‘We were shovel ready’: A Minnesota forest hit by DOGE cuts is now ablaze

Last year, the Trump administration delayed a $10 million grant that was supposed to help Minnesota thin out about 4,000 acres of dense, dry forest at high risk of burning. Most of that work never got started, according to five people familiar with the situation and a document reviewed by The Washington Post. And now, some of those areas are on fire.

In 2024, as part of a $100 million initiative to tackle the nation’s wildfires, the Biden administration awarded the Superior National Forest — where about two dozen lightning-sparked fires have been burning since early July — $10 million for projects that would have removed decades of dead trees and undergrowth, creating breaks in potential fire fuel around critical corridors and remote homes. The funding would have also paid for fire prevention efforts along a key 36-mile gravel road known as the Echo Trail — months before the ongoing Sioux Fire jumped it, threatening residences.

“We were shovel-ready,” said Aaron Kania, who was a U.S. Forest Service district ranger with the Superior National Forest for six years and a law enforcement ranger with the Bureau of Land Management for two decades before retiring last December. “Had that work been implemented, it would have been effective in stopping or slowing down these fires.”

But at the beginning of 2025, the U.S. DOGE Service paused or canceled federal grants and spending to review whether they were connected to diversity or climate initiatives. That affected nearly all of the Forest Service’s grant projects and funds, according to two USFS officials familiar with the situation, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity due to fear of professional retaliation. One official said DOGE’s involvement also delayed a regional support fund that moved crews across the country for fire prevention work. That was a “big part of the reason why our large-scale [prescribed burn and hazardous fuel treatment] accomplishments went down so much last year,” the official said.

In the following months, the agency would lose about one-third of its employees, including those who managed timber reviews and grant administration programs — critical components in getting wildfire mitigation projects like Superior National Forest’s up and running.

“It’s the totality of all these things that set us back about a year and a half,” said Kania, who was one of the leaders overseeing the grant.

The White House and the U.S. Forest Service did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Around July 7, a lightning storm started about 15 blazes that have torched nearly 64,000 acres in northeastern Minnesota, ripping through brittle, budworm-infested spruces and balsam firs. The fires have burned layers of thousands of dead trees left behind by what are known as blowdowns, when high winds fell swaths of forest. About 1,000 firefighters, some deploying from Alaska, California and Florida, are responding to what are now a smaller collection of large fires, the Forest Service said Friday.

While it’s difficult to be certain whether delaying the project worsened the fires in Superior National Forest, Kania and others say losing out on the ability to do vital prevention work at a perilous time for the region hindered them from being as prepared as they could have been.

A Forest Service document from October 2025 lists some planned activities, goals and timber sale plans related to the grant: “Vegetation management to promote healthy forests and reduce hazardous fuels; cultural resources and site inventories, restoration and protection.”

Some of these targets were pushed out a year or so, the document shows. Kania said that was because of the DOGE holdup.

While many of the impacts of DOGE’s radical cuts are still unfolding, the temporarily sidelined Superior National Forest project exemplifies how the backlog of grants and gutting of staff have harmed communities that rely heavily on federal assistance for massive, intricate projects they could otherwise not pull off themselves.

Minnesota’s spate of fires is adding to what has already been an aggressively active fire year.

The nation’s preparedness level recently ratcheted up a 5 — the highest it can go — meaning multiple areas across the country are experiencing significant fires at the same time, requiring a large amount of national resources. This comes at a time when wildland firefighters are stretched thin emotionally and physically, and as the nation’s wildfire response system is undergoing a massive restructuring that, according to the Forest Service official, could spur more firefighters to leave.

At a hearing this week, Rep. Angie Craig (Minnesota), the ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, asked Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz if the loss of agency personnel and limited resources impeded firefighting efforts. Schultz said they did not.

“Yet again, the Trump administration’s short-sighted cuts to federal programs have put Minnesotans in danger,” Craig said in a statement to The Post. “Firefighters have died and Minnesota kids have been put in harm’s way — all because this administration decided to roll back critical wildfire prevention efforts. This is not a game. These are real lives.”

Minnesota can be a tinder box, with its flash droughts, low soil, powerful wind storms and heat waves. Yet the state has struggled to get federal funding for big fuel reduction and land resiliency projects, said Paul McDonald, a commissioner for rural St. Louis County, home to the Superior National Forest. He said he has been sounding the alarm about this part of the country for about eight years.

“We have been trying to get northeastern Minnesota on the radar because, forever and ever, people thought of wildfires in the West,” he said. “We were awarded a $10 million grant and we were looking forward to lessening some of the fuels in the forests that are being hit right now.”

Fuels reduction projects are expensive and time consuming but incredibly important, said Annie Schmidt of the Alliance for Wildfire Resilience. It’s difficult for more rural communities to pool together enough resources to painstakingly go through thousands of acres with heavy-duty machines such as masticators and crews.

It can often “take years between applying for the grant and the work actually being done on the ground,” Schmidt said.

That’s why the collaborative wildfire risk prevention program was exciting, Kania said. They applied for and won $10 million from the federal government in a short amount of time. Their environmental review and contracting processes also moved quickly, he said, and in a matter of months they were “good to go.”

“The irony is that the Department of Government Efficiency created chaos which undermined a very efficient process,” Kania said. “It was pretty straightforward, we had a plan that met grant criteria, applied and received the money. We were working through finalizing partnerships when DOGE upended everything.”

McDonald and other Minnesota officials traveled to Washington two times last year and met with Forest Service officials to convey the importance of getting Superior’s wildfire prevention work back online, he said. They got the money back toward the end of 2025, he and Kania said.

However, there were some new rules and conditions. They had to redo much of the grant’s parameters to ensure more of the trees they were thinning would go to timber mills to generate revenue, according to Kania and two other people familiar with the project.

The Forest Service and the collection of nonprofit organizations involved in the project had to go back to the drawing board to ensure they had more timber to show for the work and prioritize which areas they were working in, Kania and another person explained. That was a tough task because that meant they had to target more valuable types of trees, such as Aspens.

Before the DOGE review, the teams planned to use a kind of woodchipper to thin bug-ridden trees, turn them into wood chips and leave them to decompose on the ground.

“Our initial proposal was based on the concept of how fire works and the fuel treatment effectiveness,” Kania said. “When you focus on marketable timber sales, it undermines the concept of strategic fuel reduction. What they were asking us to do no longer made sense because we had to program it for timber sales.”

Another person involved in the project countered that it is common for different administrations to come in and redefine grant agreements. Rejiggering it to get more of what they cut down to the timber industry did not drastically change the goal, the person said.

The Superior National Forest is heavily laden with brush, shrubs, low-hanging tree branches and woody debris known as slash — perfect fire fuel, said Dale MacDougall, founder of Patriot Restoration Ops, a nonprofit organization that assists with fire prevention work and had partnered with the Forest Service on the $10 million grant. His team did some thinning work in the area this past May.

Based on what he saw in Superior a few months ago, “nothing about [these fires] surprises me.”

“All you needed was the conditions right and it was ready to go,” MacDougall said. “There’s a ton of fuels in that country, and it’s a daunting task to take care of that many acres.”

Kania argued that while DOGE “was supposed to save money,” the federal government and the state will be spending a lot more money to do the same work.

Fire crews are now thinning areas, specifically along the Echo Trail, to create defensible space and fire breaks, he said, but “they are doing it under emergency conditions … and that is the most expensive way to do this work imaginable.”

During fast-moving fires, agencies hire loggers and machine operators at premium rates and pay for 16-hour days.

Firefighters are having to do work now because that work wasn’t completed with that grant money in a timely manner, Kania said.

The Echo Trail, which became a main focus of firefighting efforts, is a key example of that.

On July 15, St. Louis County Sheriff Gordon Ramsay posted photos of the corridor on Facebook: “It’s so dry that ferns and saplings are wilting and drying up. There’s also a lot of dead balsam and spruce that are fueling these fires,” he wrote. “The Sioux fire has not yet crossed the Echo Trail but it is close in parts.”

The fire jumped that road about a day or so later.

That trail is so critical, MacDougall said, because it is “dynamic” in terms of the types of trees and brush surrounding it, and its proximity to homes and wilderness. They had planned to treat “a bunch of this area” to shore up a boundary that would better prepare the forest to withstand fast-moving fires.

“Had everything gone the way it looked like it was going to before everything happened …” he paused. “Had that made a big difference, we can’t say. That we will never know.”