In the days that followed Donald Trump’s election win, flames roared through southern California neighborhoods. On the other side of the country, wildfire smoke clouded the skies in New York and New Jersey.
They were haunting reminders of a stark reality: while Trump prepares to take office for a second term, the complicated, and escalating, wildfire crisis will be waiting.
As the climate crisis unfolds, communities across the country are spending seasons under smoke-filled skies. Federal firefighters are overworked and underpaid, the cost of fire suppression has climbed, and millions of people are at risk of losing their insurance. Landscapes and homes alike have been reduced to ash as the world continues to warm.
The president-elect has offered few plans to address the emergency. Instead, he’s promised to deliver a wave of deregulation, cripple climate-supporting agencies, and clear departments of logistical experts relied upon during disasters.
His allies, including the authors of Project 2025, a conservative playbook for a second Trump administration, have recommended privatizing parts of the federal government that now serve the public good.
In the past week, Trump’s announcements for key cabinet nominations has already shown he’s begun to solidify an anti-science agenda.
“Whatever happens at a broad scale is going to affect our ability to manage risks, respond to emergencies, and plan for the future, “ said University of California climate scientist Daniel Swain. “I don’t see any way there won’t be huge effects.”
Here are the challenges ahead:
Setting the stakes
Looking back at his first term, Trump had a poor record managing large wildfire emergencies – and he had many opportunities. After presiding over the response to destructive blazes that left a devastating toll, including the Camp fire that claimed the lives of 85 people in and around the town of Paradise, in 2020 he told a crowd in Pennsylvania that high-risk fire states such as California, and their residents, were to blame.
“I said you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests – there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up,” he said. That year, a record 10.2m acres were charred across the US.
In a signal of how politicized disaster management in the Trump era became, he added: “Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us.”
Such comments raised fears among experts and officials working to protect these landscapes and the neighborhoods near them that Trump didn’t understand the magnitude of the risks US forests faced.
He’s been unwilling to embrace the strategies that the scientists and landscape managers recommend to help keep catastrophic fire in check, including a delicate and tailored approach to removing vegetation in overgrown forests, protecting old-growth stands, and following those treatments with prescribed burning.
The risks and challenges have only intensified since his first term.
Some in the wildfire response communities are hopeful that Trump will cut red tape that’s slowed progress on important forest treatments, but others have highlighted a blunt approach could do more harm than good.
Many have voiced concerns over ambitions set out in Project 2025 to curb prescribed burning in favor of increasing timber sales.
Meanwhile, federal firefighters are waiting to see whether Trump and a Republican-led Congress will secure long-overdue pay raises.
The US Forest Service (USFS), the largest employer of federal firefighters, has seen an exodus of emergency responders over abysmally low pay and gaps in support for the unsustainable and dangerous work they do.
Federal firefighters who spend weeks at a time on the fireline and rack up thousands of hours in overtime each summer, make far less than their state- and city-employed counterparts with paychecks that rival those of fast-food employees. That exodus has hampered its ability to keep pace with the year-round firefighting needs.
“Doing less with your resources makes a task like fire suppression and fuels management extremely more challenging,” said Jonathan Golden, legislative director of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters.
Joe Biden facilitated a temporary pay raise for federal wildland firefighters, but those expire at the end of the year. With Trump promising large cuts to federal budgets and the bureaucrats who operate them, many fear the Republican leadership in Congress won’t push the legislation needed to ensure these essential emergency responders keep their raise.
If the pay raises are allowed to expire, many more federal firefighters will walk out the door – right when they are needed most.
“The job isn’t going to get any easier,” Golden said. “My hope is that we continue to have a well-staffed and well-funded professional workforce that can answer the call year-round – because that’s what is required.”
Emergencies on the rise
Billion-dollar weather and climate disasters are on the rise. There was a historic number in the US in 2023 with a total of 28 – surpassing the previous record of 22 in 2022. With more than a month left, there have already been 24 this year.
Trump has a history of stalling in the aftermath of natural disasters, opting instead to put a political spin on who receives aid. For wildfires during his first term, that meant threatening California and other Democratic-majority states with delayed or withheld funding to punish them for their political leanings.
This time, some fear he may also reduce the amount of aid provided by Fema. Project 2025 has called for a shift in emergency spending, putting the “majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government” and either eliminating or armoring grants that fund preparedness to push Trump’s political agenda.
The framework advises the next president to remove all unions from the department and only give Fema grants to states, localities and private organizations who “can show that their mission and actions support the broader homeland security mission”, including the deportation of undocumented people.
These tactics could hamper both preparedness and recovery from wildfires and other disasters, especially in high-risk blue states such as California and others across the west.
The administration has also been advised by Project 2025 authors to dismantle or severely hamper the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose forecasting has been essential to warn when dangerous weather arises, and remove all mention of the climate crisis in federal rhetoric and research.
Trump’s picks of a former congressman Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum as the Department of Interior secretary – two agencies deeply connected to US climate policy – indicate his strong skepticism of the climate crisis. Zeldin and Burgum have clear directives to oversee rampant deregulation and expedite extraction on public lands.
“Folks at federal agencies are already being gently advised to think about the language they use to describe things,” Swain said. He thinks the effects will be far-reaching, especially when it comes to wildfire preparedness and response. Disabling science and weather-focused agencies could reduce important intel that responders rely on, reduce nimbleness and hamper efforts to plan into the future.
“A lot of people are thinking this is going to be the second coming of the first Trump administration and I don’t think it’s the right way to be thinking about it,” Swain said.
“This time, it’s highly plausible that the disruption and the harms will be a lot deeper and more lasting – it will be much harder to reverse.”
Big picture problems
Even before Trump retook the White House, the US was missing the mark on its ambitious climate goals. But scientists and experts have offered clear warnings about how Trump’s policies could accelerate dire outcomes.
“Climate change is a huge crisis and we don’t have time to spare,” said Julia Stein, deputy director of the Emmett Institute on climate change and the environment at the UCLA School of Law.
Stein pointed to the potential for many of these policies to be challenged in court, much like they were the first time around. States such as California, which is also home to one of the world’s largest economies to back it, are already preparing to challenge Trump’s policies. The directives of the first Trump administration were often legally vulnerable, Stein said, and she thinks they might be again this time around, especially if he attempts to rid the agencies of career bureaucrats and their deep knowledge of how things work.
In a state where wildfires are always a risk, California is also bolstering its own approach, doubling down on landscape treatments and investing in preparation, mitigation, and response according to Stein, who noted the $10bn climate bond just passed by voters there that will go toward wildfire prevention and mitigation.
Still, fires don’t recognize borders. The threats continue to push into areas that aren’t accustomed to them, and larger swaths of the country will be forced to grapple with smoke. Without partners in federal agencies that manage lands across the US, states will struggle to address the mounting challenges on their own.
“Continuing to enforce those laws in California will blunt some of the impact for Californians,” she said. “The unfortunate thing – especially when it comes to climate change – there are going to be national and global consequences for inaction at the federal level.”
