After an unseasonably, but not unprecedented, warm winter, the West is bone dry, water supplies are dangerously low, and wildfire risk is fearfully high. Parts of Colorado and Utah are infernos that, despite Herculean efforts and the deaths of three young firefighters, are not contained.
Thank God, these fires are not as bad as those Colorado suffered in 2020. But nonetheless, early drought conditions have folks spooked and surveying evacuation routes. Significantly, nearly 90% of wildfires are human-caused, even without lunatics like the New Mexican arrested for lighting a blaze along my town’s main thoroughfare.
Westerners need every firefighting hand on deck. Unfortunately, according to a Texas expert, we have been battling wildfires with one hand behind our backs. Concludes Derrick P. Holdstock of Western Fire Resources, LLC, “Current federal dispatch and policy practices undermine the availability, financial stability, and long‑term viability of the private wildland fire contracting industry — an industry that supplies more than half of all engines on large wildfires during [the highest two stages of wildland fire activity managed by the National Interagency Fire Center].”
Thus, Holdstock reveals, hidden behind the flames, smoke, and haze of annual, massive, heroic firefighting efforts in the West, a controversy largely unknown: the difference between cooperators and contractors. Cooperators are government entities created, maintained, and sustained by taxpayer dollars to fight blazes while conducting hazardous fuel reduction in their home jurisdictions. Contractors are privately owned enterprises that expend hundreds of thousands of dollars obtaining costly equipment and assembling seasonal crews in hopes of orders to fight wildfires alongside federal, state, and local agencies across the United States.
Despite the fact that private-sector contractors are “more cost effective, fully compliant, and often closer,” federal dispatch policies prioritize taxpayer-funded cooperators over them. In fact, in 2025, many federal engine resource requests were marked “Contractors Not Acceptable,” which violates U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ Memorandum 1078‑011 by not “eliminat[ing] all barriers and unnecessary procedures.” Not surprisingly, those orders often went “Unable to Fill,” notwithstanding available contractor engines, thereby endangering public safety and undermining resource protection.
Contractors have not just been denied jobs, but they have been restricted in what they may do on the job. For example, restrictive chainsaw-use language in 2025 barred routine tasks, such as cutting fire lines and mitigating hazardous fuels, which contractors have performed for decades.
When I worked on the railroad, we called these “union rules,” which made no sense then and make less sense today. They reduce operational effectiveness and prevent contractors from performing fuel mitigation work while staging for initial attack. That early work yields fire lines closer to the blaze, placing less acreage at risk by not ceding too much terrain to the oncoming wildfire early on.
In 2025, half the nation’s contractors urged that federal officials adopt these reforms: Restore practical chainsaw‑use authority consistent with training and qualifications; end “Contractors Not Acceptable” tags and prioritize them if they provide equal or better value; order contractor engines for 12‑hour shifts, 7‑day‑on/3‑day‑off schedules, from May 15 to October 15, to ensure 100 days of predictable work “to improve retention and create a ready surge force for initial and extended attack;” increase transparency in firefighting contracting by making all engine orders public; and “establish an annual Wildland Fire Contract Strategy Conference to address dispatch equity, qualifications, training pathways, and regulatory burdens.”
Those recommendations are fully consistent with and all but mandated by President Donald Trump’s Executive Orders 14308 (“Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response”) and 14239 (“Achieving Efficiency Through State and Local Preparedness”).
Thus far, most noteworthy, the U.S. Forest Service restored and strengthened contractors’ chainsaw use for 2026. Unfortunately, whether “Contractors Not Acceptable” tags have been removed is unknown — once public-facing websites are now locked behind government firewalls. Productive talks are underway on some issues. Regrettably, this year the Forest Service introduced yet another barrier by becoming “target-fixated” on troubleshooting a new but failed software system rather than using its still-functional legacy program to make new equipment available to wildfires.
Meanwhile, constitutional, statutory, and regulatory reform of the National Environmental Policy Act by all three branches will decrease delays in getting firefighting boots on the ground and increase the number of boot-clad firefighters we can put in the field, mitigating fire danger, reducing hazardous fuels, and fighting inevitable fires. For that, we will need both cooperators and contractors on the fire lines.
ONE OF SPAIN’S DEADLIEST WILDFIRES HAS KILLED AT LEAST 12 PEOPLE, WITH 23 OTHERS MISSING
As a matter of public policy, cooperators cannot “play a more active and significant role in national resilience and preparedness,” to quote from Trump’s Executive Order 14239, if they are shirking their duties at home by running taxpayer-funded for-profit businesses hundreds of miles away from their jurisdiction when private contractors can easily fulfill that role.
As a matter of personal interest, westerners today want their taxpayer-funded, neighbor-run, and community-aware firefighters nearby when a wildfire hits next door.
William Perry Pendley, a Marine, Wyoming attorney, and Colorado-based public-interest lawyer for three decades with victories at the Supreme Court of the United States, served in the Reagan administration, and led the Bureau of Land Management for President Donald Trump.