The U.S. Forest Service has seen a stunning shift in its operations and priorities, with the growing cost of fighting wildfires eating up much of the agency’s budget and “crippling” its ability to do anything else, according to a Forest Service report released last week. “In just 10 years, two out of every three dollars the Forest Service gets from Congress as part of its appropriated budget will be spent on fire programs,” says the report, “The Rising Cost of Wildfire Operations: Effects on the Forest Service’s Non-Fire Work.” You can read the full report here.

In 1995, just 16 percent of the agency’s budget went to firefighting. The shift, the report says, is “crippling the agency’s ability to conserve the nation’s forests and grasslands and to provide the multiple uses and values for which the agency was created.”

The report comes as a group of western senators, led by Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, are mounting a big push to change how Congress funds wildfires, shifting it to a  model closer to how the nation funds responses to hurricanes, floods and other natural disasters.

Among the report’s findings:

• Fire seasons now average 78 days longer than in 1970. This year’s is now predicted to run through October.
• Twice as many acres now burn as three decades ago, and Forest Service scientists expect the acreage burned may double again by mid-century.
• Between 1 percent and 2 percent of all fires consume 30 percent or more of annual costs. Last year, the Forest Service’s 10 largest fires cost the agency more than $320 million.
• The six worst fire seasons since 1960 have all occurred since 2000.
• Since 1998, fire staffing within the Forest Service has grown by 114 percent, while non-fire staffing has decreased by 39 percent.
• Resources to fight fires are being shifted from “restoration work that would help prevent catastrophic fires, protect watersheds that provide clean drinking water to tens of millions of people, protect irreplaceable cultural resources, and provide the infrastructure and programming that supports the $646 billion outdoor recreation economy and jobs and economic growth in hundreds of rural communities.”