Brian Fennessy grew up in the Los Angeles area, and got into wildland fire straight out of high school in the late 1970s. He mostly worked on, and eventually led, interagency hotshot crews – among the fittest and most respected firefighters in the country.
Even decades ago, he said there were questions about why federal wildfire response was split between multiple agencies.
“Throwing dirt is throwing dirt, right? And hiking jeep cans up the hills – doesn't matter what patch you're wearing, it's the same work,” he said. “And you know, why wouldn't there be one agency?”
Nearly five decades after he first dug fireline, Fennessy was hired as the U.S. Wildland Fire Service’s very first chief. The U.S. Wildland Fire Service (USWFS) was formed earlier this year by consolidating the fire programs of several Department of Interior agencies, including those of the Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service.
Thousands of firefighters were recently transferred to the new agency.
That came in the wake of a June 2025 Trump administration executive order that called for the Departments of Agriculture and Interior to consolidate their fire programs “to the maximum degree practicable.” Agriculture’s Forest Service has the country’s largest federal firefighting force, with well over 11,000 expected this season, according to the Mountain Journal.
In its Fiscal Year 2027 and FY 2026 budgets, the Department of the Interior requested funding for full consolidation, including the Forest Service’s fire program. Congress denied the FY26 request while also requesting a feasibility study of the proposal.
In announcing the new agency, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said it would be ”an efficient unified organization that will provide the highest level of management and support for the full spectrum of [Interior’s] wildland fire operations for the benefit of the American people, while also avoiding disruption to the wildland fire mission during the transition.”
“It's easy to be critical, and it's a whole other thing to be part of the solution,” Fennessy said of his decision to throw his hat in the ring for the USWFS chief position. “And I thought to myself ‘here's an opportunity.’ I believe in what they're talking about: Reduction of bureaucracy, alignment in mission, firefighters reporting to firefighters, the fire service having not only the authority, but being held accountable for making fire decisions.”
He said there would be additional advantages if the Forest Service’s fire program were to be absorbed by his new agency, but that decision will be Congress’ to make. And even if that doesn’t come, Fennessy said he and his Forest Service counterparts “will be working in lockstep with each other.”
‘Incredible’ fire behavior
In a recent video shared by Accuweather, torching timber in Montana’s East Side Fire sends billowing smoke into the air, a striking sight so far north so early in the year.
“That house is literally right there you guys,” a distressed bystander can be heard saying.
The Plains States have already seen fast-moving grassfires, including one in Nebraska that ran over 600,000 acres. Georgia has already lost more than 100 homes. “Incredible” is how Fennessy described these early season incidents.
“I'm seeing columns and plume-dominated fire behaviors,” he said. “Like what?!? That's the Southeast!”
But early signs of a potentially epic season isn’t the only worry in the air. Many experts are also anxious about what the new service means for this summer, and summers to come. Some see it as representing a severing of land and fire management.
Fire management is land management
“You can't manage and be a land steward without managing wildfire,” said Tracy Stone-Manning, president of the Wilderness Society and former BLM director under the Biden administration. “These lands are evolved with wildfire, everybody in the West lives in a fire landscape. So the idea of decoupling those two things is very dangerous.”
Previously, according to Fennessy, Interior fire officials were subordinate to land management officials. “The big change,” he explained, is that now “final say and authority” rests with the new fire service. But success still requires close collaboration.
“If we're not clearly coupled with our land managers, then I agree with [Stone-Manning and other critics],” Fennessy said.
“They’re exactly right, wildfire’s interwoven in all of it, and has to be,” he added. “We have to be standing side by side by our land managers and these land management agencies.”
To suppress, or not to suppress?
There’s also the age-old debate of when to suppress fires, and when to light them intentionally – or allow them to burn – for ecological benefits and community protection. Pointing to the Department of the Interior’s obligation to protect communities, Secretary Burgum recently wrote in a memo to Interior fire leadership that “we will enter this season with the presumption of a full suppression strategy applied to every wildfire under [Interior] management.”
While acknowledging the importance of prescribed fires, Burgum said they will be allowed only “WHEN CONDITIONS PERMIT.” And as the season gets busy, they will be heavily restricted.
The National Preparedness Level, or PL, system is a 1 to 5 scale that indicates how busy a season is. When determining the PL, officials consider fuel and weather conditions, current fire activity and the availability of resources throughout the country to respond. Once three is reached, according to the memo, “prescribed fire may not be used without express approval from the Geographic Area Fire Chief or their designee.”
Here’s how Burgum’s memo sounded to Dave Calkin, an influential fire scientist who previously worked more than two decades at the Forest Service.
“It is ‘make every fire go away as quickly and easily as possible,’” he said. “And that's what we've been trying for 100 years and have failed miserably at, which is why we're in a crisis. And so doubling down on what got you into a crisis seems like a pretty silly idea.”
Many researchers and officials say that there is an extraordinary deficit of low- and moderate-intensity fires on many Western landscapes, and the Forest Service itself has acknowledged the role suppression has played in what it calls a “full-blown wildfire and forest health crisis.”
“The more we suppress fire, the more fuels we get on the landscape,” Calkin said. “The more fuels we get on the landscape, when fires do occur, they're much harder to suppress and much more likely to be damaging.”
Chief Fennessy is an unapologetic defender of Burgum’s directive.
“What I like about the secretary's intent memo is that it's clear that this is what we're doing, it's not ambiguous,” he said. “We are suppressing, we're getting after fire.”
That’s based in part, he explains, on just how extreme the conditions already are this year. But he’s also frank about the long-term prospects of emerging from the wildland fire crisis without substantial increases in fuels reduction treatments like prescribed fire, which can counter the buildup of fuels.
“Suppression is important and it always will be,” Fennessy argued. “But you know as well as I do, if we don't really start having a bigger impact in treating the landscape, we're not going to get out of this. And I don't know that we ever completely get out of it. But man, we need to put a dent in this.”
“Suppression is always going to be there,” he added. “But we're not going to suppress our way out of this situation.”
He also argued that consolidation – especially if it ultimately includes the Forest Service’s fire program – could help provide capacity for more of that mitigation work.
‘Gutted’ agencies
There are also concerns about capacity for the already started fire season.
“I'm worried that the administration has gutted our land management agencies, that there are thousands and thousands of people who don't work there anymore who did last summer. And that we're not going to have enough people to do the job.Tracy Stone-Manning
In the wake of Trump administration cuts to the federal workforce, states across the West saw the number of public land agency employees fall by double-digit percentages – as high as 26% in Colorado, according to Politico.
“This is the most significant attack on the federal workforce ever,” Calkin said. “And you're going to ask more of them?”
Fennessy noted that fire personnel were exempted from the deferred resignation program and other efforts early in the Trump administration. But he also argued that some of those who chose to leave may have been planning on retiring, and that many of those who took deferred resignations may still be available during the fire season as as-needed workers.
Firefighter hiring for the season is going as planned, according to Fennessy, and he expects to have at least as many as last year – some 5,700 wildland fire personnel, along with 900 Tribal firefighters.
But Dave Calkin is also worried about what happens when the season really picks up, preparedness levels are at their highest, and the specialized teams that handle the most serious incidents start to stretch thin.
“What happens when we're in PL 5, when we have 25 available complex incident management teams and there's 80 fires – 80 large ripping fires?” he asked.
“Are we going to run out of them quickly should we get really busy? I think so,” Fennessy frankly acknowledged.
But he argued that other teams can help pull up some of the slack, and he’d like to do more to train up the next generation of incident management team members. There will be 38 complex teams available this year, according to Interior.
‘Take care of firefighters’
Even among critics, there’s respect for Fennessy’s experience, and hope that consolidation could bring positive changes. Timothy Ingalsbee, head of the wildfire advocacy group FUSEE, shares many of Stone-Manning and Calkin’s concerns, but called the new chief an “exceptional individual,” pointing to his significant leadership experience in both wildland and structure fire. Before taking the helm of the USWFS, Fennessy served as the chief of both San Diego and Orange County’s fire departments.
“He has a lot of trust amongst the crews,” Ingalsbee said. “The question is, ‘how much latitude does he have from the administration?’”
In Fennessy, many wildland folks see someone who has put in the same hard fireline hours that they have, and paid a high price for them. Fennessy shared with the Mountain West News Bureau that a few years ago he was diagnosed with and then successfully treated for prostate cancer, which he chalked up to his lengthy fire career. That cancer is on a growing list of those officially acknowledged as occupational risks for federal firefighters.
“I look at things like cancer awareness and prevention, that's got to be at the top, right next to, health and wellness,” he said. “Those two things are the very top of my priorities.”
“I think all of us that have experienced this, I think we have an obligation in many ways, especially those in leadership, to talk about it,” he added of the heavy physical and mental health toll that firefighting takes.
Asked what it means for someone with such perspectives to be at the head of the new service, Luke Mayfield, a former hotshot and co-founder of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, said “I don't know that I can adequately say how important it is and how happy I am to see someone of Chief Fennessy’s integrity and intelligence in the position.”
Mayfield is a strong supporter of consolidation, but he said the benefits will be hard fought.
“I don't think that there's ever going to be a good time to take these steps. What we've been doing has not been working: it hasn't been working from a suppression standpoint, it hasn't been working from a land management standpoint. And I think that this is an opportunity to do it, to learn from early mistakes, to continue to innovate, to continue to make forward progress.”Luke Mayfield
“It's not going to be clean,” Mayfield added. “This is going to be messy.”
And “even if it goes perfectly,” Annie Schmidt, managing director of partnerships for the nonprofit Alliance for Wildfire Resilience, said the new service is “not going to solve all of our nation's wildfire problems.”
That’s in part because the wildland fire crisis is everybody’s problem, meaning everybody has a role to play in solving it.
“There will still be action that needs to happen at the state level, at the local level, at the individual action level,” Schmidt said. “And it's not just about land management, it's about public health. We're all breathing smoke in the summers. It's about emergency management, how we're evacuating folks. It's a bigger problem than the unification of land management agencies represents.”
“I think people need to be patient, people need to be supportive,” Mayfield said. “And if they see gaps or holes in the system … then help build those bridges,” he said, adding: “let's build something that works, and use your voice and advocate for what right looks like.”
But “the first thing that we need to do,” he said, “is take care of firefighters.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Boise State Public Radio, Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio and KJZZ in Arizona as well as NPR, with support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
