Sponsors (4)
The bill gives states more flexibility and incentive to use mitigation (like prescribed burns) and increases EPA transparency for wildfire pollution petitions, at the cost of possible weaker air-quality enforcement, legal uncertainty for compliance, and modest additional federal workload and expense.
State governments can have state-approved prescribed burns and other mitigation actions considered when excluding wildfire-related pollution from regulatory determinations, which can reduce penalties or nonattainment designations for affected areas.
State governments and rural communities may be more likely to carry out proactive wildfire risk reduction (e.g., prescribed burns, vegetation management) because the bill recognizes those mitigation actions as reducing wildfire magnitude/frequency.
State and local governments (and the public) get more data and transparency because EPA must perform regional modeling of multistate wildfire events and publish monthly petition status online within 12 months.
Urban and rural residents could face weaker air quality protections if treating mitigation actions as grounds for excluding wildfire-related pollution makes it easier to omit exceedances from regulatory counts, potentially delaying remedies for nonattainment areas.
State and local governments, industry, and communities may face legal uncertainty about which air quality exceedances will count toward violations and compliance planning.
Taxpayers could incur additional federal costs because EPA must perform expanded regional modeling and monthly public reporting, increasing agency workload and resource needs.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Allows some approved wildfire mitigation actions (e.g., prescribed burns) to be treated like exceptional events for excluding air monitoring data, adds regional analysis and public transparency requirements for EPA.
This bill revises the federal rule for excluding air quality monitoring data affected by "exceptional events" to explicitly include certain wildfire mitigation actions (like prescribed burns) as a parallel category. It requires the EPA to add regional modeling and analysis for multistate petitions, to publish and monthly update a public website tracking petition status within 12 months, and to tighten petition criteria by requiring clear causal links between exceedances and the exceptional event or mitigation action.
Official title: FIRE Act
Introduced December 3, 2025 by Gabe Evans · Last progress April 27, 2026