The firefighting bill that grew 13-fold in dollars nobody spends any more
Showing the misleading chart
In a fire-lookout newsletter we invented, a chart puts federal wildfire suppression spending from 1985 to 2023 in dollars as spent: $240 million to $3.17 billion, 13 times over, with eleven new records on the way. Prices rose 2.8-fold over the same years. Put every year in 2023 dollars and the rise is about 4.7-fold, and three of those records disappear.
01The claim
Fighting wildfire costs the federal government 13 times what it did in 1985, and the bill keeps setting new records.
02The trick
Every column is NIFC’s own figure, the axis starts at zero and no year is missing. The catch is the unit: each column is in the dollars of its own year, and a 1985 dollar and a 2023 dollar are not the same size. Consumer prices rose 2.83-fold between those years (CPI-U annual averages 107.6 and 304.7), so a chart in dollars as spent shows inflation and firefighting stacked together, and the eye can’t pull them apart. The headline’s 13× (13.2× unrounded) is the two multiplied. The records are inflated the same way. A new high in current dollars only has to beat an old figure counted in dollars that each bought more, so a year can top the 2002 bill as spent while buying less than 2002 did. (The Lookout Log and its commentary are our invention, drawn to show the mechanism; every figure is NIFC’s.)
03The fix
The redraw converts each year to 2023 dollars with the CPI-U and draws that as a solid line, with the as-spent figures dashed behind it on the same axis, so you can watch the ratio between them shrink year by year until the two meet at 2023. Take out the 2.8× that was prices and about 4.7× is left: $680 million in 1985 against $3.17 billion in 2023, in the same dollars. The record count drops from eleven to eight. 2006 ($1.70 billion as spent), 2012 ($1.90 billion) and 2015 ($2.13 billion) all beat 2002’s $1.67 billion as spent, but in 2023 dollars 2002 is $2.84 billion and the three come to $2.58 billion, $2.52 billion and $2.74 billion, all short of it. What remains is still a large rise, and the redraw says so. Real spending averaged about $0.9 billion a year in 1985–99, $2.1 billion in the 2000s, $2.4 billion in the 2010s and $3.6 billion in 2020–23. Single years swing with the season, so endpoints are fragile: comparing five-year averages, 1985–89 against 2019–23, gives 3.4×. Two notes on the method. The CPI is a consumer price index, not a firefighting one, so it is a reasonable common yardstick, not an exact measure of what crews, aircraft and engines cost. And the figure is federal suppression only, so it leaves out state and local firefighting and all the fuels and prevention work. Whenever money is compared across decades, the first question is which year’s dollars it is in.