The US Forest Service has signed a 20-year deal with New Mexico to expand timber production, wood use, forest restoration, and wildfire mitigation statewide, with federal and state resources aligned across priority firesheds that supply water, wood products, recreation, and jobs. That is according to the agency, which announced the signing in Washington on Wednesday, building on a 2019 shared stewardship deal and extending a rapid run of state signings under the President’s timber push.
“This 20-year commitment strengthens our partnership with New Mexico to increase fuel treatments,” Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz said, promising to accelerate restoration and cut wildfire risk across millions of acres, with the target watersheds serving as what he called the state’s critical water towers.
Getting that work under contract is an old problem in the Southwest, with researchers reporting in April that 40-year-old appraisal tools were cutting bidder turnout on thinning projects across Arizona and New Mexico.
“This agreement means more boots on the ground in New Mexico,” Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham said, with crews to thin overgrown forests and reduce fuel loads before the next fire season.
The pact was signed under Donald Trump’s order for the immediate expansion of American timber production, and it advances a directive that allows the Forest Service to clear states, counties, and federally recognised tribes to run certain projects on federal land. Its stated target is a 25 per cent rise in American timber output.
New Mexico follows Montana’s first-of-its-kind 20-year pact in June 2025 and Idaho’s December pledge to double national forest timber sales to 100 million board feet within five years. Utah and Wyoming updated their own deals in January, and Alaska signed a 20-year Tongass pact in February, with all three states run by Republican governors.
Two escaped federal prescribed burns merged in 2022 into the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire, the largest in New Mexico’s history, destroying at least 500 homes across 341,471 acres. Lujan Grisham declared herself outraged over the agency’s negligence at the time and demanded it overhaul its burning programme, and her government has now signed up to work beside that same agency until 2046.
It comes as the state fights a harsh fire season, with Lujan Grisham declaring a drought and wildfire emergency on 20 May and granting US$500,000 in extra funding as at least 16 fires burned in late June. Nationally the strain is the same, with the National Interagency Fire Center holding Preparedness Level 5, the top of its scale, since 18 July.
“Our forests have exceeded the land’s carrying capacity,” Victor Lucero, forest health programme coordinator at the New Mexico Forestry Division, said last month, with bark beetles killing trees across 84,600 hectares in 2025, more than triple the year before.
Delivering the promised work is the open question, with nine senators led by New Mexico’s Martin Heinrich writing to Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz in December over analysis putting the agency 38 per cent behind on fuels work compared with the previous four years. Money is tight on the timber side too, with House Republicans approving just $45 million for the Forest Service timber programme, a quarter of the $175 million the administration sought.
