It was a rare windless April day in southern Washington and Adam Lieberg was stuck in front of his computer. He was supposed to be burning acres of twigs and pine needles in the forests between the Columbia River and the Yakama Nation nearby — the sort of controlled burn of ground fuel that is one of the most effective ways to minimize future wildfires.
Lieberg, a land manager for the conservation nonprofit Columbia Land Trust, was desperate to do his job. The country was already setting records for high temperatures and widespread drought, which meant wildfire season could be unusually devastating. Lieberg was burning some land, but not as much as he would have liked. That's because he had a money problem.
Last August, the U.S. Forest Service promised the Columbia Land Trust a grant of more than $9 million to carry out that work over the next five years. Lieberg had intended to burn 500 acres this spring to protect the surrounding communities and keep the forest healthy.
But as of April, Lieberg hadn't received a cent from the federal grant, called the Community Wildfire Defense Grant Program. It is delayed because of a new federal policy requiring partners to adhere to a host of requirements that have little to do with wildfires, including restrictions related to immigration, diversity hiring and other "America First" initiatives of the Trump administration. Other federal policies announced in 2026 further limit burning on public lands.
Lieberg said without the funding, they're missing the small window they have to protect people by setting fires before it gets hotter.
"If we don't have both steady streams of state and federal funds for our forest health crisis, then the work doesn't get done," Lieberg said. "The fires continue to get larger and more catastrophic."
The Forest Service hasn't released close to $20 million to other Washington state groups for projects related to burning, confirmed George Geissler, the Washington Department of Natural Resources State Forester. And it's not just Washington. Twenty-two states and two Tribes were promised $200 million through the grant program. Groups in Hawaii and Wisconsin have also not yet received funding, state representatives confirmed to NPR.
"Almost every state is in this position," said Geissler, who helps distribute federal funds to local groups. "It does not matter if you're blue or red."
On the last day of the year in 2025, U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins signed a memo that changed the terms and conditions for partnerships with the agency, in order to "advance policies that put America First," the memo stated. "This means requiring all recipients and cooperators to adhere to standard practices consistent with sound stewardship of taxpayer dollars, transparency, accountability, and alignment with the national security interests of the United States."
The memo required partners to affirm that the awards would not "support climate change" and fund or support "DEI" initiatives, among other requirements.
Geissler said that because the new terms include conditions that violate or contradict Washington state laws, he can't legally accept them – and people like Lieberg can't receive the money to carry out burns.
"I have to sign that we're accepting the money so that it can go out, and we can't sign it," said Geissler.
NPR asked the Forest Service to confirm why funds had not been received by Washington and other states, but did not get an answer. On March 23, 20 states and the District of Columbia sued the USDA to block the new terms for receiving federal funding, which the states characterized as coercive.
Since the Community Wildfire Defense Grant program was launched in 2022, funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for five years and $1 billion, this is the first time that money has been stalled, Geissler said. During the Biden administration, Washington groups received more than $52 million from the Forest Service to help carry out burns on forested areas owned by the state and private and nonprofit groups, according to data provided by Washington to NPR.
Lieberg said the delay in funding was causing groups like his to miss out on some of the best time for burning land, and was preventing them from paying staff. Typically, the money would have been awarded by early 2026, in time for the spring, he said. That's when it can be easiest to conduct burns, since the snow has melted and mild temperatures allow firefighters to better control the fires they set.
"If we lose a season of burning because maybe they don't award the grant until the middle of the season or something, then we can't plan and prep and do all that stuff that we need to put safe, effective fire on the ground," Lieber said. "We have a position that is critically important to what we're doing. And we can't hire that position right now because of the uncertainty that's going on."
The Rollins memo wasn't the only policy change that restricted burning. In April, the heads of two other federal agencies announced changes that would further limit burning on public lands.
Until this year, as long as weather and firefighting conditions permitted, federal firefighters had been allowed to set prescribed fires and let wildfires burn throughout the year to consume fuel and keep forest ecosystems healthy. But on April 8, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum changed that directive. In a memo he said the agency would "enter this season with the presumption of a full suppression strategy applied to every wildfire" on federal land. And without explicit approval, prescribed fire could not be used after a certain point in the wildfire season, the memo outlined, and all prescribed fires underway by then would be extinguished.
Forest Service Chief Schulz echoed the call for "a full suppression strategy for every fire" at an April 16 budget hearing.
Last year, the Forest Service burned only about half of the acreage that it did in both 2024 and 2023, according to an NPR analysis published in May. The recent policy shifts indicate 2026 will also be lower under the Trump administration. Just over 1 million acres of the almost 200 million acres the Forest Service manages have been burned so far this year, according to an agency tracker.
Because approximately one third of Americans live in areas vulnerable to wildfires, according to Forest Service research, those changes could put people across the country at a greater risk of loss due to wildfires, according to more than a dozen current and former firefighters and forestry professionals interviewed by NPR.
The limitations for burning "put us in a worse position to deal with fires," said Bill Avey, a former firefighter and forester who served for 40 years with the Forest Service, leading national teams of firefighters and supervising management of the Lewis and Clark Forest in Montana. "By putting fires out and not letting them burn, you actually create more fuel for a worse situation down the road."
"Forced suppression is what has brought us to this fuel loading that leads to the catastrophic mega-fires," said Carson States, a former Forest Service firefighter who leads the Willamette Ignitions Network, a nonprofit that carries out prescribed burns. "The suppression only policies are very regressive."
Firefighters also said sending firefighters to quickly put out every fire – even ones in rural areas that don't pose a danger to the public – could exhaust already depleted firefighting crews.
Last year the Forest Service lost more than 5,000 staff through layoffs, resignations and early retirements. As many as 1,400 of those had training required to fight fires.
Liz Crandall was one of the workers let go last year. A former Field Ranger at the Deschutes National Forest in Oregon, she assisted in prescribed burns and said she put out more than 50 abandoned campfires while patrolling the forest. Crandall said the suppression only policy endangers the few firefighters left at the agency.
"You are putting your firefighters more at risk," said Crandall. "That's not okay."
The consequences of not setting prescribed fires build up over time. Last month, the federal government seemed to recognize the problem. On April 14, the federal government outlined plans to boost pay by 25% for government firefighters who work on prescribed burns.
After the agency fired her in February, the Forest Service offered Crandall the same job back a month later, but she declined. The new increase in pay is not enough to tempt her back to the agency, she said.
"A lot of people don't want to work for the federal government right now because it's unstable and unpredictable," said Crandall. "I don't blame them."
Firefighters also indicated that a full suppression strategy was not supported by science or indigenous knowledge of how to protect land. A 2025 study found that during the 2020 fire season in California, areas that had been burned before experienced wildfires that were about 16% less severe, on average.
"It's in defiance of all that we have learned, decades of fire ecology research, all that indigenous people have shared with us about how they stewarded the land with fire," said Dr. Timothy Ingalsbee, a wildland fire ecologist and former Forest Service firefighter. "And so it's just very alarming."
Back in the state of Washington, Lieberg closed his computer for the day and took a walk near the Columbia Land Trust's office in White Salmon, a town surrounded by trees. He pointed out the overgrown bushes and large Douglas firs, a kind of evergreen tree with branches that drape to the ground, near a large A-frame wooden house.
"If you think of a fire up the cliff and getting in here, however much these homes cost right now, there is no way that that home is surviving," Lieberg said.
Lieberg said if he receives the grant money soon, there might still be time to complete more burns before the hotter months, when it becomes difficult to carry out burns because of the wildfire risk. But the longer he has to wait, the riskier it becomes for the public, because the sticks and twigs that would fuel wildfires keep accumulating. Groups like his have to be allowed to set controlled fires to help reduce that overgrowth quickly, he said. Otherwise, a wildfire might get to the area first.
"If all of our stuff burns down before we could do our preventative beneficial fire, this is going to really take on a new level of frustration," Lieberg said. "Because that's why we're trying to do this."
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