Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Wildfire season is here, and it’s already ugly. More than 2.5 million acres have burned nationwide this year — nearly double the 10-year average for this point in the calendar — with the most dangerous months still ahead. Much of the western United States just experienced one of the region’s driest winters, leaving forests and other vegetation unusually parched as summer begins. In Wyoming, lightning ignited the largest May wildfire ever recorded in Bridger-Teton National Forest. In California, an 18,000-acre wildfire burned one-third of Santa Rosa Island and threatened the extinction of six plants only found there.
But weather is only part of the story. Across much of the West, decades of fire suppression and insufficient management have left many forests unnaturally dense and overloaded with fuels, creating conditions that allow fires to burn larger, hotter and more destructively.
Fixing that problem requires trimming a different kind of overgrowth: federal red tape. Congress has spent years debating permitting reform for energy projects, transmission lines and other infrastructure. But one of the strongest cases for reform is found outside pipeline corridors and construction sites. It’s in America’s forests.
There is growing scientific evidence and bipartisan recognition that active forest management reduces wildfire risks and improves resilience. The Biden administration’s strategy called for dramatically expanding efforts to remove fuels — dense brush, small trees and other overgrown vegetation — and restore healthy forest conditions across federal lands. The second Trump administration has embraced similar goals. But the projects designed to achieve these aims must navigate the same federal permitting system that delays energy projects and highway construction. Cutting through this byzantine warren of regulations is essential to scaling up the work that can make forests, and the communities that surround them, less vulnerable to catastrophic fire.
Consider environmental review. The most extensive form — an environmental-impact statement — can take years to complete and creates opportunities for litigation. Americans typically associate such reviews with pipelines or industrial projects. Yet the federal agency that prepares the most environmental-impact statements is the U.S. Forest Service. And the review process is often just the beginning. Forest management has become the most litigated category of federal action, driven by a small number of environmental groups that specialize in procedural challenges. As a result, vital fuels-reduction efforts can spend years under review or tied up in court before a single acre is restored.
The delays can stretch a decade or longer. Near my hometown of Bozeman, Montana, the Forest Service partnered with the city on a project to reduce wildfire risks in the watershed that supplies drinking water to one of the fastest-growing communities in the West. The proposal became entangled in administrative appeals, environmental review and litigation, delaying on-the-ground work for more than 15 years.
Similar battles continue across the region. In the Custer Gallatin National Forest outside Yellowstone National Park, environmentalists have sued the Forest Service over multiple forest health projects approved by the Biden administration and authorized using a Biden-era expedited review process. The projects were designed to thin overstocked forests and reduce hazardous fuels — work the expedited process was meant to accelerate — but still face protracted legal challenges.
The costs of delay can be substantial. Every year a restoration project is delayed, forests become more overgrown and wildfire risks increase. In some cases, the very landscapes slated for restoration have burned before planned treatments could be implemented. In Montana, a lawsuit delayed a fuels-reduction and forest-health project near Helena. Then, in 2024, a wildfire burned through much of the proposed treatment area, destroying habitat the project had aimed to protect.
Congress has the tools to address this problem, but the Senate is dragging its feet. Bipartisan legislation that would streamline environmental reviews for fuel treatment projects and reduce frivolous litigation passed the House of Representatives last year. The House also passed the Fire Act in April, which would fix perverse federal regulations that essentially treat smoke from beneficial prescribed burns the same as emissions from industrial sources. Both bills are now idling in the Senate.
These reforms would not eliminate environmental and legal review, but they would better align federal policy with the broad consensus that forest restoration is urgently needed. Too often, environmental reviews function more as litigation defense than as a genuine tool for understanding a project’s impacts. The legislation under the Senate’s consideration would spare future projects from the sort of delays that have paralyzed Montana’s critical watershed restoration project.
Forest restoration works. Delaying these projects does not protect the environment — it preserves the very conditions that make forests less resilient and more dangerous.
Congress has options. The bills are bipartisan, broadly supported and awaiting Senate action. There is no reason to wait for another summer of destroyed communities, scorched habitat and smoke-filled skies to finally adopt commonsense policies that could reduce this perennial danger.
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