On November 15, 2021, President Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) into law. The IIJA allocates funds to address several issues, including rebuilding roads, bridges, airports, upgrading public transit, cleaning up pollution, providing affordable access to the internet, and creating resiliency against extreme weather events, including wildfires. As part of the IIJA, Congress allocated approximately $3 billion to restore ecosystems and reduce wildfire risk for fiscal years 2022–2026.
On January 18, 2022, the Forest Service announced the Wildfire Crisis Strategy (Strategy), a 10-year plan to treat up to 50 million acres of high-risk firesheds and develop a long-term maintenance plan beyond the 10 years. Of these 50 million acres, 20 million will be on national forestlands. The Strategy calls for a paradigm shift in confronting the wildfire crisis by strategically focusing on fuel and forest health treatments using the best available science as a guide. As part of the Strategy, the Forest Service will utilize increased forest management activities, including forest thinning and prescribed fire. The IIJA funding acts as a down payment for this 10-year plan. Thus, the Forest Service must comply with the IIJA when allocating funds.
A key provision of the IIJA is section 40803(g) (codified at 16 U.S.C. 6592) that provides the factors the Forest Service must consider in determining what projects to prioritize. The first two factors listed are projects that have completed the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 “NEPA) process and projects that reduce the likelihood of experiencing uncharacteristically severe effects from a potential wildfire.
In January 2022, the Forest Service announced its Implementation Plan (Plan) for the Wildlife Crisis Strategy. In the Plan, the Forest Service outlines how it will prioritize landscapes. Essentially, initial investments are aimed toward high-risk firesheds where projects are ready to begin or expand but lack funding: projects should have already gone through public comment and required environmental analysis, especially for the projects to begin in the Plan’s first two years. The Plan thus seems to comply with the first factor, a completed NEPA process, listed in section 40803(g). The Plan also notes that the projects will be prioritized by those that are outcome driven and are at scale or can be built to scale, meaning that the projects are large enough to solve the problem, which aligns with the second factor, wildfire risk reduction, listed in section 40803(g). Importantly, developing needed workforce capacity is emphasized as a condition for success.
Section 40803(j) requires the secretary of agriculture and the secretary of the interior to establish a five-year monitoring, maintenance, and treatment plan within 120 days of the Act. The plan must include the activities, listed in section 40803(c), that the secretary of agriculture and secretary of interior will take to reduce the risk of wildfire. The secretaries must do this by conducting restoration treatments and improving the Fire Regime Condition Class of 10 million acres of high-risk land, not including scheduled annual treatments. The activities listed in section 40803(c) include monitoring the effects of treatments on wildfire outcomes and ecosystem restoration services and publishing a report every five years showing the extent that treatments and previous wildfires affect the boundaries of wildfires. The plan must also establish a process for prioritizing treatments in areas and communities at the highest risk of catastrophic wildfires.
While the Forest Service’s Implementation Plan establishes a process for prioritizing treatments, the Plan only vaguely addresses monitoring and maintenance by stating that the agency requires the capacity to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of treatments. The Plan states the Forest Service will monitor changing conditions, including fire behavior and fire activity that may occur. Developing multiparty monitoring strategies and reporting is listed as a next step, but the Plan fails to specify exactly how the Forest Service will monitor the effects of treatments on wildfire outcomes and ecosystem restoration services as required by the IIJA. It remains unclear whether the Forest Service plans to monitor using any particular benchmarks or what metrics it will use.
Four months after the Implementation Plan was released, the Department of Interior (DOI) published the Wildfire Five-Year Monitoring, Maintenance, and Treatment Plan (Five-Year Plan) in partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as required by the IIJA. This Five-Year Plan provides more insight into how the DOI and Forest Service will work together to achieve long-term success. It details how the DOI will reduce wildfire risk via fuel treatments, partnerships, strategic coordination, and implementing projects that have completed NEPA requirements. The DOI emphasizes the importance of aligning their plan with the Forest Service’s 10-year Strategy to effectively reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. The DOI details how it will leverage science and research supported by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to prioritize and inform shovel-ready projects as part of the DOI’s short-term monitoring plan. In the long term, DOI will leverage the USGS and Bureau of Land Management monitoring assessments to evaluate fire behavior and treatment effectiveness, longevity, and impacts of future wildfire behavior. The Five-Year Plan also discusses how the DOI will continue to invest in fuel management treatments in areas where wildfire risk has been successfully reduced in an effort to maintain wildfire risk reduction. The DOI will do this by working with USGS to produce an analytical tool to assess maintenance requirements.
After publishing the Implementation Plan, the Forest Service announced the Wildfire Crisis Landscape Investments in April 2022. This announcement contained the initial 10 high-risk landscapes to be addressed via the Wildfire Crisis Strategy using $131 million in IIJA funding. These landscapes included firesheds in Oregon, Washington, California, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona totaling 208,000 acres of treatment in the fiscal year 2022. Again, the Forest Service lists an adequate workforce as a condition for success.
After work began in these 10 firesheds, the Forest Service released the Wildfire Crisis Update (Update) in November 2022. The Update notes that the criteria for selecting the initial landscapes were based on partnerships, alignment with high-risk firesheds, meeting the intent of the IIJA, completed analysis under NEPA, agency and partnership capacity, and projects that are at scale or can be built to scale to initiate work in the fiscal year 2022. This again highlights the Forest Service’s goal to act quickly in solving the crisis. The Update addressed the Forest Services’ struggles with the NEPA process, but did not address that the landscapes chosen should have already finished the NEPA process to avoid this issue, as required by the IIJA and as planned in their Implementation Plan. One of the biggest challenges the Forest Service reports it faced is labor shortages due to the federal hiring process, general labor shortages, increased housing costs, and lack of housing available in rural areas where much of the restoration work needs to occur. Lastly, the Forest Service reported that despite the funding from the IIJA, there will still be insufficient funding to complete the Wildfire Crisis Strategy.
Despite addressing these problems with the initial landscapes, on January 19, 2023, the Forest Service announced 11 additional landscapes to begin wildfire prevention across Oregon, Washington, California, Idaho, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. These additional landscapes received funding from the IIJA and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA provided an additional $5 billion in funding for the Forest Service over 10 years, including $1.8 billion for fuels and vegetation treatment. The Forest Service specified completed NEPA decisions it plans to utilize when working on these additional landscapes––a promising factor for a speedier outcome. In this announcement, the Forest Service again addressed labor shortages as a barrier to completing the planned fire risk reduction work.
There are now 21 firesheds that the Forest Service aims to address immediately. Despite the substantial funding from the IIJA and the IRA and repeated plans to increase their workforce, the Forest Service must overcome significant barriers to completing the Wildfire Crisis Strategy goals within the 10-year time frame. While choosing NEPA-ready projects for the next landscapes will be helpful, the ongoing labor shortages, lack of funding, and failure to choose NEPA-ready projects on the initial landscapes may stall the Strategy’s time line and ability to produce the promised outcomes.
