Wildfire has always been part of the American West, but fires are now larger, more frequent, and far more likely to reach places where people live. Smoke from a single season can blanket cities hundreds of miles away, and a fire that crosses into a subdivision can destroy thousands of homes in hours. Who is responsible for preventing and fighting these fires, who pays, and how should the law allocate a risk that keeps growing?
In this TalksOnLaw interview, Joel Cohen sits down with Professor Stephen R. Miller, a land use and real estate scholar who studies planning for wildfire in the wildland-urban interface, then at the University of Idaho College of Law in Boise and now Associate Dean and Professor of Law at Northern Illinois University College of Law, to walk through the federal, state, and local laws that govern wildfire management.
A Growing Threat
Miller describes fire seasons that have grown dramatically worse. Studies show several times more fire activity in the West than in the 1970s and 1980s, and most of California's largest and most destructive fires have come in the last decade. Smoke is a public health problem well beyond the fire lines. Fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, had been declining nationally because of regulation, but wildfire smoke has driven sharp increases in cities such as Boise and Denver, with estimated excess deaths among elderly and vulnerable residents. Miller identifies three causes: a hotter, drier climate, a century of federal land management that let fuels build up, and rapid population growth into areas that have always burned. Idaho's 2016 Pioneer Fire was among the largest fires in the country, he notes, but it drew little attention because it burned far from people. What has changed is how many people now live next to fire-prone land.
Who Fights Wildfire, and Who Pays
Five federal agencies manage most of the West's public land: the Forest Service and four agencies within the Department of the Interior. Whatever agency owns the land, the federal government, and ultimately the taxpayer, bears most of the cost of suppression. That model dates to the "Big Burn" of 1910, which scorched millions of acres in Idaho and Montana and shocked the nation. The Weeks Act of 1911 expanded federal support for fire protection, and by the 1930s the Forest Service had adopted the "10 a.m. policy," aiming to control every fire by 10 a.m. the day after it was spotted. The result, Miller explains, was a budget increasingly consumed by firefighting. Suppression took roughly 15 percent of the Forest Service budget in the 1990s, but it came to take more than half, leaving less for work that reduces risk.
Reducing the Fuel
Agencies reduce fire risk through mechanical thinning, prescribed burning, and herbicides. A federal audit found tens of millions of acres in need of treatment, but the agencies had funding to treat only one to two million acres a year. Treatment is also contested. Since the 1970s, environmental groups have worried that thinning projects become cover for commercial logging, while the timber industry sees litigation as the obstacle, and the agencies are caught between two sides that do not trust each other.
HFRA, the FLAME Act, and the Cohesive Strategy
Miller highlights two modern federal statutes. The Healthy Forests Restoration Act of 2003 created Community Wildfire Protection Plans, a flexible tool that lets a "community," from a homeowners' association to a county, convene local, state, and federal partners to plan for fire. The Federal Land Assistance, Management, and Enhancement Act of 2009, known as the FLAME Act, required federal agencies to work with states and localities on a national strategy, which in 2014 became the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Management Strategy. The Cohesive Strategy has three goals. The first is restoring and maintaining resilient landscapes. Many western hillsides that were once mostly grassland with scattered trees are now densely forested because fire was suppressed, and fire-adapted species such as lodgepole pine depend on burning to reproduce. The second is fire-adapted communities, built from the start to withstand fire and maintained over time by residents who understand the risk. The third is safe and effective response, coordinated among federal, state, and local firefighters. Miller notes that the strategy remains a loose framework, and many communities still use Community Wildfire Protection Plans as the practical way to bring those players together.
Fighting Fire at the Urban Edge
Federal firefighting resources are coordinated through the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, where agency representatives meet daily during fire season to allocate aircraft, crews, and equipment among regions. Elite wildland crews, which once worked mainly to catch remote fires before they grew, are now often deployed to protect homes on the edge of development, where fires are more dangerous and public expectations are higher. Firefighters generally prioritize life, then property, then natural resources, but those judgments are wrenching in real time. Miller cites a study estimating more than $200,000 in suppression costs to protect a single rural home, and a Boise fire official who tells residents that with 16 trucks he can save 16 homes, and asks which 16 they should be. Because fire can destroy one house and spare the next, predicting where to put resources is especially hard.
Recovery and the Allocation of Risk
After a disaster, federal recovery money flows mainly through FEMA, following a state disaster declaration and a discretionary federal one. Jurisdictions must have hazard mitigation plans, often prepared at the county level, that guide how recovery and mitigation funds are used. Miller closes by framing wildfire law as a question of risk allocation. Should the cost fall on federal taxpayers through suppression spending, on local governments that approve development in fire-prone areas, or on homeowners who choose to live there and must maintain their property? There is no silver bullet, he says, and society will have to decide.
What to Know Now
The trends Miller described have intensified. The 2023 Lahaina fire on Maui killed 102 people, and the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles killed about 30 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures, becoming the costliest wildfire disaster on record. Utility equipment has been blamed for several major fires, including the Eaton Fire, and utility liability has driven major settlements, including a $4 billion global settlement of the Maui claims, and new state backstops such as California's expansion of its utility wildfire fund in 2025. Homeowners insurance in high-risk areas has become harder to obtain, pushing many owners into state insurers of last resort and prompting regulatory reforms. States and localities continue to strengthen wildland-urban interface building codes and defensible-space rules.
Federal policy has also shifted. A 2018 budget reform created a separate wildfire suppression reserve so that agencies no longer have to raid prevention budgets in bad years. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act funded fuels reduction and created a Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, whose 2023 report made nearly 150 recommendations, and federal wildland firefighters received a permanent pay raise in 2025. The Forest Service adopted a 10-year strategy to treat tens of millions of acres. In January 2026, the Interior Department launched a consolidated U.S. Wildland Fire Service, though Congress has not endorsed or separately funded it, and the Forest Service remains separate. The Fix Our Forests Act, which would speed environmental review of forest-thinning projects and limit litigation, passed the House in 2025; a Senate committee approved its own version later that year, and the White House endorsed the bill in 2026, though it has not yet become law. Supporters argue that faster, larger-scale treatment is essential. Critics warn that curbing environmental review and lawsuits could open forests to logging without reducing risk to communities. Disaster aid is also in flux: in 2026 a presidential FEMA Review Council recommended raising the damage thresholds for federal disaster declarations and shifting more responsibility to the states, some of which would require changes to the Stafford Act. Miller's central question, who should bear the growing risk of living with fire, remains unresolved.
