Wildland fires ignited by lightning are both natural and inevitable and play an important ecological role on the nation’s landscape. In addition to maintaining habitat diversity, releasing soil nutrients, and causing the seeds of fire-dependent species to germinate, fire periodically removes undergrowth, small trees, and vegetation that can otherwise build up and intensify subsequent fires. However, various human land use and management practices, including decades of suppressing wildland fires, have altered the normal frequency of fires in many forest and rangeland ecosystems, leading to uncharacteristically dense vegetation and atypical fire patterns in some places. At the same time, more homes and communities are being built in areas where fires can occur, increasing risks to human life, property, and infrastructure. Experts estimate that between 1990 and 2000, 60 percent of all new housing units in the United States were built in the wildland-urban interface, and by 2000, about 38 percent of housing units overall were located in the wildland-urban interface. Recent media reports indicate that this trend of growth in the wildland-urban interface continues. Finally, agency analyses indicate that climate change and related drought may also be responsible for significant increases in the occurrence of, and costs of responding to, wildland fire. Increases in the size and severity of wildland fires, and in the cost of fighting them, have led federal agencies to fundamentally reexamine their approach to wildland fire management. For decades, federal agencies aggressively suppressed wildland fires and were generally successful in decreasing the number of acres burned. In some areas of the country, however, rather than eliminating severe wildland fires, decades of suppression disrupted ecological cycles and began to change the structure and makeup of forests and rangelands, increasing the land’s susceptibility to fire. Increasingly, the agencies have recognized the key role that fire plays in many ecosystems and the utility of fire itself as a tool in managing forests and watersheds. The agencies worked together to develop the Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy in 1995, which for the first time formally recognized the essential role that fire plays in maintaining natural systems. This policy was subsequently reaffirmed and updated in 2001. In addition to noting the negative effects of past wildland fire suppression, the policy also recognized that continued development in the wildland- urban interface has placed more values at risk from wildland fire while increasing the complexity and cost of wildland fire suppression operations. To help address these trends, the policy directed agencies to consider management objectives and the values at risk when determining how or whether to suppress a wildland fire. Under this approach, termed “appropriate management response,” the agencies may fight fires that threaten communities or other highly valued areas more aggressively than they fight fires in remote areas or in areas where natural fuel reduction would be beneficial. In some cases, the agencies may simply monitor the fire, or take only limited suppression actions, to ensure that it continues to pose little threat to valued resources. Under current interagency policy, local federal units must develop land management and fire management plans that document approved fire management strategies for each acre of burnable land and other important information about how the land will be managed, including local values at risk, needed local fuel reduction, and rehabilitation actions. Once a fire starts, land management and fire management specialists are to identify and implement the appropriate management response, in accordance with the unit’s approved land and fire management plans. Responding to wildland fires—which can burn across federal and nonfederal jurisdictions—often requires coordination and collaboration among federal, tribal, state, and local firefighting entities to effectively protect lives, homes, and resources. Five federal agencies—the Forest Service within the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service within the Department of the Interior—fight wildland fires. These federal agencies work together with nonfederal firefighting entities to share personnel, equipment, and supplies and to fight fires, regardless of which entities have jurisdiction over the burning lands. Agreements developed and agreed to by cooperating entities, commonly referred to as master agreements, govern cooperative fire protection efforts and include general provisions for sharing firefighting costs among responsible entities. Agencies need a cohesive strategy that identifies the available long-term options and associated funding for reducing excess vegetation and responding to wildland fires if the agencies and the Congress are to make informed decisions about an effective and affordable long-term approach for addressing problems that have been decades in the making. We first recommended that the agencies develop such a strategy for addressing fuels in 1999. After we evaluated a number of related wildland fire management issues, we reiterated our recommendation in 2005 and 2006 but also recognized that a comprehensive solution needs to address not only reducing fuels but also an overall response to wildland fire. To develop an effective overall strategy, agencies need to complete several key tasks, which address weaknesses we previously identified. Our 2005 report summarized several weaknesses in the federal government’s management of fuel reduction and related wildland fire programs and identified a number of actions to address these weaknesses. Specifically, these weaknesses included the following: the agencies lacked basic data, such as the extent and location of lands needing fuel reduction; the agencies needed to identify and prioritize fuel reduction projects; many federal land management units did not have fire management plans that met agency requirements designed to restore fire’s natural role in ecosystems consistent with human health and safety; and the agencies were unable to assess the extent to which they were reducing wildland fire risks, to establish meaningful fuel reduction performance measures, or to determine the cost-effectiveness of these efforts because they lacked needed data. We also identified a number of tasks the agencies needed to complete to develop a cohesive strategy. These tasks included finishing data systems that are needed to identify the extent, severity, and location of wildland fire threats in our national forests and rangelands; updating local fire management plans to better specify the actions needed to effectively address these threats; and assessing the cost-effectiveness and affordability of options for reducing fuels and responding to wildland fire problems. The agencies have made some progress on the three primary tasks we identified as important to developing a wildland fire management strategy, although concerns have been raised about when or whether the agencies will successfully complete them. More specifically, LANDFIRE, a geospatial data and modeling system, is being designed to assist the agencies in identifying the extent, severity, and location of wildland fire threats to the nation’s communities and ecosystems. LANDFIRE data are nearly complete for most of the western United States, with data for the remainder of the country scheduled to be completed in 2009. The agencies will need to ensure, however, that LANDFIRE data are kept current in order to reflect landscape-altering events, such as large fires and hurricanes, and they do not yet have a plan to do so. In 2006, we reported that 95 percent of the agencies’ individual land management units had completed fire management plans in accordance with agency requirements promulgated in 2001. However, the agencies do not require regular plan updates to ensure that new data (from LANDFIRE, for example) are incorporated into the plans. Moreover, in the wake of two court decisions—each holding that the Forest Service was required to prepare an environmental assessment or environmental impact statement under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to accompany the relevant fire management plan—the Forest Service decided to withdraw the two plans instead of completing them. It is unclear whether the agency would withdraw other fire management plans successfully challenged under NEPA; nor is it clear whether or to what extent such agency decisions could undermine the interagency policy directing that every burnable acre have a fire management plan. Without such plans, however, current agency policy does not allow use of the entire range of wildland fire response strategies, including less aggressive, and potentially less costly, strategies. The Fire Program Analysis (FPA) system is a computer-based model designed to assist the agencies in cost-effectively allocating the resources necessary to address wildland fires. FPA is being designed in two phases. Phase I was intended to provide information for use in allocating resources for the initial responses to fires and in developing estimates for agencies’ fiscal year 2008 budgets. Phase II was to be focused on additional activities, including fuel reduction and large-fire suppression. A “midcourse review” of FPA, completed in 2006, however, has resulted in recent endorsement by the Wildland Fire Leadership Council of what may be significant design modifications to FPA—ones that may not fulfill key project goals of (1) optimizing how resources are allocated, (2) linking fuel reduction to future preparedness and suppression costs, (3) ensuring comparability among different agencies’ analyses and resulting decisions, and (4) enabling aggregation of local costs to identify national options and related budgets. Agencies plan to have a prototype of phase II, reflecting this design modification, completed by June 2007. According to a program official, the prototype will enable project managers to assess and report to the leadership council on the planned scope, schedule, and cost of FPA, including whether or not they will meet the scheduled completion date of June 2008. Further, gaps in the data collected for FPA may also reduce its usefulness in allocating resources. Although the agencies had made progress on these three primary tasks at the time of our 2006 update, they had not developed either a cohesive strategy identifying options for reducing fuels or a joint tactical plan outlining the critical steps, together with related time frames, the agencies would take to complete a cohesive strategy, as we recommended in our 2005 report. In February 2006, the agencies issued an interagency document titled Protecting People and Natural Resources: A Cohesive Fuels Treatment Strategy, but we found that the document did not identify long-term options or associated funding for reducing fuels and responding to wildland fires.