Exclusive — Sen. Tim Sheehy: ‘Response Apparatus to Wildfires Woefully Inaccurate,’ Tragedy ‘Doesn’t Have to Happen’

Sen. Tim Sheehy (R-MT), a former Navy SEAL and former aerial firefighter who founded the aerial firefighting services company Bridger Aerospace, said the existing way of responding to wildfires is “woefully inaccurate” and requires better coordination on the federal, state, and county levels.

“I spent 10 years after I was in the military fighting wildfires. I had the largest aerial firefighting fleet privately contracted for fixed wing in America. So, I was a water bomber pilot; would fly through the fires, fly over the fires, and literally drop water. That was my business, that was my job. So, I got to understand the construct of how we responded to wildfires,” Sheehy said at a Breitbart News policy discussion event on Wednesday. “Suffice to say…our federal, state, and county response apparatus to wildfires is woefully inaccurate. And L.A. was a symbol of that. Lahaina and Hawaii burned down a couple years prior to that.” 

“We’ve had repeated crises, red and blue states alike, where we literally will lose entire towns and cities to wildfire. And people say, ‘how can this happen?’ Well, it doesn’t have to happen. We can be better prepared with better prescribed burning and defense mechanisms ahead of time, better response mechanisms after the fire, and just an actual focus on suppression,” he continued.

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Sheehy pointed to the launch of the National Wildland Fire Service as a step in the right direction. The Department of the Interior created the service with the “vision of unifying the wildland fire management programs across the Department’s bureaus and offices,” the agency said in a press release. The department created the service in line with President Donald Trump’s executive order in June 2025 to modernize the nation’s wildfire response, mitigation, and prevention framework.

“That’ll be a coordinated national effort. Because right now it’s not a singular organization — it is very federated. It’s kind of a pickup basketball game every time a fire happens of who’s responsible and how they’re going to manage it,” he said.

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Sheehy further explained that organizing wildfire prevention and response could significantly bring down housing costs for Americans. 

“This has effects beyond just wildfire. When you talk about housing, and obviously that’s a core part of our economy, there’s really the four ‘i’s’ and we hear a lot about the first ‘i’s,’ which are interest rates and inflation. We don’t hear a lot about the second two ‘i’s,’ which are immigration — you have 20 to 30 million people enter this country rapidly over a short period of time that puts a pressure on housing supply — and insurance,” he explained. 

“Right now, the fastest-growing cost of owning a home is insurance premiums, especially in high-risk areas in the country. Some people’s insurance premiums are greater than their mortgage every year. That makes living in that home unaffordable. So having a focused national response plan and preventative measures around wildfires will help bring those insurance premiums down and that’ll be the single-biggest impact on housing affordability in this nation,” he said. “And this administration is focused on it, and if we stay focused on it, we’ll start to bring down those insurance rates because those adjusters can adjust the insurance risk based on our ability to respond to these fires better.”