U.S. Senator Tim Sheehy is advancing a legislative strategy centered on controlled burning and federal reorganization to address what officials describe as a crisis of forest fuel accumulation and wildfire response fragmentation. The approach comes as 2026 ranks among the most severe fire seasons in recent memory, with blazes affecting communities across the West from Los Angeles to the Mountain West.

The Wildfire Landscape

Major fires have struck population centers nationwide, including the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles last year and recent blazes disrupting Lahaina, Denver, Spokane, and Reno. The cascading consequences—trillions in economic losses, thousands of disrupted lives, and thousands of premature deaths linked to smoke exposure—have sharpened focus on forest management policy. In Montana and across the region, homeowners in fire-prone areas face insurance costs that are becoming prohibitively expensive or, in many cases, unavailable altogether.

Root Cause: Fuel Buildup

Federal and state forestry officials have identified decades of fire suppression as a primary driver of the current crisis. Aggressive fire-exclusion policies, intended to protect timber and infrastructure, allowed dead wood and dense vegetation to accumulate across millions of acres. That fuel load now poses an acute risk, transforming what might have been manageable fires into catastrophic events.

Sheehy has framed controlled burning—what he calls “good fire”—as the antidote. “The best cure for bad fire is good fire,” the Montana senator said, encapsulating the philosophy that strategic, low-intensity burns reduce dangerous fuel before uncontrolled wildfires ignite.

Legislative Response

Sheehy cosponsored the Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA) in the Senate, legislation designed to accelerate forest management in high-risk zones. The bill would designate Fireshed Management Areas in regions facing the most acute wildfire danger and expand the tools available to land managers. Specifically, FOFA would broaden the use of categorical exclusions under the National Environmental Policy Act, allowing forest treatments to proceed with reduced environmental review timelines—a change intended to speed prescribed burns and mechanical thinning.

The legislation also addresses federal workforce challenges. Wildland firefighters across the country earn substantially less than comparable service workers; in Bozeman, they make less than fast-food employees. Sheehy has proposed establishing a unified U.S. Wildland Fire Service, operating in partnership with the U.S. Fire Administration, to standardize pay, training, and deployment across federal, state, and local response operations.

Coordination Problems

Currently, federal, state, local, military, and private entities converge on active fires with misaligned funding mechanisms, operational strategies, and policy frameworks. Sheehy argues that a single unified service would eliminate redundancy and confusion, streamline resource allocation, and improve interagency coordination during critical response windows.

“It is time to unify fire suppression under a single federal organization,” Sheehy told the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, signaling his legislative priority for the coming session.

Broader Context

The Montana senator’s dual focus—accelerating on-the-ground fuel reduction and restructuring the federal workforce—reflects a growing consensus among Western policymakers that the current system is administratively fragmented and operationally inadequate. Recent fires across the region, including two Beaverhead County blazes that burned more than 44,000 combined acres and the Nature Grove Fire near Hamilton that expanded to 900 acres, underscore the scale of the challenge Montana faces. Whether Congress will prioritize FOFA and the proposed Wildland Fire Service reorganization remains uncertain, but the 2026 fire season has intensified pressure on lawmakers to act.