures became far less common after tribes were forced from their lands. In the 1930s, the Forest Service also adopted a policy to extinguish all wildfires."
