HR-204-119
Placed on Senate Legislative Calendar under General Orders. Calendar No. 490.
Sponsored by Thomas Tiffany (R-WI)
What it does
The ACRES Act would require the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior to include annual reports on hazardous fuels reduction activities — such as prescribed burns and mechanical vegetation clearing — in their budget submissions to Congress. It would mandate standardized data collection procedures within 90 days of enactment, require that each treated acre be counted only once regardless of how many activities occurred on it, and direct the Government Accountability Office to study the law's implementation within two years. All reports would be made publicly available online.
Who benefits
Communities in wildland-urban interface areas who would gain clearer data on how much fire-risk reduction work is being done near them. Congress and federal budget analysts who would receive more consistent, comparable data for oversight and appropriations decisions. Taxpayers broadly, who would gain transparency into the cost-per-acre efficiency of federal wildfire programs. Researchers, state and local emergency managers, and insurance companies that rely on federal wildfire risk data. Prescribed fire and forestry contractors whose work would be more accurately captured in official records.
Who is hurt
Federal agency staff at the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management who would bear the administrative burden of implementing new standardized tracking procedures with no additional funding authorized. Agencies that have previously reported higher acreage totals by counting the same acre multiple times under different treatment types would show lower reported numbers, potentially affecting their budget justifications. Contractors whose work was previously counted multiple times per acre may appear less productive under the new methodology.
Supporters argue
Supporters argue that current federal reporting on hazardous fuels reduction is inconsistent and inflated — the same acre can be counted multiple times under different treatment categories, making it impossible to know how much land has actually been treated. They contend that accurate, standardized data is essential for Congress to make informed appropriations decisions and for the public to evaluate whether billions of dollars in wildfire prevention spending are producing results, particularly as wildfire seasons have grown longer and more destructive in recent decades.
Opponents argue
Opponents argue that the bill imposes new reporting mandates on already resource-constrained federal land agencies while explicitly authorizing no additional funding, meaning compliance costs would come at the expense of on-the-ground fire prevention work. They contend that changing the counting methodology — recording each acre only once — will produce lower reported acreage figures that may be misread as reduced agency productivity, potentially undermining budget requests for programs that are actually performing well under existing metrics.