In late May, new Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz published a letter on the 2025 fire season that, among many other things, called for wildfires to be extinguished “as swiftly as possible.”
That may sound prudent to many, but it raised eyebrows among some who study fire policy. They worried that it may signal a return to aggressive suppression that has been linked to growing wildfire severity. Others read more flexibility and room for discretion when fighting wildfires in the document.
But to understand the context of Schultz’s letter, we need to go back nearly 100 years – to another letter whose impacts are still being felt.
"The approved protection policy on the National Forests calls for fast, energetic and thorough suppression of all fires in all locations, during possibly dangerous fire weather,” U.S. Forest Service Chief Ferdinand Silcox wrote in May 1935.
This was the start of what would become known as the 10 a.m. policy. Controlling new fires within the “first work period” was to be the goal. Failing at that, “each succeeding day will be planned and executed with the aim, without reservation, of obtaining control before ten o'clock of the next morning,” the letter continued. These uncompromising marching orders would guide wildfire response for years to come.
The suppression bias
“We know that decades of fire suppression and not allowing fire to have much of a role on the landscape has led to greatly increased fuel loads, especially in types of forests that historically had fire pretty routinely, both from human ignitions as well as natural ignitions,” said Mark Kreider, who spoke with the Mountain West News Bureau in late May.
The Forest Service itself has acknowledged that “rigorous fire suppression” has contributed to what it calls a “full-blown wildfire and forest health crisis.”
Kreider was the lead author of a paper last year that identified another way that aggressive fire exclusion has exacerbated wildfire intensity: the suppression bias. The paper argues that low- and moderate-intensity fires are easier to extinguish, resulting in a bias toward “higher-intensity burning occurring under extreme weather.”
“Thus, the fires which ecosystems, species, and people experience are skewed towards the most severe and destructive,” it continued.
“Through this suppression bias, we're taking those inherent increases from climate change and fuel accumulation, and we're sort of tacking on an extra bump up in severity,” Kreider told the Mountain West News Bureau shortly after the paper’s publication.
That’s why he read sections of Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz’s recent letter of intent with concern.
“We will make appropriate risk informed efforts to fully suppress small fires before they become large, complex incidents to ensure we can protect lives, property, valuable timber and natural resources,” it reads. “It is critical that we suppress fires as swiftly as possible.”
To Kreider, that last line is reminiscent of the 10 a.m. policy, which was formally abandoned in the 1970s in favor of an approach that recognized fire’s ecological role. Kreider agrees with Schultz that suppression has a role to play in protecting homes, but worries about the implications of trying to quickly extinguish all blazes.
“I think it will increase risk in the future,” he said. “I think this is a case of addressing short-term risk without adequate consideration given to the long-term risk.”
Fire experts aired similar concerns when drafts of a Trump Administration executive order that called for the immediate suppression of wildfires were published in April.
“They’re proposing we’re going to go toe-to-toe with these fires,” Jerry Williams, a retired national fire and aviation director with the Forest Service, told the Mountain Journal. “So instead of more thinning and prescribed burning, we’re going to try to be suppression-centric. That’s going to go back to the 1930s ‘10 a.m. policy.’”
But the administration’s final order, released last month, did not contain that language.
In response to a request for comment, a Forest Service spokesperson told the Mountain West News Bureau that Americans expect the agency to “always prioritize saving lives and property.”
“Firefighters must be fully focused on wildfire suppression during the busy part of wildfire season,” the emailed statement continued. “Prescribed fire and managing naturally ignited fire are critical to reducing wildfire risk and remains our focus outside of peak wildfire season.”
Schultz’s letter itself discusses the importance of lowering wildfire risk, and fuels reduction work, as well as so-called “potential operational delineations (PODs),” which Kreider calls great, science-based tools. PODs are landscape containers for fires, whose boundaries are formed by roads, ridges and other features that can be used to control blazes. Fires that start within them can be allowed to burn safely, accomplishing much of the same goals as a prescribed fire.
Escape clauses
“When I first heard about [the letter] indirectly, hearsay, I said, ‘oh my gosh, it's the 10 a.m. policy coming back,’” prominent wildfire historian Stephen Pyne told the bureau. “It is not.”
Where others saw a jump back in time to 1935, Pyne said the letter leaves room for flexibility and discretion that the 10 a.m. policy did not. He noted that it opens with a strong emphasis on firefighter safety, and later says that direct attack on fires will be done only when it’s safe and “feasible.” He called those “escape clauses” from the seemingly hard-nosed focus on suppression.
“Well, what does feasible mean?” Pyne asked. “The 10 a.m. policy had no tolerance for anything else. And that was its glory and its ultimate failure.”
“It allows other kinds of options, even under a suppression policy,” he added. “We've got all this ambiguity, which is actually very helpful. It's what we need.”
No going back
“It would be probably about the dumbest thing we could do from a fire management perspective to go back to the 10 a.m. policy,” said Matthew Hurteau, director of the Center for Fire Resilient Ecosystems and Society at the University of New Mexico. “It's the precise reason we're in the position we're in.”
A 2021 academic article that evaluated “more than a century of research” on the effects of aggressive suppression across ecosystems found “persistent and substantial fire deficit and widespread alterations to ecological structures and functions.”
“As a result, current conditions are more vulnerable to the direct and indirect effects of seasonal and episodic increases in drought and fire, especially under a rapidly warming climate,” it continued.
“The systems that we started excluding fire from 100, 150 years ago, they don't exist anymore,” Hurteau said. “We've got fragmented landscapes with houses and communities...sprinkled in there. The chief's letter acknowledged the fact that we've got to do suppression in some of those areas because we've got the fuel buildup and the like.”
But it also acknowledged, he argues, that there are places where we need to allow fire to burn.
Asked what he would tell Chief Schultz, Hurteau said he and many wildfire researchers would say “we need to make investment in preparing these landscapes to receive fire.”
“Ideally what we see is a fire management budget that's equivalent to the suppression budget,” he continued. “So we have fire crews that put fire on the ground, fire crews that manage natural ignitions for ecological outcomes.”
With sufficient, sustained investment in restoring fire to the landscape, he says the need for suppression would eventually diminish – though never go away completely. But suppression efforts are also going to keep contending with the rising temperatures and drought that climate change brings, according to Hurteau.
“If we invest whole hog in [suppression] right now, maybe we increase the effectiveness a hair,” he said. “But we're going to start truly losing that battle.”
As intense as this fire season is likely to be, he added, “the chance that next year is worse is pretty decent.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
