Although its effect on communities can be devastating, wildland fire is a natural and necessary process that provides many benefits to ecosystems, such as maintaining habitat diversity, recycling soil nutrients, limiting the spread of insects and disease, and promoting new growth by causing the seeds of fire-dependent species to germinate. Wildland fire also periodically removes brush, small trees, and other vegetation that can otherwise accumulate and increase the size, intensity, and duration of subsequent fires. Over the past century, however, various management practices—including fire suppression, grazing, and timber harvest—have reduced the normal frequency of fires in many forest and rangeland ecosystems and contributed to abnormally dense, continuous accumulations of vegetation, which can fuel uncharacteristically large or severe wildland fires. Federal researchers have estimated that unnaturally dense fuel accumulations on 90 million to 200 million acres of federal lands in the contiguous United States place these lands at an elevated risk of severe wildland fire. In response to the growing wildland fire problem, the five federal agencies responsible for managing wildland fires—the Forest Service in the Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service, and National Park Service in the Department of the Interior—adopted the 1995 federal wildland fire management policy, which formally recognized the essential role that fire plays in maintaining natural systems. This policy was subsequently reaffirmed and updated in 2001. Two important implications of the new policy are that the agencies recognized that (1) they needed to reduce accumulated vegetation that could fuel intense wildland fires and (2) it was not appropriate to continue attempting to suppress all fires. Acknowledging the problem caused by accumulated fuels, Congress substantially increased appropriations for fuel reduction treatments— appropriating more than $3.2 billion to the Forest Service and Interior since 2001—and, in 2003, passed the Healthy Forests Restoration Act, with the stated purpose of, among other things, reducing wildland fire risk to communities, municipal water supplies, and other at-risk federal land. After receiving its annual appropriation, the Forest Service allocates funds to its nine regional offices, which in turn allocate funds to individual national forests and grasslands. Interior, upon receiving its annual appropriation, allocates funds to its four fire management agencies—with the Bureau of Land Management receiving the largest share, about 50 percent of Interior’s funding. Interior’s agencies then allocate funds to their regional or state offices, which in turn allocate funds to individual field units, such as national parks or wildlife refuges. Forest Service and Interior agency field units are generally responsible for selecting individual fuel reduction projects to undertake, which are typically conducted through mechanical treatments (using chainsaws, chippers, mowers, and the like) or by using prescribed fire (which land managers deliberately set to restore or maintain desired vegetative conditions). The agencies used the tools and fuel reduction funding provided by Congress to treat more than 18 million acres from 2001 through August 2007. Over the last decade, Congress, the Office of Management and Budget, federal agency officials, and others have expressed concerns about mounting federal wildland fire expenditures. These concerns have led GAO, the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Inspector General, the Forest Service, Interior, and others to conduct numerous reviews of the federal wildland fire program. These reviews identified many issues the agencies needed to address if they are to contain costs—issues generally related to reducing accumulated fuels, acquiring and using firefighting personnel and equipment, and selecting firefighting strategies. Land managers and incident management teams (specialized fire-response teams that include personnel to handle command, planning, logistics, operations, and finance functions) have a wide spectrum of strategies available to them when responding to wildland fires, some of which can be significantly more costly than others. These strategies range from having a few personnel monitor a fire while allowing it to burn to achieve ecological benefits—a practice known as wildland fire use—to mobilizing all available personnel and equipment to try to control the entire perimeter of a fire or otherwise suppress it as quickly as possible. In selecting a strategy for a particular fire, land managers are required to consider the cost of suppression, the value of structures and other resources threatened by the fire, and the potential ecological effects of the fire. The agencies use the term “appropriate management response” for a strategy that considers these factors. Recent reports by GAO and others, however, have identified barriers to the agencies increasing their use of less aggressive strategies, which often cost less. If the agencies and Congress are to make informed decisions about an effective and affordable long-term approach for addressing wildland fire, the agencies need a cohesive strategy that identifies the long-term options and associated funding for reducing excess vegetation and responding to fires. We first recommended the development of a cohesive strategy for addressing excess vegetation in 1999. By 2005, the agencies had yet to develop such a strategy, and that year we reiterated the need for such a strategy and broadened our recommendation’s focus to include options not only for reducing fuels but also for responding to wildland fires when they do occur, in order to better address the interrelated nature of the two activities. We repeated our call for a cohesive strategy in 2006 and 2007. Although the agencies had consistently concurred with our recommendation to develop a cohesive strategy, in 2007 they retreated from their commitment to develop one. The Department of Agriculture’s Under Secretary for Natural Resources and Environment testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources in January 2007, and before the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands in June 2007, that he did not think it useful to provide specific funding estimates for fuel treatments years into the future because conditions on the ground change over time and may change priorities in future years. Forest Service and Interior officials subsequently told us in January 2008 that they have no plans to develop a cohesive strategy that identifies long-term options and associated funding requirements. Despite the agencies’ retreat from their commitment to develop a cohesive strategy, a strategy of this sort nevertheless remains fundamental if the agencies and Congress are to fully understand the potential choices, and associated costs, for addressing wildland fire problems. We also believe the agencies have mischaracterized our recommendation to develop long- term options, and associated funding, for reducing fuels. Our intent was not to have the agencies identify the specific areas they would treat each year into the future, but rather that they develop broad options for reducing fuels, including estimated costs, and analyze the effects of the different options on the predicted costs of preparing for and responding to wildland fires in the future. One such analysis was developed in 2002 by a team of Forest Service and Interior experts, who produced an estimate of the funds needed to implement each of eight different fuel reduction options for protecting communities and ecosystems across the nation over the next century. The team determined that effectively reducing the risks to communities and ecosystems across the nation could require an approximate tripling of fuel reduction funding, to about $1.4 billion annually, for an initial period of several years. These initially higher costs for fuel reduction would decline after fuels had been sufficiently reduced to allow less-expensive prescribed burning methods in many areas. More importantly, the team estimated that the reduction in fuels would allow the agencies to suppress more fires at lower cost and would reduce total wildland fire management costs and risk after 15 years. Alternately, the team concluded that maintaining the then-current level of investment in fuel reduction would increase costs as well as risks to communities and ecosystems in the long term. However, the Office of Management and Budget raised concerns about the accuracy of the long-term funding estimates used by the study; as a result, agency officials told us in 2006 that they needed to improve the data before they could develop a cohesive strategy. Now, however—and despite agency efforts to improve their data—this concern appears to be moot, as the agencies have abandoned their commitment to develop the strategy. We reported in 2007 that although the Forest Service and Interior agencies had taken several steps intended to help contain wildland fire costs, they had not clearly defined their cost-containment goals or developed a strategy for achieving those goals—steps that are fundamental to sound program management. As we reported, the agencies are implementing a number of steps designed to help them contain wildland fire costs—such as improving how they acquire and use firefighting assets, updating policies to require officials to consider the full spectrum of available strategies when selecting a firefighting strategy, and developing new decision support tools that help officials select the most appropriate strategy. However, we also found that the agencies had neither clearly defined the goals of their cost-containment efforts nor developed a clear plan for how the various steps they are taking to help contain costs fit together. Without such a strategy, we believe the agencies will have difficulty determining whether they are taking the most important steps first, as well as the extent to which the steps they are taking will help contain costs. As a result, we recommended that the agencies take several steps to improve the management of their cost-containment efforts, including establishing clearly defined goals and measurable objectives and a strategy to achieve them. Because of the importance of these actions and continuing concerns about the agencies’ response to the increasing cost of wildland fires—and so that the agencies could use the results of these actions to prepare for the 2008 fire season—we recommended the agencies provide Congress with this information no later than November 2007, a step they have yet to take. The Forest Service and Interior, in commenting on a draft of that report, generally disagreed with the characterization of many of our findings, but they neither agreed nor disagreed with our recommendations. In particular, they identified several agency documents that they argue provide clearly defined goals and objectives and that make up their strategy to contain costs. Although the documents cited by the agencies provide overarching goals and objectives, they lack the clarity and specificity needed by land management and firefighting officials in the field to help manage and contain wildland fire costs.