What the plan covers
Where we started
For as long as any of us have been alive, we knew how you protect a Montana town from fire: you keep the forest worked. You cut, you clear, you don’t let the woods get overgrown, and you keep good timber jobs paying for it all. I believed that. Most of us did, because for a long time it was true, and the people doing that work, the loggers, the mill hands, the firefighters, were never wrong. They were doing exactly what the land asked of them.
But the land is asking something different now. The climate has changed, the forests have changed, and the economics of timber have changed. When the facts move that much, honesty means the answer has to move with them. I didn’t start where I ended up, so let me walk you through what changed my mind.
Start with the home
Start with what actually saves a house, because we’ve had this part backwards. Whether a home survives a wildfire isn’t decided by how many acres got logged miles away. It’s decided by the house and the space right around it. A metal roof instead of shakes. Vents embers can’t get through. Thirty feet of defensible space. Jack Cohen, a retired Forest Service fire scientist in Missoula, spent his career proving homes ignite from embers and their own surroundings, not from a wall of flame off the ridge. Harden the home and you change the odds more than any backcountry cutting ever could. So the first thing I’d do is help Montanans do it. There’s already legislation for a refundable tax credit to fire-harden your home, the way we credit energy upgrades. A few thousand dollars for a metal roof and ember-proof vents beats losing your home, and it’s a fraction of what we spend fighting the fire it prevents. It also takes on the insurance crisis directly, because a hardened home is a lower risk and a lower premium, and right now families in fire country are losing coverage they can’t replace.
But a tax credit only helps if you can front the money, and a young family stretched thin can’t lay out ten thousand dollars and wait for a refund. The grants for this already exist: Community Wildfire Defense Grants and FEMA’s pre-disaster mitigation money, which this administration tried to end until a court blocked it. I’d fund those instead of gutting them, so the family and the renter who can’t write the check up front still get a hardened home. Here’s the honest part: a lot of the people most in the fire’s path can do the least about it. You can’t harden a home you rent, and a family in a mobile home or a senior on a fixed income can’t front the cost. The answer isn’t to tell folks to do better on their own. It’s to make the help reach the people who need it most, not just the ones who can already afford it.
After the fire
And when a town does burn, we can’t leave the people who lost everything to fend for themselves. We can’t predict which community burns in a given year, but we know exactly which ones are at risk, year after year, so we can be ready to help them recover before the disaster instead of scrambling after it. Too often the aid is slow, tangled in paperwork, or never comes at all, and it’s the people who were already struggling who get left behind. When a neighborhood of renters and mobile homes burns, they don’t get the fast insurance checks and the quick rebuild wealthier places do. We’ve watched it play out: in one recent fire that leveled working-class towns, most of the homes lost were mobile homes, more than half the families who turned to FEMA got denied, and the lowest-income applicants were about four times more likely to be turned away than wealthier ones. They end up homeless, sometimes for years. That’s a federal failure, and it means funding FEMA and being honest that it has to do a lot better, because these disasters are only coming more often. We need a government that can actually catch the people who fall.
The forest may not grow back
Here’s the fact that changed my mind more than any other. We used to treat a big fire as a rough season the forest bounces back from. That’s not true anymore. It’s gotten so hot and dry that after a severe fire, in more and more of Montana, the trees don’t come back at all, and the land reverts to brush and stays that way for a long time. And here’s the part that’s hard to hear: a century of putting out every fire left a lot of our forests overgrown, packed with small, water-starved trees that are more fuel than forest. A woods that crowded isn’t healthy, and it isn’t safe. It doesn’t hold carbon so much as stockpile it, and one bad fire sends it all up at once. The goal was never to stop fire. This land evolved with it, and for thousands of years low, cool fire kept it healthy. What we have to stop is the high-intensity megafire that leaves nothing behind. That’s how we protect the water, the habitat, and the country we hunt and hike, and it’s why I’ll defend the Roadless Rule: intact backcountry burns less severely, and every new road is one more place a fire starts.
The air we breathe
And there’s the part we’ve stopped noticing: the air. Our summers are turning into smoke seasons, with kids kept inside, people with asthma and heart conditions suffering, and whole valleys you can’t see across. That smoke is a health emergency we’ve normalized, and a megafire throws off a catastrophic amount of it. Prevention isn’t only about property. It’s about whether you can breathe in August.
The people who fight the fire, all of them
Now think about who actually shows up when the fire comes, because Washington keeps forgetting: in Montana, more than eight in ten fire departments are all-volunteer. The person coming to save your house is far more likely to be a neighbor doing it for free, a state DNRC crew, or a contract hand than a federal hotshot. When I say take care of firefighters, I mean all of you.
If you’re one of the volunteers, you already know how thin it’s gotten. Departments can’t recruit or keep people, the calls climb every year, and your trucks and gear are wearing out. There’s federal money built for exactly this: the AFG and SAFER grants pay for equipment, training, and recruiting and keeping volunteers, and Volunteer Fire Assistance goes straight to rural departments. I’d fund it like the lifeline it is, and make sure a small Montana department can actually get through the paperwork to win it. And if you’re on a local or state crew called up to a federal fire, you should be paid back in full and on time, because right now the reimbursement doesn’t cover what it costs to send your engine and the money comes slow.
Every one of you breathing that smoke carries a higher risk of cancer and heart disease, and whether you’re covered for it depends on whether you’re federal and what state you live in. Federal firefighters finally won the presumption that their cancer came from the job. I’d defend it, extend those protections to the volunteers and contractors breathing the same smoke, fund the national cancer registry so we actually count it, and get the forever chemicals out of your gear. And if you’re a federal wildland firefighter, we still classify you as a “forestry technician” and start you around thirteen dollars an hour. Congress made your pay raise permanent in 2025, which was right, but the job still treats you as temporary help. Tim’s Act, named for a smokejumper we lost, would finish it: year-round status, real health and mental-health care, and pay that means it. Year-round is real because the off-season is the prevention work, thinning and prescribed fire and restoration, which keeps the contract crews busy all year too. If we ask you to stand between our homes and the fire, the least we owe you is the gear, the pay, and the doctor to match.
Honest about the mills
I won’t lie to the timber families about what’s coming, because you deserve better than a comfortable lie. Montana has gone from more than thirty sawmills to about six. The two that closed in Missoula County last year took an era with them. That didn’t happen because of environmentalists. It happened because the mills moved south and overseas, where the trees grow twice as fast and labor costs pennies, and because the economics stopped working, and no senator can wave that away. Telling you the mills are coming back would be a lie, and you’d smell it. Here’s what I can offer instead, and I won’t pretend it’s small: the work of protecting Montana from fire is real, it’s growing, and it doesn’t run out. Thinning near towns, hardening homes, restoring burned ground, running prescribed fire, and the kind of ecosystem stewardship these forests have needed for a long time. A logger or a mill hand already has the skills for it. But you’ve heard “green jobs” promised before and watched them never show, so I’ll be specific: it only counts if it pays a real wage, close to home, year after year. That’s why I’d lock in the multi-year funding and the long-term contracts that let an outfit hire you for a career instead of a season. And it’s bigger than any one job. When a mill closes it takes the tax base, the school, and half of Main Street with it. That’s what Secure Rural Schools was built to cushion, and Congress finally reauthorized it at the end of 2025 after letting it lapse. I’d make that funding permanent, because keeping the work and the schools here is how a town like Seeley Lake stays a town.
That thinning has to mean the right thing, because the word gets abused. Real fuels reduction takes out the small, crowded young trees and the brush that lets a ground fire climb into the crowns. It leaves the big old trees standing, the ponderosa and the larch that have shrugged off fire for centuries because thick bark and high limbs are exactly what beats a fire. Those old giants are the most fire-resistant thing in the forest and the hardest to replace, since in this climate they don’t grow back once they’re gone. Anyone who calls hauling out the biggest, oldest trees “thinning” has it backwards, and I won’t back it.
Right now Washington’s answer is to order up a quarter more logging on the national forests and strip the reviews that slowed it down. I won’t back that, and the reason is the one that runs through everything else here: it spends the wildfire fight in the wrong place. A blanket cut-more, review-less order from D.C. pours the money and the machines into the backcountry, after the big old fire-resistant trees that were never the problem, while the family that can’t afford a metal roof gets nothing and the crews doing the real prevention work get laid off in the fall. Put the dollars where a house is actually saved and a firefighter actually stays employed: home-hardening, the near-town fuels work, and real help for the people already burned out. There’s a bipartisan bill, the Fix Our Forests Act, behind some of this, and the urgency in it is real. I’d make it better, not block it: keep the fast track for the honest work close to home, and restore the guardrails that stop it from becoming a backcountry giveaway.
The ranch and the range
The ranch and the range are their own fight, and I’m not skipping them. Out here, a lot of what burns is grass and rangeland, not forest, and you can lose the fences, the hay, the outbuildings, and the herd in a single afternoon, most of it uninsured. When I talk about protecting people from fire, I mean your whole operation, not just the house.
You also hold a tool Washington is finally catching up to, and it’s the same idea as a prescribed burn: prescribed grazing. Put the right livestock on the right ground at the right time and they eat down the fine fuel that carries a grass fire before the season starts. Done that way it keeps the rangeland healthy and pays you to do it instead of costing the taxpayer. Done carelessly it does the reverse, chewing up creek banks and spreading the invasive cheatgrass that burns even hotter, so the guardrails are the whole point: protect the water and the wildlife, time it right, and never let fire prevention become an excuse to overgraze. There’s solid research behind it and Congress is looking at backing it, and I’d push that hard, because done right it’s the rare fix that’s good for the land, the rancher, and the fire all at once.
And here’s the honest flip side, because it’s the same rule. There’s a small handful of ground where livestock and wildlife just can’t share it, the grizzly corridors and the bighorn range, and there grazing isn’t a tool, it’s a fight nobody wins: the rancher loses stock, the bear that learns cattle are easy gets shot, and a wild sheep herd catches a disease it can’t recover from. The answer there is the opposite of forcing anyone out. Let a willing rancher take a fair, voluntary buyout, usually paid by a conservation group and not the taxpayer, and close that allotment for good. It’s a dignified way out of a losing fight for the rancher, and a fighting chance for the wildlife, and it’s already working around Yellowstone.
And when a fire does tear through, the help has to actually show up, for the ranch and the family both. The federal programs that replace lost livestock, rebuild fence, and reseed burned range exist, and so does the help for a family that lost the house and a town rebuilding what burned, but you wait too long and fight too much paperwork to reach any of it. I’d fund them and speed them up, so a season lost to fire doesn’t also cost you the ranch, the home, or the town.
Good fire, done right
One last piece, because it’s easy to get wrong. Prescribed fire, good fire set on purpose under the right conditions, is one of the best tools we have. It’s also the one that got away in New Mexico and became that state’s largest fire, so people are right to be wary. But when the Forest Service studied that disaster, they didn’t decide to stop. They decided to do it smarter, with better modeling and more caution, and they went back to it, because the alternative is worse. And good fire isn’t ours to take credit for. Montana’s tribes, the Salish and Kootenai especially, kept these forests healthy with deliberate, low fire for thousands of years before anyone called it “prescribed.” We spent a century suppressing that knowledge along with the fire, and we’re paying for it. The least we can do now is back the tribes leading this work and learn from them. And yes, a planned burn makes smoke, but a burn on a chosen day is a fraction of what a megafire dumps on a whole valley, so it’s the trade that actually keeps our kids breathing. That’s the honest posture on fire: we aren’t going to stop it from happening. We get to decide whether it’s a tool we handle or a catastrophe that handles us.
By the numbers
The bottom line
So that’s where the facts took me, and it isn’t where I started. Protect the home and the town first, because that saves lives and it’s what you can actually control. Keep the backcountry wild, because intact forest is safer forest and, more and more, the only cover the water and wildlife have left. Cut the smoke so our kids can breathe in summer. Pay and care for the people who fight the fire like the public servants they are. And give the men and women who worked these woods a real future doing the work the woods need now. None of that asks a logger, a firefighter, or a rancher to believe something they know isn’t so. It just asks all of us to see what changed, and change with it.
Sources: Jack Cohen / U.S. Forest Service Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory (home ignition); Science (2026) fuel-treatment cost-benefit; Montana DNRC (volunteer fire departments); Stevens-Rumann et al. and The Nature Conservancy (post-fire regeneration); MTPR, Flathead Beacon, Territory Ahead / TSLN (Montana mill closures); U.S. Dept. of the Interior and The Conversation (wildland-firefighter pay and classification); OPB (2020 Almeda Fire FEMA denials); USDA Forest Service 90-day review of the 2022 Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon fire (prescribed fire); Char-Koosta News and The Nature Conservancy (Confederated Salish & Kootenai cultural fire); Headwaters Economics and IBHS (home hardening). Bills are named as introduced; status shifts each Congress.