US Drought Tests Trump Strategy of Logging to Fight Wildfire (1)

Extreme drought and rising temperatures in the US are poised to overwhelm the Trump administration’s plans to control wildfire by logging federal forests, scientists say.

Industrial-scale logging and forest thinning can’t prevent or significantly reduce wildfire threats amid a drought that’s ravaging 58% of the US, many scientists say. The drought is expected to lead to catastrophic wildfires that stand to become the new normal amid climate change, the researchers say.

“The type of drought we’re seeing this year across the West is a glimpse into the future,” said Erica Fleishman, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University. “Thinning and logging forests—that’s not going to control wildfires.”

The US is on track in 2026 for more wildfires than 2025, a much wetter year. More than 5 million acres burned last year—more than double the land that burned in 2020, one of the worst wildfire years on record. As of April, 1.8 million acres had burned so far across the US—double the acres burned in the same period last year.

Trump administration officials say wildfire risk makes it imperative to log forests and help the timber industry. The administration is taking an aggressive approach to quickly suppress wildfires as it increases logging by 25% this year, US Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said May 4 at a House Natural Resources subcommittee hearing.

“When we think of threats to forests and forest landowners, the primary threat is not wildfire, it’s not disasters, it’s a lack of markets,” Schultz said, responding to a question about how to support sawmills.

But scientists are divided about how much aggressive fire suppression, logging, and treatment efforts like forest thinning in remote areas reduce the severity and spread of wildfires, especially in extreme drought. Many say treatments near communities are more effective at protecting homes and businesses than doing so deeper in forests.

The timber industry says national forests are now overgrown and infested with pests and disease, demanding widespread logging, thinning, and management.

“The public expects wildfires to be suppressed, and for important values like life, property, and natural resources to be protected,” said Nick Smith, spokesman for the American Forest Resources Council, a wood products trade group. “We hear the trope that ‘we can’t log our way’ out of the problem, but we can’t burn our way out of it, either.”

Smith cited a paper by three economists who found the Forest Service’s thinning efforts saved $2.8 billion in damages between 2017 and 2023.

Researchers Split

Forest Service research shows that forest treatments reduce wildfire severity by as much as 72% compared to untreated areas. The 2024 study was cited in a Congressional memo supporting Schultz’s hearing Thursday. The Forest Service said the study’s author, an agency research ecologist, was unavailable for comment.

Forest thinning can reduce wildfire intensity, severity, and spread even in extreme drought, but only if it’s done based on unique local conditions and is followed up with intentionally-set prescribed fire, said Tony Cheng, director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute at Colorado State University.

“Logging on its own, without prescribed fire, can intensify fires if a lot of logging debris is left on site,” he said. “The most effective land treatment to limit the unwanted impacts of wildfire is, ironically, fire – prescribed fire or managed wildland fire.”

Evidence shows thinning is most effective in low-elevation forests and closer to communities at high risk, said William Anderegg, a University of Utah climate scientist studying wildfire.

Those forest treatments have their limits when it’s so dry, he said.

“They’re helpful, but they can be overwhelmed by extreme fire weather and drought, which are in part driven by human-caused climate change,” Anderegg said.

Forest thinning is effective as a “precision instrument” targeting high-risk forests near where people live, but “there’s no way that we can harvest or thin our way out of the fire problem we’re facing,” said Matthew Hurteau, director of the Center for Fire Resilient Ecosystems and Society at the University of New Mexico.

After more than a century of fire suppression increasing forests’ fuel loads, reducing risk requires more fire in forests, not less, he said.

Research shows wildfire suppression makes future wildfires worse, and many wildfire ecologists and scientists say federal efforts to snuff out fires and thin or log woodlands far from the edges of cities will have little effect.

“Suppressing wildfire contributes to future conditions that may lead to more extensive and severe wildfires in many forest ecosystems as illustrated by the legacy of fire suppression,” said Rosemary Sherriff, a landscape ecology professor at California State Polytechnic University-Humboldt. “Severe fire is a natural and important component for many forests.”

Forests evolved with fire, Fleishman said. When some forest types are thinned, flammable grasses grow where trees once were, replacing one type of flammable vegetation with another, she said.

The West’s most destructive wildfires ignited amid extreme drought and winds in grasslands or scrubby woodlands, including Colorado’s wintertime 2021 Marshall Fire that scorched grasslands and more than 1,000 homes in Denver’s suburbs, the 2025 Los Angeles fires, and Hawaii’s 2023 Lahaina fire.

“Only thinking about wildfire in terms of trees is kind of ignoring that the greatest area burned in the West is not in areas with trees and is not thinking about the fact that a lot of the grasslands burning are non-native invasive grasses,” Fleishman said.

Little Control

Commercial logging won’t cut the risk of severe wildfires under hot and dry conditions expected this summer or in the future, said Tom Veblen, an emeritus geography professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder studying the effects of wildfire.

“As fire weather becomes more extreme—especially with high winds and severe drought—the effectiveness of fuel treatments declines sharply,” he said.

Humans have little control over wildfires, but they have far more control over how they protect their communities, said Chad Hanson, an ecologist for the John Muir Project, an environmental advocacy group.

“They are still pushing this logging agenda as if it’s going to somehow help forests or protect communities, or both,” Hanson said. “Forest ecosystems need fire.”

Weather and climate factors drive wildfire, not forest density, he said.

“If you have a drought year, and an ignition during hot, dry, windy conditions, you will get a significant fire that will spread until the weather changes,” Hanson said.