Sen. Tammy Baldwin: Wisconsin Forests Deserve Better

Devastating wildfires are raging in Washington and Oregon. And many other states have felt the heartbreaking impacts of their destruction.

That's why I'm pleased the emergency supplemental appropriations bill includes $615 million for wildfire suppression, to provide much-needed support to these suffering communities.

But it's not just western states that feel the impacts of wildfires. In fact, wildfires hurt Wisconsin, too. That's because there's a broken budget process called "fire borrowing," which forces the U.S. Forest Service to take funding intended to manage our national forests and instead uses it to fight wildfires in other states. This cripples the Forest Service and diverts critical funding from our state.

In Wisconsin, more than 50,000 people are employed in the forest products industry from jobs in forestry and logging to paper makers in the state's many mills. The industry pays over $3 billion in wages into the state's economy and ships products worth over $17 billion each year. Unfortunately, fire borrowing has led to long project delays that are affecting this vital industry and jeopardizing the jobs it supports.

The practice of fire borrowing has increased in recent years, triggered when we have a bad fire season and the Forest Service runs out of funds available for firefighting. When fire funding is gone, the agency transfers funds from other parts of its budget and "borrows" them to pay for the fire suppression. When these funds are diverted, agency work is put on hold.

No business owner would select a supplier who couldn't provide a clear delivery schedule or who would routinely delay delivery of products for undetermined amounts of time. Loggers and other local businesses that partner with the Forest Service have to deal with such uncertainty because of fire borrowing. Government can work better than this.

Fortunately, Congress has the chance to solve this problem. The Senate emergency supplemental appropriations bill would solve this broken process by treating the largest fires like other natural disasters, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, and it would stabilize the rest of the Forest Service budget so other essential work — ranging from timber sales to the management of forest health — can be completed on schedule. Furthermore, the proposal is fiscally responsible because it would help reduce long-term costs by allowing for increased fire prevention activities and because it wouldn't increase the amount that Congress can spend on natural disasters.

Ending fire borrowing has strong bipartisan support. In fact, more than 120 members of the House or Representatives and Senate and more than 200 groups ranging from the timber industry to conservation groups to the National Rifle Association support the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, the bipartisan bill that contains the fire borrowing fix included in the supplemental. The consensus is that we need to get this fix done this year.

While there's strong bipartisan support for ending fire borrowing, it's unclear if the House of Representatives is going to support this fix in its version of the supplemental appropriations bill. In fact, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has consistently stood in the way of bipartisan solutions offered in both the House and Senate. He has ignored the fact that the current budget structure is flawed and has resulted in the Forest Service taking the forest management funding Wisconsin's forests rely upon and instead using it to fight wildfires.

As his House Republican colleague, Rep. Mike Simpson of Wyoming, recently pointed out, "Unfortunately, continuing the status quo, as Chairman Ryan advocates, prevents us from reducing the cost and severity of future fires by forcing agencies to rob the money that Congress has appropriated for these priorities to pay for increasingly unpredictable and costly fire suppression needs."

The bipartisan solution that I support for Wisconsin is a fiscally responsible fix to a devastating problem with wide ranging impacts. It will help us respond to wildfires and it will support businesses and thousands of jobs in the timber industry in Wisconsin and throughout the country.

I urge my fellow Wisconsin colleagues as well as my colleagues in the House and Senate to come together, supporting the end to fire borrowing, and solve this problem once and for all.