Wildfire suppression spending cannibalized 50%+ of Forest Service non-fire budget for decades

Wildfire suppression costs exceeded congressional appropriations almost every year from 1990 to 2018. When suppression funds ran out mid-fire-season, the Forest Service transferred money from other programs: trail maintenance, timber management, watershed restoration, and the very fuel reduction projects that would prevent future fires. This created a doom loop: borrowing from prevention to pay for suppression meant more fuel accumulated, which produced worse fires, which cost more to suppress, which required more borrowing from prevention. By the mid-2010s, fire spending consumed over 50% of the Forest Service's total budget, up from 16% in 1995. Congress passed a partial fix in 2018 creating a Wildfire Suppression Operations Reserve Fund, but the fund balance was only $670M as of FY2023, while individual fire seasons routinely exceed $3B. The structural cause is that Congress appropriates suppression budgets based on 10-year rolling averages, but climate change is making each decade worse than the last, so the average always underpredicts actual costs.