A $10 million federal grant to help Minnesota clear out dense, dry forest was delayed last year by the Trump administration, according to five people familiar with the matter and a document reviewed by The Washington Post. Most of the planned work never started. Some of the areas that were supposed to be treated are now on fire.
The Biden administration awarded the money to the Superior National Forest in 2024 as part of a larger $100 million effort to address wildfire risk nationwide. The funding was meant to remove dead trees and undergrowth built up over decades, and to create fire breaks near key travel corridors and remote homes.
About two dozen lightning-sparked fires have been burning in the Superior National Forest since early July. The grant would have also funded fire prevention work along the Echo Trail, a 36-mile gravel road that the Sioux Fire later jumped, threatening nearby residences.
Former ranger says forest was ready for treatment before funding was paused
“We were shovel-ready,” said Aaron Kania, who worked as a U.S. Forest Service district ranger with the Superior National Forest for six years and previously served two decades as a law enforcement ranger with the Bureau of Land Management. Kania, who retired in December, said, “Had that work been implemented, it would have been effective in stopping or slowing down these fires.”
At the start of 2025, the U.S. DOGE Service paused or canceled federal grants and spending to review whether they were tied to diversity or climate initiatives, according to two U.S. Forest Service officials who spoke to the Post on condition of anonymity, citing fear of professional retaliation. A federal judge later found that DOGE’s broader grant-termination process at another agency had improperly used race and gender as criteria for cutting funding.
In Minnesota, the review affected nearly all of the Forest Service’s grant projects and funds, the officials said. One official said DOGE’s involvement also delayed a regional fund used to move firefighting crews around the country – a major reason the agency’s large-scale prescribed burn and fuel treatment work declined sharply last year.
In the months that followed, the Forest Service lost about one-third of its employees, including staff who managed timber reviews and grant administration. That falloff mirrors a broader pattern of departures across federal agencies during the same period, including thousands of exits from the State Department.
The Forest Service roles lost were critical to getting projects like the one in Superior National Forest up and running. “It’s the totality of all these things that set us back about a year and a half,” Kania said.
Around July 7, a lightning storm sparked roughly 15 fires that have burned nearly 64,000 acres in northeastern Minnesota, tearing through spruce and balsam fir trees weakened by budworm infestation. The fires have also burned through dead trees left behind by past windstorms, known as blowdowns. About 1,000 firefighters, including crews from Alaska, California and Florida, were responding as of Friday, the Forest Service said.
Kania and others said losing the ability to carry out prevention work at a critical time left the region less prepared than it could have been. A Forest Service document from October 2025 listed planned activities under the grant, including “vegetation management to promote healthy forests and reduce hazardous fuels.” Kania said some of those goals were pushed back roughly a year because of the DOGE-related holdup.
Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minnesota), the ranking Democrat on the House Agriculture Committee, asked Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz at a hearing this week whether the loss of staff and limited resources had hurt firefighting efforts; Schultz said it had not.
Craig said in a statement, “Yet again, the Trump administration’s short-sighted cuts to federal programs have put Minnesotans in danger. 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.”
Paul McDonald, a commissioner for rural St. Louis County, home to the Superior National Forest, said he has spent about eight years trying to draw federal attention to wildfire risk in northeastern Minnesota. “We have been trying to get northeastern Minnesota on the radar because, forever and ever, people thought of wildfires in the West,” McDonald said.
The money was restored toward the end of 2025, McDonald and Kania said, after Minnesota officials traveled to Washington twice to press Forest Service officials on the issue. New conditions were attached, requiring more of the thinned trees to be routed to timber mills for revenue, according to Kania and two other people familiar with the project.
Kania said that shift undermined the original strategy, which had been based on maximizing fire fuel reduction rather than prioritizing marketable timber. Another person involved in the project said revising grant terms between administrations is common and said the change did not drastically alter the project’s overall goal.
Dale MacDougall, founder of Patriot Restoration Ops, a nonprofit that partnered with the Forest Service on the grant, said his team completed some thinning work in the area this past May. “There’s a ton of fuels in that country, and it’s a daunting task to take care of that many acres,” MacDougall said.
Referring to the fires, he added, “Had everything gone the way it looked like it was going to before everything happened… Had that made a big difference, we can’t say. That we will never know.”
Published: Jul 26, 2026 06:45 am