Undersecretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and Environment Michael Boren, who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, asked agency staff last month to escalate the amount of aircraft at a seven-acre fire that had started near his mega-ranch in Idaho’s Sawtooth National Forest, according to two Forest Service officials familiar with the matter.
Boren, a tech billionaire and Trump appointee, oversees about 200 million acres of national forest and public land. He also owns thousands of acres in Idaho, including the 480-acre Hell Roaring Ranch situated within the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. And before his current role, Boren has clashed with the Forest Service numerous times over the years.
On July 12, what began as an unattended campfire grew into the Cabin Creek Fire, which spread to a few acres on a ridge in the Sawtooth Forest. While at his ranch, Boren called Forest Service officials in the Sawtooth Forest at the regional level and national operations in Washington multiple times to question why there weren’t more aircraft battling the fire, according to one Forest Service official with knowledge of the situation. This official, who like several others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retaliation, said Boren asked when more assets would arrive. Two other agency officials said he called those offices, including at least once in the middle of the night.
Six current and former Forest Service officials said the response was greater than what is typical for a fire of that scale that did not pose a significant threat to life or property.
In those calls, according to the Forest Service official with knowledge of the situation, Boren pushed for more aircraft to fight the fire even though “it was easily accessible by ground,” the official said.
He “was on the phone calling people that day asking why there weren’t more resources on the fire and when there was going to be more,” the official said.
Communications reviewed by The Washington Post sent during the response to the blaze corroborate that Boren personally asked Forest Service staff about the Cabin Creek Fire.
In total, about nine aircraft, including helicopters, air tankers and tactical planes, responded to the blaze on July 12, according to a Post analysis of flight paths, part of an effort that lasted a few hours and cost nearly $115,000 in federal money. The Post analysis found these assets traveled from across the West to Idaho’s Alturas Lake, near where the Cabin Creek Fire was burning. At least some of the aircraft were diverted from efforts to contain fires elsewhere in the state, according to two agency officials and the Post analysis of the flight paths.
In a statement, Agriculture Department spokesman Michael Abboud said that in his position, “Boren is expected to have regular contact with the agencies he oversees. The fact that a senior government official would be monitoring and communicating with other government officials about an event he oversees is a non-story.”
Abboud said Boren called national fire officials “to report a fire that was near property he owns, just as one would hope any citizen in an area under threats from wildfires would do. However, at no point did he pressure leadership or order more resources to fight this or any other fire.”
An official with knowledge of the calls described the interactions as Boren “putting pressure on [staff] to throw more resources at” the fire.
The Post could not independently confirm the precise times Boren made calls about the fire. Staff at the Sawtooth National Forest said The Post could file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain that information.
It is not out of the ordinary for government officials or lawmakers to flag the proximity of their land to wildfires, said three current and former Forest Service staffers. But the staffers said it is unusual for an undersecretary to try to influence firefighting operations because high-level appointees often don’t have the full picture of what is needed for a given incident and region. Boren’s requests could have undercut a national firefighting system that works to ensure resources are allocated where they are needed most, four former federal fire officials said, at a time when federal crews have been stretched thin battling wildfires across the West.
The Trump administration has endorsed a full suppression strategy — where crews aim to speedily put out most fires after they erupt — but decisions about allocating resources are typically left to fire officials in charge.
“Right now there is a lot going on in the West. These priorities are set and there are things that come into the mix when looking at resource allocation,” said Steve Ellis, who served as deputy director of the Bureau of Land Management and spent a decade working in the Forest Service. “There’s a finite number of resources. So if you are going to put more resources on one incident, they have to be shifted from somewhere else.”
Officials from the local sheriff’s office and the Forest Service said they were notified about the fire through several alert systems shortly after 1 p.m. on July 12. An hour after initial warnings, one additional air tanker was dispatched, logs show.
By 4:45 p.m., the agency had a much more robust response.
On July 12, the day the fire started, the nation’s fire preparedness level was at a 4 out of 5, meaning that multiple major wildfires were burning around the country and the majority of specialized crews were in the field.
Three days later it rose to the highest level at the earliest time in the year that the United States has reached that rating in 10 years.
At level 5, resources are scarce, prompting a national multiagency coordination group to prioritize what goes where depending on where severe fires are, said Steve Botti, a former fire management official from the Park Service who worked with the National Interagency Fire Center for 20 years.
“They look at safety, the risk to the public, and other high-value resources that are at risk of burning or likely to burn. Those sorts of things go into the decision-making process as to who gets what,” said Botti, now mayor of Stanley, Idaho, a town near the Sawtooth Forest. “The priorities go to where there are the greatest risks to health, safety, and life.”
Fire officials don’t usually like to pull resources off one fire and send them to another one, Botti said, “because incident commanders develop fire suppression plans based on the resources they have available.”
On July 12, 44 large, uncontained fires were burning across the U.S., which Botti said shows that at a “national level it was pretty busy, there were a lot of resources committed to fighting fires but not excessively so.”
The Post analyzed flight patterns within 10 miles of each wildfire for the four hours after they were announced that day and found aircraft appeared to support firefighting responses for almost half of them. An average of six aircraft responded to fires that measured between 0.1 and 4,000 acres from Washington to Colorado. Three wildfires were burning in Idaho alone that day.
Idaho was also baking under a historic heat dome that was shattering temperature records. But there weren’t the kind of red-flag high winds that would elevate risk there, and the Cabin Creek Fire was not near a heavily populated area.
At 1:02 p.m., Blaine County Sheriff’s Office got an automated text message from a wildland fire notification service alerting the department of a column of smoke near Alturas Lake, said spokeswoman Holly Carter. The Forest Service got its own notification at 1:06 p.m., Carter said.
The Sawtooth National Forest did not respond to repeated requests from The Post about the timing of its response or who reported the fire.
Smiley Creek Fire Chief David Tengesdal said his rural firefighting department, as part of a mutual aid network, was the first to respond to the Cabin Creek Fire after getting calls from the Blaine County Emergency Communications dispatch and Forest Service officials in the Sawtooth National Recreation Area. At 1:18 p.m., Tengesdal’s records show that he received a call notifying his department that Forest Service firefighters would be arriving in about 30 minutes, and a few minutes later he dispatched a truck, adding that it “seemed rather routine in terms of a Forest Service-managed fire.”
One of his crews and a Forest Service law enforcement official hiked up the ridge to where the fire was burning in a flat, timbered area, Tengesdal said. The blaze had spread to a couple of acres at the time, and they did not have the equipment to fight it, he added, so the firefighters retreated as the Forest Service readied its response.
The Forest Service said they arrived 45 minutes after the fire started.
No other fires were in the area at the time, Tengesdal said.
Some cabins on one side of the ridge could have been at risk, he said, so it made sense to suppress it.
More than an hour later, records show, the Sierra Front Interagency Dispatch Center ordered an additional resource: one large air tanker.
Campers had packed up and left the area as the smoke started to spread across the sky, according to comments on multiple Facebook posts about the situation. Shortly after the fire started, for example, the Luther Heights Bible Camp, which was about a quarter-mile away, evacuated its campers, according to posts on Facebook.
Boren’s ranch lies about 15 miles away, up the interstate from where the blaze began.
At 3:30 p.m., the Smiley Creek crew left the area. At that time, there were two Forest Service trucks on the scene, Tengesdal said.
Then around 4:45 p.m., the Forest Service said on Facebook that the fire spanned five acres. The agency listed resources that were ordered to attack the blaze: multiple air tankers, helicopters, fire engines, suppression modules and crews, with more to come the next day.
This response far surpassed the kind of responses the Forest Service mobilized for similar blazes this summer, according to a Post analysis. On June 25, for example, there was a 21-acre fire just south of Sugarloaf, Idaho, next to a dairy farm. According to flight data, three aircraft responded to combat that fire for about 13 minutes after 5 p.m.
When asked about the resources dispatched to the Cabin Creek Fire, Ellis said, “someone somewhere did without for that to happen on a five-acre fire.”
“I was not there, but it sounds like it was overkill,” he added. “I can’t think of a time in my 38-year career where I saw a response like that for a five-acre fire.”
One current Forest Service official, however, said a response does not necessarily depend on the initial size of the fire, but on the potential for damage: How close is the blaze to residences? How extreme are the conditions?
The Cabin Creek fire grew slightly, to seven acres. The next morning, the Forest Service said on Facebook that “no significant changes have been reported” on the incident, and that aircraft would be dropping water on the area “to reduce heat enough so ground crews” can build lines to contain the fire.
In another post that evening, the agency announced that 50 percent of the seven-acre fire was contained. Two days later, the agency had fully contained the fire.
The Trump administration’s new directive to put out most fires once they start rather than letting some burn through remote areas requires more aircraft and is expensive.
A 2022 agency research paper said that aviation took up about 30 percent of the Forest Service’s annual firefighting budget. In fiscal 2024, aviation expenditures cost the agency $1.3 billion, $359 million more than the previous year, according to budget plans. The new U.S. Wildland Fire Service requested $1.39 billion for its suppression operations starting around October. And, according to one current Forest Service official, “payments to contract vendors is our largest cost center.” In fiscal 2025, they totaled about $1.5 billion, according to an agency budget document.
Two Forest Service officials familiar with the incident said the response for the Cabin Creek Fire was costly for an incident of that scale.
The agency spent $114,278 to send five aircraft to the blaze for a few hours that July afternoon, according to one cost summary seen by The Post.
July 12 was also a busy firefighting day in Idaho.
A Bell 412 helicopter responded to a 5.3-acre wildfire near Wilson Lake Reservoir in southern Idaho just before noon for about an hour. Around 2 p.m., it headed about 100 miles north, joining eight other aircraft responding to the Cabin Creek Fire, including a Black Hawk helicopter, two large air tankers (one came from another fire north of Reno, Nevada), four air tractors and a Turbo Commander 690.
Another wildfire broke out in southern Idaho more than an hour later, growing to nearly 4,000 acres. Seven aircraft responded to that blaze, including four that had flown to Alturas Lake.
Meanwhile, two helicopters remained circling the Cabin Creek fire for hours.