The Fires of Corruption
Is America fighting wildfires instead of preventing them? This opinion piece argues that decades of suppression-focused budgets, prescribed burning, and wild horse removals have contributed to worsening wildfire conditions, and calls for a new approach
This article argues that America's wildfire policies have become structurally dependent on suppression rather than prevention, while simultaneously criticizing the Bureau of Land Management's long-standing approach to wild horse management. It contends that reducing wild horse populations, maintaining low herd sizes, and relying on prescribed burns instead of year-round natural grazing have increased fine-fuel accumulation and contributed to larger, more destructive wildfires. Drawing on scientific literature, federal budget data, and examples from recent fires, the author calls for a fundamental shift toward restoring wild horses as ecological fuel managers and aligning federal land management with what he describes as evidence-based wildfire prevention.
NOTE: this article was originally sent by email by Wild Horse Fire Brigade on August 19, 2026.
Subject: Shocking new article: 'The Fires of Corruption'
Email from Wild Horse Fire Brigade
The Fires of Corruption
How the U.S. Forest Service’s Suppression-Heavy Budget and the BLM’s Three Foundational Lies on Wild Horses Combine to Manufacture Catastrophe
By William E. Simpson II © 2026
For more than a century, the United States has treated wildfire primarily as an emergency to be fought rather than a risk to be reduced at its source. The institutional incentives that sustain this approach are now measurable in budgets, in environmental assessments, and in the growing body count of smoke-related deaths and destroyed communities. At the center of the problem sit two federal agencies whose policies, taken together, systematically increase the volume of fine fuels on Western rangelands while simultaneously promoting high-risk practices that have repeatedly escaped control.
The U.S. Forest Service Budget: Suppression First, True Prevention Last
Recent Forest Service discretionary appropriations reveal a structural preference for fighting fires after they start rather than preventing them through landscape-scale, year-round ecological processes. In Fiscal Year 2025, the combined Wildland Fire Management (WFM) account and the Wildfire Suppression Operations Reserve Fund accounted for roughly half of the agency’s discretionary funding. Within the WFM account, Salaries and Expenses routinely exceed $1.1–1.2 billion, while base Suppression funding sits near $1.011 billion before the multi-billion-dollar adjustment is tapped. Hazardous fuels reduction funding remains comparatively small—typically in the low-to-mid hundreds of millions.
The result is an agency whose budgetary metrics reward the continuation of large, expensive fire seasons. Personnel costs and suppression operations dominate. Genuine, low-risk prevention that works with natural processes remains chronically under-resourced.
Prescribed Fire: A “Bad Prescription”
One of the agency’s preferred “prevention” tools—prescribed (Rx) fire—has a documented record of catastrophic failure. Empirical evidence from the last two decades shows that escaped prescribed burns have repeatedly become uncontrolled wildfires, destroying thousands of homes and contributing to deaths through fire and smoke.
The most devastating recent example occurred in New Mexico in 2022. Two U.S. Forest Service prescribed burns on the Santa Fe National Forest—one a broadcast burn (Las Dispensas / Hermits Peak) and the other a holdover pile burn (Calf Canyon)—escaped control, merged, and became the Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire. It burned approximately 341,735 acres, the largest wildfire in New Mexico’s recorded history. The fire destroyed roughly 900 structures, including hundreds of homes, displaced thousands of residents, and later produced deadly flash flooding on the burn scar that killed at least three people. Independent estimates of total losses have exceeded $5 billion; Congress ultimately appropriated approximately $5.45 billion for victim compensation.
The same season, another escaped Forest Service prescribed burn in New Mexico, the Cerro Pelado Fire, burned more than 45,000 acres and destroyed additional structures. These were not isolated anomalies. Escaped prescribed fires have a long and costly history across the West, including earlier disasters that destroyed homes and took lives. When federal agencies light fires under the banner of “prevention,” the public bears the risk—and too often pays the full price when those fires escape.
Prescribed fire, as currently practiced at scale by federal agencies, is not a reliable solution. It is a high-risk intervention that has repeatedly turned into the very catastrophe it claims to prevent.
The BLM’s Three Foundational Misrepresentations
Parallel to the Forest Service’s suppression bias and risky prescribed-fire program runs a second institutional failure at the Bureau of Land Management. For more than five decades the BLM has managed free-roaming wild horses under three claims that appear so routinely in Environmental Assessments, public websites, and reports to Congress that they function as doctrine:
- Wild horses “have no natural predators.”
- The Appropriate Management Levels (AMLs) the agency sets represent the scientifically determined number the land can support in a “thriving natural ecological balance.”
- Wild horses are “not native” to North America.
All three are false.
Predation
Peer-reviewed research using GPS-collared mountain lions and investigation of more than 1,300 kill sites in Nevada’s Great Basin found that horses comprised nearly 60 percent of documented prey items for collared lions. Some individual lions specialized almost entirely on horses; both males and females took horses of all age classes year-round. Earlier studies already showed mountain-lion predation capable of holding foal survival to roughly 27 percent in some populations. Subsequent before-and-after analyses of horse removals confirm that individual lions can and do specialize on horses. The agency’s continued assertion that horses lack predators is a rhetorical necessity: without it, the justification for aggressive, repeated removals weakens.
Genetics and AMLs
The agency’s own long-time genetic expert, E. Gus Cothran, and the 2013 National Academies of Sciences review established clear standards: monitor observed heterozygosity and allelic diversity, sample herds regularly, and act when diversity falls more than one standard deviation below the feral mean. The BLM Handbook incorporates these principles. In practice, sampling is sporadic, studbooks do not exist for free-roaming herds, and the low AMLs imposed on many Herd Management Areas make long-term retention of genetic variation structurally difficult. Small, isolated populations are managed toward numbers that virtually guarantee progressive loss of rare alleles—precisely the outcome the 1971 Act was written to prevent.
Nativeness
The horse family Equidae originated and diversified in North America more than 50 million years ago. The genus Equus itself first appears in the North American fossil record roughly four million years ago. Caballine (true) horses of the lineage that includes modern Equus caballus lived across the continent until the late Pleistocene extinctions. Horses migrated outward across Beringia; when Spanish expeditions returned them in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, they were reintroducing a species whose evolutionary origin and long residence were North American. Paleontologist Ross MacPhee of the American Museum of Natural History has stated the case plainly: morphological and DNA evidence converge on the conclusion that Equus caballus arose on this continent. Labeling them “non-native” is a policy choice, not a scientific finding.
Grazing Ecology and the Fuel Consequence
Horses are not cattle. Cattle and sheep are selective ruminants that prefer green, higher-protein forage and tend to avoid cured fine fuels once grasses dry. Horses, as hindgut fermenters, continue to consume dry grasses, cured cheatgrass, and lower-quality material later into the season—precisely the fine fuels that carry fast-moving rangeland fire.
BLM’s own recent Environmental Assessments quietly concede the short-term consequence. Standard language across multiple 2024–2025 documents (Pancake Complex, Lahontan, Carter Reservoir/Buckhorn/Coppersmith, and others) states that reducing horses to AML “would result in a short-term increase in the volume of fine fuels” and “could result in a theoretical increase in wildfires.” The agency then pivots to claim long-term benefits through reduced dominance of invasive annuals. The empirical record after major gathers frequently shows the short-term effect materializing while the long-term benefit remains aspirational.
Observers who track specific Herd Management Areas have documented a recurring sequence: aggressive gather, reduction to or below low AML, followed within a few years by large, fast-moving fires in the same landscape. Continuous, year-round horse grazing creates a mosaic of reduced fine-fuel continuity. Sudden removal allows cured grasses and annuals to accumulate. When ignition arrives under hot, dry, windy conditions, the fire has continuous fuel that was previously interrupted.
The 2026 Bug and Stallion Fires north of Reno illustrate the pattern. While the BLM was advancing another North Complex gather decision for the Dogskin Mountains HMA (AML of only 10–15 animals on roughly 6,500 acres), the Bug Fire’s northern edge pushed into that same terrain.
The Human and Ecological Cost
The consequences are not abstract. Catastrophic wildfires now generate tens of billions of dollars in annual economic losses. Wildfire smoke is responsible for tens of thousands of premature deaths in the United States. Millions of wildlife die in the flames or from the toxic effects of smoke. And the repeated reduction of wild horse populations to genetically non-viable levels accelerates the loss of rare alleles that represent the last living remnants of ancient, pre-Columbian North American horse lineages.
The 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act did not authorize the BLM to manage these animals as pests to be minimized. Its preamble declares them “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” that “enrich the lives of the American people” and are to be protected as “an integral part of the natural system of the public lands.” The operational reality—low AMLs that undermine genetic security, repeated gathers that create short-term fuel pulses, public messaging that denies predation and nativeness, and a growing list of landscapes that burn hard after the horses are gone—stands in direct contradiction to that statutory command.
Closing
The systematic removal of known wildfire-fuels mitigators, combined with a federal fire budget that structurally favors suppression and high-risk prescribed burning over genuine prevention, is not merely poor policy. It is arguable institutional malfeasance that produces predictable, deadly, and enormously costly results. The smoke over the Dogskin Mountains in August 2026, and the burned homes and flood-scarred communities of northern New Mexico in 2022, were not abstractions. They were the physical consequence of decades of narrative over evidence. Until both agencies are forced to align their practices with the science of predation, foraging ecology, evolutionary history, and the plain language of the 1971 Act, the cycle will continue: remove the horses, light risky fires under the label of “prevention,” watch the fine fuels rebuild, fight the fires that follow, and count the bodies and the dollars afterward.
References
Andreasen, A. M., et al. (2021). Prey Specialization by Cougars on Feral Horses in a Desert Environment. The Journal of Wildlife Management , 85(6), 1104–1120. https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.22087
Iacono, P. C., et al. (2024). Evaluating mountain lion diet before and after a removal of feral horses in a semiarid environment. Ecosphere . https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.4919
National Research Council. (2013). Using Science to Improve the BLM Wild Horse and Burro Program: A Way Forward . National Academies Press. https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/13511/using-science-to-improve-the-blm-wild-horse-and-burro-program
Cothran, E. G. (various reports, synthesized in NRC 2013). Genetic diversity analyses of BLM Herd Management Areas.
Davies, K. W., et al. Grazing management and fine-fuel reduction literature in sagebrush and annual-grass systems.
Nieto-Espinet, A., et al. / Bartolomé Filella, J., et al. (2025). Dietary strategies of feral and domestic horses under varying grazing pressures. Agroforestry Systems .
BLM Environmental Assessments (2024–2025), including Pancake Complex, Lahontan, and related documents: language acknowledging short-term increases in fine-fuel volume after reduction of horses to AML.
Congressional Research Service reports on Forest Service and DOI wildfire appropriations (IF13101, IF13102, and related products).
U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior budget justifications and enacted appropriations tables (FY2023–FY2026).
Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire documentation: U.S. Forest Service incident reports, GAO reviews, New Mexico state records, and contemporaneous reporting confirming the fire originated from two escaped prescribed burns, burned ~341,735 acres, destroyed approximately 900 structures, and produced subsequent flood-related fatalities. Compensation appropriations totaled approximately $5.45 billion.
Cerro Pelado Fire (2022) documentation: escaped U.S. Forest Service prescribed burn / holdover piles in New Mexico.
MacPhee, R. (American Museum of Natural History). Statements and analyses affirming that Equus caballus originated in North America.
Weinstock, J., et al., and subsequent ancient-DNA studies on the North American origin of Equus .
Kirkpatrick, J. F., & Fazio, P. M. Summaries of the fossil and genetic case for wild horses as native North American wildlife.
Simpson, W. E. II (2026). The Cost of the Myth: How BLM’s Misinformation on Wild Horses Fuels Catastrophe – The Bug and Stallion Fires.
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