Experts and Advocates Release Key Principles for Improving Wildfire Funding and Budgeting

The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Alliance for Wildfire Resilience, BuildStrong America, the Federation of American Scientists, Megafire Action, and Taxpayers for Common Sense have established a set of key principles to guide congressional action on wildfire funding transparency and accountability.

As wildfires become increasingly frequent and destructive, the costs associated with them are also rising—putting financial pressure on federal, state, local, and Tribal governments. Public investment has grown, in the form of historic federal funding for wildfire management, but it is difficult to gauge the impact of these funds because of insufficient tracking of spending, inconsistent budgeting practices across government agencies, and a lack of metrics to accurately measure success.

The organizations developed the following principles based on their research and outreach efforts, as detailed in “How Congress can Improve Wildfire Funding Accountability and Transparency”:

• “Wildfire spending should be more comprehensively tracked and reported and federal agency budgets for wildfire should be better coordinated.
• The federal government should continue to sustain and expand its investments in mitigation, like those made in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act, in order to reverse the trend of ballooning wildfire suppression costs.
• The federal government should find ways to help states and local governments better access federal resources and make their own investments to lessen the overall cost of wildfires.
• Federal agencies should use outcome-based performance metrics to evaluate the success of continued and expanded mitigation investment”.

In establishing these principles, Pew and the other organizations aim to describe key problems with current approaches and suggest high-level policy solutions to those challenges, as well as to outline the potential positive effects Congress could expect by taking action. The principles also reflect several recommendations to Congress from the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, a bipartisan federal commission made up of wildfire policy experts and practitioners.

As wildfires affect more and more communities, Congress can do more to help mitigate their destructive impact. With these principles as a guide, policymakers can ensure that approaches to funding are in line with the best information possible.

Andrea Snyder works on The Pew Charitable Trusts’ managing fiscal risks project.