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Testimony:

Before the Subcommittee on Forests and Forest Health, Committee on 
Resources, House of Representatives:

United States Government Accountability Office:

GAO:

For Release on Delivery Expected at 11:00 a.m. EDT:

Thursday, February 17, 2005:

Wildland Fire Management:

Forest Service and Interior Need to Specify Steps and a Schedule for 
Identifying Long-Term Options and Their Costs:

Statement of Robin M. Nazzaro, Director, Natural Resources and 
Environment:

GAO-05-353T:

GAO Highlights:

Highlights of GAO-05-353T, a testimony before the Subcommittee on 
Forests and Forest Health, Committee on Resources, House of 
Representatives

Why GAO Did This Study:

Over the past two decades, the number of acres burned by wildland fires 
has surged, often threatening human lives, property, and ecosystems. 
Past management practices, including a concerted federal policy in the 
20th century of suppressing fires to protect communities and ecosystem 
resources, unintentionally resulted in steady accumulation of dense 
vegetation that fuels large, intense, wildland fires. While such fires 
are normal in some ecosystems, in others they can cause catastrophic 
damage to resources as well as to communities near wildlands known as 
the wildland-urban interface.

GAO was asked to identify the (1) progress the federal government has 
made in responding to wildland fire threats and (2) challenges it will 
need to address within the next 5 years. This testimony is based 
primarily on GAO’s report Wildland Fire Management: Important Progress 
Has Been Made, but Challenges Remain to Completing a Cohesive Strategy 
(GAO-05-147), released on February 14, 2005. 

What GAO Found:

Over the last 5 years, the Forest Service in the Department of 
Agriculture and land management agencies in the Department of the 
Interior, working with the Congress, have made important progress in 
responding to wildland fires. The agencies have adopted various 
national strategy documents addressing the need to reduce wildland fire 
risks; established a priority for protecting communities in the 
wildland-urban interface; and increased efforts and amounts of funding 
committed to addressing wildland fire problems, including preparedness, 
suppression, and fuel reduction on federal lands. In addition, the 
agencies have begun improving their data and research on wildland fire 
problems, made progress in developing long-needed fire management plans 
that identify actions for effectively addressing wildland fire threats 
at the local level, and improved federal interagency coordination and 
collaboration with nonfederal partners. The agencies also have 
strengthened overall accountability for their investments in wildland 
fire activities by establishing improved performance measures and a 
framework for monitoring results. 

While the agencies have adopted various strategy documents to address 
the nation’s wildland fire problems, none of these documents 
constitutes a cohesive strategy that explicitly identifies the long-
term options and related funding needed to reduce fuels in national 
forests and rangelands and to respond to wildland fire threats. Both 
the agencies and the Congress need a comprehensive assessment of the 
fuel reduction options and related funding needs to determine the most 
effective and affordable long-term approach for addressing wildland 
fire problems. Completing a cohesive strategy that identifies long-term 
options and needed funding will require finishing several efforts now 
under way, each with its own challenges. The agencies will need to 
finish planned improvements in a key data and modeling 
system—LANDFIRE—to more precisely identify the extent and location of 
wildland fire threats and to better target fuel reduction efforts. In 
implementing LANDFIRE, the agencies will need more consistent 
approaches to assessing wildland fire risks, more integrated 
information systems, and better understanding of the role of climate in 
wildland fire. In addition, local fire management plans will need to be 
updated with data from LANDFIRE and from emerging agency research on 
more cost-effective approaches to reducing fuels. Completing a new 
system designed to identify the most cost-effective means for 
allocating fire management budget resources—Fire Program Analysis¾may 
help to better identify long-term options and related funding needs. 
Without completing these tasks, the agencies will have difficulty 
determining the extent and location of wildland fire threats, targeting 
and coordinating their efforts and resources, and resolving wildland 
fire problems in the most timely and cost-effective manner over the 
long term. 

A November 2004 report of the Western Governors’ Association also 
called for completing a cohesive federal strategy to address wildland 
fire problems. 

What GAO Recommends:

In its report and this testimony, GAO recommends that the Secretaries 
of Agriculture and the Interior provide the Congress with a plan 
outlining the critical steps and time frames for completing a cohesive 
strategy that identifies the options and funding needed to address 
wildland fire problems.

www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-05-353T.

To view the full product, including the scope
and methodology, click on the link above.
For more information, contact Robin M. Nazzaro at (202) 512-3841 or 
nazzaror@gao.gov.

[End of section]

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:

I am pleased to be here today to discuss the status of the federal 
government's efforts to address our nation's wildland fire problems. 
The trend of increasing wildland fire threats to communities and 
ecosystems that we reported on 5 years ago has been continuing. The 
average number of acres burned by wildland fires annually from 2000 
through 2003 was 56 percent greater than the average amount burned 
annually during the 1990s. Wildland fires are often necessary to 
restore ecosystems, but some fires also can cause catastrophic damages 
to communities and ecosystems. Experts believe that catastrophic 
damages from wildland fires probably will continue to increase until an 
adequate long-term federal response, coordinated with others, is 
implemented and has had time to take effect.

My testimony today summarizes the findings of our report released this 
week that discusses progress the federal government has made over the 
last 5 years and key challenges it faces in developing and implementing 
a long-term response to wildland fire problems.[Footnote 1] This report 
is based primarily on over 25 reviews we conducted in recent years of 
federal wildland fire management that focused largely on the activities 
of the Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture and the land 
management agencies in the Department of the Interior, which together 
manage about 95 percent of all federal lands.

Summary:

In the past 5 years, the federal government has made important progress 
in putting into place the basic components of a framework for managing 
and responding to the nation's wildland fire problems, including:

* establishing a priority to protect communities near wildlands--the 
wildland-urban interface;

* increasing the amount of effort and funds available for addressing 
fire-related concerns, such as fuel reduction on federal lands;

* improving data and research on wildland fire, local fire management 
plans, interagency coordination, and collaboration with nonfederal 
partners; and:

* refining performance measures and results monitoring for wildland 
fire management.

While this progress has been important, many challenges remain for 
addressing wildland fire problems in a timely and effective manner. 
Most notably, the land management agencies need to complete a cohesive 
strategy that identifies the long-term options and related funding 
needed for reducing fuels and responding to wildland fires when they 
occur. A recent Western Governors' Association report also called for 
completing such a cohesive federal strategy. The agencies and the 
Congress need such a strategy to make decisions about an effective and 
affordable long-term approach for addressing problems that have been 
decades in the making and will take decades more to resolve. However, 
completing and implementing such a strategy will require that the 
agencies complete several challenging tasks, including:

* developing data systems needed to identify the extent, severity, and 
location of wildland fire threats to the nation's communities and 
ecosystems;

* updating local fire management plans to better specify the actions 
needed to effectively address these threats; and:

* assessing the cost-effectiveness and affordability of options for 
reducing fuels.

We are recommending that the Secretaries of Agriculture and the 
Interior provide the Congress, in time for its consideration of the 
agencies' fiscal year 2006 wildland fire management budgets, with a 
joint tactical plan outlining the critical steps the agencies will 
take, together with related time frames, to complete a cohesive 
strategy that identifies long-term options and needed funding for 
reducing and maintaining fuels at acceptable levels and responding to 
the nation's wildland fire problems.

Background:

Wildland fire triggered by lightning is a normal, inevitable, and 
necessary ecological process that nature uses to periodically remove 
excess undergrowth, small trees, and vegetation to renew ecosystem 
productivity. However, various human land use and management practices, 
including several decades of fire suppression activities, have reduced 
the normal frequency of wildland fires in many forest and rangeland 
ecosystems and have resulted in abnormally dense and continuous 
accumulations of vegetation that can fuel uncharacteristically large 
and intense wildland fires. Such large intense fires increasingly 
threaten catastrophic ecosystem damage and also increasingly threaten 
human lives, health, property, and infrastructure in the wildland-urban 
interface. Federal researchers estimate that vegetative conditions that 
can fuel such fires exist on approximately 190 million acres--or more 
than 40 percent--of federal lands in the contiguous United States but 
could vary from 90 million to 200 million acres, and that these 
conditions also exist on many nonfederal lands.

Our reviews over the last 5 years identified several weaknesses in the 
federal government's management response to wildland fire issues. These 
weaknesses included the lack of a national strategy that addressed the 
likely high costs of needed fuel reduction efforts and the need to 
prioritize these efforts. Our reviews also found shortcomings in 
federal implementation at the local level, where over half of all 
federal land management units' fire management plans did not meet 
agency requirements designed to restore fire's natural role in 
ecosystems consistent with human health and safety. These plans are 
intended to identify needed local fuel reduction, preparedness, 
suppression, and rehabilitation actions. The agencies also lacked basic 
data, such as the amount and location of lands needing fuel reduction, 
and research on the effectiveness of different fuel reduction methods 
on which to base their fire management plans and specific project 
decisions. Furthermore, coordination among federal agencies and 
collaboration between these agencies and nonfederal entities were 
ineffective. This kind of cooperation is needed because wildland fire 
is a shared problem that transcends land ownership and administrative 
boundaries. Finally, we found that better accountability for federal 
expenditures and performance in wildland fire management was needed. 
Agencies were unable to assess the extent to which they were reducing 
wildland fire risks or to establish meaningful fuel reduction 
performance measures, as well as to determine the cost-effectiveness of 
these efforts, because they lacked both monitoring data and sufficient 
data on the location of lands at high risk of catastrophic fires to 
know the effects of their actions. As a result, their performance 
measures created incentives to reduce fuels on all acres, as opposed to 
focusing on high-risk acres.

Because of these weaknesses, and because experts said that wildland 
fire problems could take decades to resolve, we said that a cohesive, 
long-term, federal wildland fire management strategy was needed. We 
said that this cohesive strategy needed to focus on identifying options 
for reducing fuels over the long term in order to decrease future 
wildland fire risks and related costs. We also said that the strategy 
should identify the costs associated with those different fuel 
reduction options over time, so that the Congress could make cost- 
effective, strategic funding decisions.

Important Progress Has Been Made in Addressing Federal Wildland Fire 
Management Problems over the Last 5 Years:

The federal government has made important progress over the last 5 
years in improving its management of wildland fire. Nationally it has 
established strategic priorities and increased resources for 
implementing these priorities. Locally, it has enhanced data and 
research, planning, coordination, and collaboration with other parties. 
With regard to accountability, it has improved performance measures and 
established a monitoring framework.

Progress in National Strategy: Priorities Have Been Clarified and 
Funding Has Been Increased for Identified Needs:

Over the last 5 years, the federal government has been formulating a 
national strategy known as the National Fire Plan, composed of several 
strategic documents that set forth a priority to reduce wildland fire 
risks to communities. Similarly, the recently enacted Healthy Forests 
Restoration Act of 2003 directs that at least 50 percent of funding for 
fuel reduction projects authorized under the act be allocated to 
wildland-urban interface areas. While we have raised concerns about the 
way the agencies have defined these areas and the specificity of their 
prioritization guidance, we believe that the act's clarification of the 
community protection priority provides a good starting point for 
identifying and prioritizing funding needs. Similarly, in contrast to 
fiscal year 1999, when we reported that the Forest Service had not 
requested increased funding to meet the growing fuel reduction needs it 
had identified, fuel reduction funding for both the Forest Service and 
Interior quadrupled by fiscal year 2004. The Congress, in the Healthy 
Forests Restoration Act, also authorized $760 million per year to be 
appropriated for hazardous fuels reduction activities, including 
projects for reducing fuels on up to 20 million acres of land. 
Moreover, appropriations for both agencies' overall wildland fire 
management activities, including preparedness, suppression and 
rehabilitation, have nearly tripled, from about $1 billion in fiscal 
year 1999 to over $2.7 billion in fiscal year 2004.

Progress in Local Implementation: Data and Research, Fire Management 
Planning, and Coordination and Collaboration Have Been Strengthened:

The agencies have strengthened local wildland fire management 
implementation by making significant improvements in federal data and 
research on wildland fire over the past 5 years, including an initial 
mapping of fuel hazards nationwide. Additionally, in 2003, the agencies 
approved funding for development of a geospatial data and modeling 
system, called LANDFIRE, to map wildland fire hazards with greater 
precision and uniformity. LANDFIRE--estimated to cost $40 million and 
scheduled for nationwide implementation in 2009--will enable 
comparisons of conditions between different field locations nationwide, 
thus permitting better identification of the nature and magnitude of 
wildland fire risks confronting different community and ecosystem 
resources, such as residential and commercial structures, species 
habitat, air and water quality, and soils.

The agencies also have improved local fire management planning by 
adopting and executing an expedited schedule to complete plans for all 
land units that had not been in compliance with agency requirements. 
The agencies also adopted a common interagency template for preparing 
plans to ensure greater consistency in their contents.

Coordination among federal agencies and their collaboration with 
nonfederal partners, critical to effective implementation at the local 
level, also has been improved. In 2001, as a result of congressional 
direction, the agencies jointly formulated a 10-Year Comprehensive 
Strategy with the Western Governors' Association to involve the states 
as full partners in their efforts. An implementation plan adopted by 
the agencies in 2002 details goals, time lines, and responsibilities of 
the different parties for a wide range of activities, including 
collaboration at the local level to identify fuel reduction priorities 
in different areas. Also in 2002, the agencies established an 
interagency body, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council, composed of 
senior Agriculture and Interior officials and nonfederal 
representatives, to improve coordination of their activities with each 
other and nonfederal parties.

Progress in Accountability: Better Performance Measures and a Results 
Monitoring Framework Have Been Developed:

Accountability for the results the federal government achieves from its 
investments in wildland fire management activities also has been 
strengthened. The agencies have adopted a performance measure that 
identifies the amount of acres moved from high-hazard to low-hazard 
fuel conditions, replacing a performance measure for fuel reductions 
that measured only the total acres of fuel reductions and created an 
incentive to treat less costly acres rather than the acres that 
presented the greatest hazards. Additionally, in 2004, to have a better 
baseline for measuring progress, the Wildland Fire Leadership Council 
approved a nationwide framework for monitoring the effects of wildland 
fire. While an implementation plan is still needed for this framework, 
it nonetheless represents a critical step toward enhancing wildland 
fire management accountability.

Agencies Face Several Challenges to Completing a Long-Needed Cohesive 
Strategy for Reducing Fuels and Responding to Wildland Fire Problems:

While the federal government has made important progress over the past 
5 years in addressing wildland fire, a number of challenges still must 
be met to complete development of a cohesive strategy that explicitly 
identifies available long-term options and funding needed to reduce 
fuels on the nation's forests and rangelands. Without such a strategy, 
the Congress will not have an informed understanding of when, how, and 
at what cost wildland fire problems can be brought under control. None 
of the strategic documents adopted by the agencies to date have 
identified these options and related funding needs, and the agencies 
have yet to delineate a plan or schedule for doing so. To identify 
these options and funding needs, the agencies will have to address 
several challenging tasks related to their data systems, fire 
management plans, and assessing the cost-effectiveness and 
affordability of different options for reducing fuels.

Completing and Implementing the LANDFIRE System Is Essential to 
Identifying and Addressing Wildland Fire Threats:

The agencies face several challenges to completing and implementing 
LANDFIRE, so that they can more precisely identify the extent and 
location of wildland fire threats and better target fuel reduction 
efforts. These challenges include using LANDFIRE to better reconcile 
the effects of fuel reduction activities with the agencies' other 
stewardship responsibilities for protecting ecosystem resources, such 
as air, water, soils, and species habitat, which fuel reduction efforts 
can adversely affect. The agencies also need LANDFIRE to help them 
better measure and assess their performance. For example, the data 
produced by LANDFIRE will help them devise a separate performance 
measure for maintaining conditions on low-hazard lands to ensure that 
their conditions do not deteriorate to more hazardous conditions while 
funding is being focused on lands with high-hazard conditions.

In implementing LANDFIRE, however, the agencies will have to overcome 
the challenges presented by the current lack of a consistent approach 
to assessing the risks of wildland fires to ecosystem resources as well 
as the lack of an integrated, strategic, and unified approach to 
managing and using information systems and data, including those such 
as LANDFIRE, in wildland fire decision making. Currently, software, 
data standards, equipment, and training vary among the agencies and 
field units in ways that hamper needed sharing and consistent 
application of the data. Also, LANDFIRE data and models may need to be 
revised to take into account recent research findings that suggest part 
of the increase in wildland fire in recent years has been caused by a 
shift in climate patterns. This research also suggests that these new 
climate patterns may continue for decades, resulting in further 
increases in the amount of wildland fire. Thus, the nature, extent, and 
geographical distribution of hazards initially identified in LANDFIRE, 
as well as the costs for addressing them, may have to be reassessed.

Fire Management Plans Will Need to Be Updated with Latest Data and 
Research on Wildland Fire:

The agencies will need to update their local fire management plans when 
more detailed, nationally consistent LANDFIRE data become available. 
The plans also will have to be updated to incorporate recent agency 
fire research on approaches to more effectively address wildland fire 
threats. For example, a 2002 interagency analysis found that protecting 
wildland-urban interface communities more effectively--as well as more 
cost-effectively--might require locating a higher proportion of fuel 
reduction projects outside of the wildland-urban interface than 
currently envisioned, so that fires originating in the wildlands do not 
become too large to suppress by the time they arrive at the interface. 
Moreover, other agency research suggests that placing fuel reduction 
treatments in specific geometric patterns may, for the same cost, 
provide protection for up to three times as many community and 
ecosystem resources as do other approaches, such as placing fuel breaks 
around communities and ecosystems resources. Timely updating of fire 
management plans with the latest research findings on optimal design 
and location of treatments also will be critical to the effectiveness 
and cost-effectiveness of these plans. The Forest Service indicated 
that this updating could occur during annual reviews of fire management 
plans to determine whether any changes to them may be needed.

Ongoing Efforts to Assess the Cost-Effectiveness and Affordability of 
Fuel Reduction Options Need to Be Completed:

Completing the LANDFIRE data and modeling system and updating fire 
management plans should enable the agencies to formulate a range of 
options for reducing fuels. However, to identify optimal and affordable 
choices among these options, the agencies will have to complete certain 
cost-effectiveness analysis efforts they currently have under way. 
These efforts include an initial 2002 interagency analysis of options 
and costs for reducing fuels, congressionally-directed improvements to 
their budget allocation systems, and a new strategic analysis framework 
that considers affordability.

The Interagency Analysis of Options and Costs: In 2002, a team of 
Forest Service and Interior experts produced an estimate of the funds 
needed to implement eight different fuel reduction options for 
protecting communities and ecosystems across the nation over the next 
century. Their analysis also considered the impacts of fuels reduction 
activities on future costs for other principal wildland fire management 
activities, such as preparedness, suppression, and rehabilitation, if 
fuels were not reduced. The team concluded that the option that would 
result in reducing the risks to communities and ecosystems across the 
nation could require an approximate tripling of current fuel reduction 
funding to about $1.4 billion for an initial period of a few years. 
These initially higher costs would decline after fuels had been reduced 
enough to use less expensive controlled burning methods in many areas 
and more fires could be suppressed at lower cost, with total wildland 
fire management costs, as well as risks, being reduced after 15 years. 
Alternatively, the team said that not making a substantial short-term 
investment using a landscape focus could increase both costs and risks 
to communities and ecosystems in the long term. More recently, however, 
Interior has said that the costs and time required to reverse current 
increasing risks may be less when other vegetation management 
activities--such as timber harvesting and habitat improvements--are 
considered that were not included in the interagency team's original 
assessment but also can influence wildland fire.

The cost of the 2002 interagency team's option that reduced risks to 
communities and ecosystems over the long term is consistent with a June 
2002 National Association of State Foresters' projection of the funding 
needed to implement the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy developed by the 
agencies and the Western Governors' Association the previous year. The 
state foresters projected a need for steady increases in fuel reduction 
funding up to a level of about $1.1 billion by fiscal year 2011. This 
is somewhat less than that of the interagency team's estimate, but 
still about 2-1/2 times current levels.

The interagency team of experts who prepared the 2002 analysis of 
options and associated costs said their estimates of long-term costs 
could only be considered an approximation because the data used for 
their national-level analysis were not sufficiently detailed. They said 
a more accurate estimate of the long-term federal costs and 
consequences of different options nationwide would require applying 
this national analysis framework in smaller geographic areas using more 
detailed data, such as that produced by LANDFIRE, and then aggregating 
these smaller-scale results.

The New Budget Allocation System: Agency officials told us that a tool 
for applying this interagency analysis at a smaller geographic scale 
for aggregation nationally may be another management system under 
development--the Fire Program Analysis system. This system, being 
developed in response to congressional committee direction to improve 
budget allocation tools, is designed to identify the most cost- 
effective allocations of annual preparedness funding for implementing 
agency field units' local fire management plans. Eventually, the Fire 
Program Analysis system, being initially implemented in 2005, will use 
LANDFIRE data and provide a smaller geographical scale for analyses of 
fuel reduction options and thus, like LANDFIRE, will be critical for 
updating fire management plans. Officials said that this preparedness 
budget allocation systemæwhen integrated with an additional component 
now being considered for allocating annual fuel reduction funding-- 
could be instrumental in identifying the most cost-effective long-term 
levels, mixes, and scheduling of these two wildland fire management 
activities. Completely developing the Fire Program Analysis system, 
including the fuel reduction funding component, is expected to cost 
about $40 million and take until at least 2007 and perhaps until 2009.

The New Strategic Analysis Effort: In May 2004, Agriculture and 
Interior began the initial phase of a wildland fire strategic planning 
effort that also might contribute to identifying long-term options and 
needed funding for reducing fuels and responding to the nation's 
wildland fire problems. This effortæthe Quadrennial Fire and Fuels 
Reviewæis intended to result in an overall federal interagency 
strategic planning document for wildland fire management and risk 
reduction and to provide a blueprint for developing affordable and 
integrated fire preparedness, fuels reduction, and fire suppression 
programs. Because of this effort's consideration of affordability, it 
may provide a useful framework for developing a cohesive strategy that 
includes identifying long-term options and related funding needs. The 
preliminary planning, analysis, and internal review phases of this 
effort are currently being completed and an initial report is expected 
in March 2005.

The improvements in data, modeling, and fire behavior research that the 
agencies have under way, together with the new cost-effectiveness focus 
of the Fire Program Analysis system to support local fire management 
plans, represent important tools that the agencies can begin to use now 
to provide the Congress with initial and successively more accurate 
assessments of long-term fuel reduction options and related funding 
needs. Moreover, a more transparent process of interagency analysis in 
framing these options and their costs will permit better identification 
and resolution of differing assumptions, approaches, and values. This 
transparency provides the best assurance of accuracy and consensus 
among differing estimates, such as those of the interagency team and 
the National Association of State Foresters.

A Recent Western Governors' Association Report Is Consistent with GAO's 
Findings and Recommendation:

In November 2004, the Western Governors' Association issued a report 
prepared by its Forest Health Advisory Committee that assessed 
implementation of the 10-Year Comprehensive Strategy, which the 
association had jointly devised with the agencies in 2001.[Footnote 2] 
Although the association's report had a different scope than our 
review, its findings and recommendations are, nonetheless, generally 
consistent with ours about the progress made by the federal government 
and the challenges it faces over the next 5 years. In particular, it 
recommends, as we do, completion of a long-term federal cohesive 
strategy for reducing fuels. It also cites the need for continued 
efforts to improve, among other things, data on hazardous fuels, fire 
management plans, the Fire Program Analysis system, and cost- 
effectiveness in fuel reductions--all challenges we have emphasized 
today.

Conclusions:

The progress made by the federal government over the last 5 years has 
provided a sound foundation for addressing the problems that wildland 
fire will increasingly present to communities, ecosystems, and federal 
budgetary resources over the next few years and decades. But, as yet, 
there is no clear single answer about how best to address these 
problems in either the short or long term. Instead, there are different 
options, each needing further development to understand the trade-offs 
among the risks and funding involved. The Congress needs to understand 
these options and tradeoffs in order to make informed policy and 
appropriations decisions on this 21st century challenge.

This is the same message we provided to this subcommittee 5 years ago 
in calling for a cohesive strategy that identified options and funding 
needs. But it still has not been completed. While the agencies are now 
in a better position to do so, they must build on the progress made to 
date by completing data and modeling efforts underway, updating their 
fire management plans with the results of these data efforts and 
ongoing research, and following through on recent cost-effectiveness 
and affordability initiatives. However, time is running out. Further 
delay in completing a strategy that cohesively integrates these 
activities to identify options and related funding needs will only 
result in increased long-term risks to communities, ecosystems, and 
federal budgetary resources.

Recommendation for Executive Action:

Because there is an increasingly urgent need for a cohesive federal 
strategy that identifies long-term options and related funding needs 
for reducing fuels, we have recommended that the Secretaries of 
Agriculture and the Interior provide the Congress, in time for its 
consideration of the agencies' fiscal year 2006 wildland fire 
management budgets, with a joint tactical plan outlining the critical 
steps the agencies will take, together with related time frames, to 
complete such a cohesive strategy.

Mr. Chairman, this concludes my prepared statement. I would be pleased 
to answer any questions that you or other Members of the Subcommittee 
may have at this time.

GAO Contacts and Staff Acknowledgments:

For further information about this testimony, please contact me at 
(202) 512-3841 or at nazzaror@gao.gov. Jonathan Altshul, David P. 
Bixler, Barry T. Hill, Richard Johnson, and Chester Joy made key 
contributions to this statement.

FOOTNOTES

[1] GAO, Wildland Fire Management: Important Progress Has Been Made, 
but Challenges Remain to Completing a Cohesive Strategy, GAO-05-147 
(Washington, D.C.: Jan. 14, 2005).

[2] Report to the Western Governors on the Implementation of the 10- 
Year Comprehensive Strategy, Western Governors' Association Forest 
Health Advisory Committee (Denver, 2004).