The Flathead is on the cusp of summer uncertainty.
Given the current political and economic climate, tourism in the valley is markedly down and it doesn’t look like it will rebound any time soon.
Concurrently, this summer is forecast to be hotter and dryer than usual through the end of August. So dry, in fact, that Montana is the only state in the nation with a “below normal” seasonal precipitation outlook, according to NOAA.
Then there’s the fallout from DOGE’s rapid assault on the local landscape, leading to the dismissals of dozens of rangers, firefighters (Uncle Sam is now rushing to hire some of them back), technicians, trail crew and maintenance workers in the Flathead National Forest, Glacier National Park, and beyond.
And if all of that misery isn’t enough, and with the peak of wildfire season just six weeks away, President Trump, with the encouragement of Montana’s two Republican senators, is aiming to shift the nation’s wildland firefighting efforts into one single consolidated federal fire brigade, potentially leading to the reassignment of hundreds of firefighters currently employed by the U.S. Forest Service.
“Currently, federal jurisdiction over wildfire response is spread across a myriad of federal and state agencies with no clear responsibility for wildfire fighting and the protection of our communities”—or so Montana Senators Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy write in a letter to Trump.
Alongside 15 other lawmakers, they are calling on the president to take immediate and decisive “executive action” to foster interagency cohesion, streamline outdated processes, and ensure robust response to wildfires that our currently fought in Northwest Montana by the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, and numerous municipal and rural fire departments.
The pair of Montana lawmakers claims that “unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles and redundancies within the agencies responsible for wildfire management are significantly hampering our ability to respond quickly and aggressively, putting more lives and communities in jeopardy.”
Just hold your hoses, counters a group of former U.S. Forest Service chiefs tasked in their careers with fighting wildland fires. They are warning Congress that a so-called Federal Wildland Fire Service would “actually increase the likelihood of more large catastrophic fires, putting more communities, firefighters and resources at risk.”
“It’s going to create greater risk and it’s going to be particularly chaotic,” warns Steve Ellis, a former wildfire incident commander—Forest Service and BLM—who is chair of the National Association of Forest Service Retirees.
Timothy Ingalsbee, meanwhile, who is with Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, is actually predicting the demise of the Forest Service, which currently fields the most firefighters of any federal agency, should it lose its land (and fire) management capabilities.
Consider already in this early 2025 fire season that the Flathead National Forest, steward of 2.4 million acres stretching 120 miles from the Canadian border, has conducted controlled burns in the Swan Lake Ranger District and Tally Lake Ranger District.
Given it lost at least three dozen staffing positions to Elon Musk and Co. earlier this year, I asked the Flathead Forest if they are prepared to fight this season’s wildland fires?
“We are still working through staffing changes with the overall goal of improvement to our public services,” came the response. “The safety of our visitors, adjacent landowners and firefighters remain top priorities.”
In fact, firefighters on the Flathead National Forest are not only adequately prepared for the approaching wildfire season, they “are already assisting other national forests and partners across the nation.”
Flathead Forest personnel “who hold positions that are non-wildland firefighting jobs, such as trail crew or timber management, help with our wildland firefighting response,” it assured. “This can include everything from initial attack and weekend patrols to taking assignments to other national forests for long-duration wildfire incident management.”
Otherwise, bear in mind that the U.S. Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture, whereas the proposed Federal Wildland Fire Service would become a branch of the Interior Department. The extent of any merging of agencies or agency resources remains to be seen.
The USDA press office in Washington informed me last week that it “will not speculate as to the future,” although it did pass along the following statement from Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins:
“President Trump has directed the entire federal government to take immediate action to protect the people, communities, and the natural resources our country depends on from wildfire risk. Now more than ever, [Interior] Secretary [Doug] Burgum and I are working in lockstep, alongside our federal partners, to effectively combat wildfires. At USDA we are ensuring the entire department is geared to respond to what is already an above normal summer fire season.”
And until somebody says otherwise, Rollins adds: “We are providing the resources needed to ensure the Forest Service has the strongest and most prepared wildland firefighting force in the world.”
John McCaslin is a longtime journalist and author who lives in Bigfork.