Burning up budgets

That the U.S. Forest Service spends almost half its annual budget — about $2 billion — fighting wildfires is itself a fiscal calamity sufficiently egregious to prod Congress into action.

Yet the number of dollars the agency doles out to douse flames, though significant even by federal government standards, isn't even the worst of the matter.

Here's the truly insidious part: As the Forest Service's firefighting tab grows, so too, perversely, do the odds that the agency will have to shell out even more money in the future.

What's happened, as fire suppression has risen from 21 percent of the Forest Service's spending in 2000 to 47 percent now, is that the agency has less money for the selective logging and prescribed burning projects that make Western forests less vulnerable to fire.

To put it another way, the more the Forest Service spends putting out fires, the less it spends trying to prevent fires.

The Baker City-based Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, for instance, has had its timber sales budget slashed by more than half in the past 15 years.

Congressman Greg Walden, who represents Eastern Oregon, wants to tinker with that calculus.

Earlier this month the House passed H.R. 5541, also known as the FLAME Act, which Walden co-sponsored. The bill, which now goes to the Senate, would set aside money, separate from the Forest Service's budget, to pay to fight fires larger than 300 acres.

The FLAME Act needs to become law.

The federal government should be spending taxpayers' money to take care of the forests they and all Americans own — and, not coincidentally, producing valuable wood products at the same time.

Right now the government is squandering too many of our dollars — and too many of our trees.