Sponsors (6)
Official title: Direct the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture to encourage and expand the use of prescribed fire on land managed by the Department of the Interior or the Forest Service, with an emphasis on units of the National Forest System in the western and southeastern United States, to acknowledge and support the long-standing use of cultural burning by Indian Tribes and Indigenous practitioners, and for other purposes.
Introduced June 10, 2025 by Ronald Lee Wyden · Last progress June 10, 2025
The bill substantially expands federal and partner capacity, authorities, and tools to scale prescribed fire and reduce wildfire risk — improving ecological and community protection — but raises trade-offs around increased smoke exposure, funding shifts, potential limits on local review, and operational and liability risks that could affect health, budgets, and some Tribal/local projects.
Communities near wildfire-prone areas and federal/non‑federal landowners get expanded funding, technical assistance, and training to increase prescribed-fire capacity and reduce hazardous fuels, lowering overall wildfire risk.
Properties and infrastructure near the wildland–urban interface receive prioritized projects and ecological restoration funds that reduce property loss risk and improve habitat and watershed function.
Federal agencies and partners can use landscape-scale NEPA decisions and up-to-10-year cooperative agreements to plan and implement cross-boundary prescribed-fire programs, reducing repetitive reviews and enabling coordinated large-scale treatments.
Nearby residents — rural and urban — will face increased smoke exposure and short-term health risks from expanded prescribed-burning activity.
Landscape-scale NEPA decisions and broader authorities could reduce opportunities for site-specific environmental review and local public input on particular burns.
Conditioning non‑Federal treatments on demonstrated Federal benefit may exclude some Tribal and community projects that primarily serve local resilience, limiting local control and funding access.
Based on analysis of 8 sections of legislative text.
Allows use of up to 15% of hazardous-fuels funds for prescribed fire, creates cooperative authorities and workforce incentives, and requires annual reporting tied to funding eligibility.
Authorizes and directs the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior to expand use of prescribed fire across Federal and, where beneficial, non-Federal lands by allowing limited flexible use of existing hazardous-fuels funds, creating prioritization criteria, setting multi-year targets, and funding training, outreach, and partnerships. The bill also creates cooperative authorities with States, Tribes, local governments, NGOs, and private entities, establishes workforce and hazard-pay measures to recruit and retain fuels personnel, and requires annual reporting of prescribed-fire activities with conditions on financial assistance tied to reporting compliance.