Sponsors (10)
Creates paid R&R leave for federal wildland firefighters, allows a $5M transfer to continue a salary increase, and makes overtime-waiver language open-ended.
Official title: To amend title 5, United States Code, to provide rest and recuperation leave for employees engaged in wildland firefighting, and for other purposes.
Introduced June 24, 2026 by James Varni Panetta · Last progress June 24, 2026
The bill improves pay, mandated recovery time, and administrative flexibility for federal wildland firefighters and other covered employees—strengthening wildfire response and avoiding new appropriations—while increasing near-term federal payroll costs, potentially diverting IIJA funds, creating operational coverage needs, and raising budget-transparency and long-term cost-management concerns.
Wildland firefighters (Forest Service and DOI) get immediate paid rest-and-recovery (R&R) after long deployments, mandating recovery time, ensuring equitable compensation for intermittent/seasonal crews, and creating uniform deployment/leave rules across agencies.
Federal wildland firefighters receive continued base pay increases and related premium pay (funded up to $5 million from unobligated IIJA balances), boosting pay, morale, and retention which supports wildfire response capacity.
Federal employees in the covered offices retain overtime-waiver eligibility beyond 2024, avoiding immediate pay reductions for overtime-eligible work and giving agencies continued flexibility to manage staffing and overtime costs.
Taxpayers face higher federal payroll costs from paying R&R like annual leave for deployed firefighters and from continued overtime-waiver pay eligibility.
Up to $5 million shifted from unobligated IIJA balances to fund firefighter pay could delay or reduce other infrastructure projects funded under IIJA.
The temporary override of statutory spending restrictions to use IIJA balances reduces budgetary transparency and could set a precedent for bypassing established spending limits.
Based on analysis of 4 sections of legislative text.
Creates paid rest-and-recuperation (R&R) leave for federal wildland firefighters employed by the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior, including rules for when R&R must be taken and how it is paid. Allows a limited transfer of up to $5 million in unobligated IIJA balances to continue an existing federal wildland firefighter base salary increase and makes permanent, open-ended calendar-year language for a separate overtime-cap waiver provision so it can apply beyond 2024. The bill sets uniform R&R policies (deployment counting, required R&R days after multi-week deployments, pay treatment, and rules for intermittent employees), restricts use of transferred funds to continuation of the salary increase (no new program expansion), and implements minor technical edits to statutory text to keep overtime-waiver provisions operative in future years.