Firefighting plan that tripped up spending package back on track

Source: Roll Call

Posted December 5, 2025 at 5:49am


A dispute over a Trump administration plan to consolidate federal firefighting operations may be close to resolution, in a sign of modest progress toward Senate passage of a major fiscal 2026 spending package. Sen. Tim Sheehy, R-Mont., said Thursday he was prepared to release his hold on the Interior-Environment bill, a prime candidate for the “minibus” spending package, after cutting a deal to remove language that threatened to delay, if not derail, the firefighting reorganization.

Sheehy, a former firefighting pilot and founder of an aerial firefighting and aerospace services company, is a key backer of the plan and rejected any effort to delay it. “But we’ve cleared that language, so we should be good now,” he said. The dispute was just one of several obstacles blocking Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s effort to win unanimous consent for combining as many as five annual spending bills into a package that he had hoped to bring to the floor this week.

While Sheehy’s hold may now be resolved, it also serves as a case study in how the most arcane policy dispute can tie up work on long-delayed appropriations for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. The administration announced plans in September to create a U.S. Wildland Fire Service, consolidating operations currently split between the Interior and Agriculture departments, following up on an executive order President Donald Trump issued in June.

The plan was designed “to modernize wildfire response systems, streamline federal wildfire capabilities, and strengthen their effectiveness,” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement at the time. The eventual Interior-USDA plan released in September stopped short, for now, of consolidating wildland firefighting operations in one new agency housed within Interior, as Trump’s executive order called for.

Read more: https://rollcall.com/2025/12/05/firefighting-plan-that-tripped-up-spending-package-back-on-track/