ACRES Act

Madam Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and pass the bill (H.R. 204) to require that the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of the Interior submit accurate reports regarding hazardous fuels reduction activities, and for other purposes.

Madam Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and to add extraneous material on H.R. 204, the bill now under consideration.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Madam Speaker, I rise in strong support of Representative Tiffany's legislation, H.R. 204, the Accurately Counting Risk Elimination Solutions, or ACRES Act. This is a commonsense, good-governance bill that will bring sorely needed transparency and accountability to the misleading way our Federal land managers are tracking and reporting hazardous fuel treatments.

This month, wildfires in southern California leveled entire communities and took the lives of at least 24 people. Local residents forced to flee their homes described the scene as a war zone.

Unfortunately, the tragedies in southern California are just the latest consequences in what has been a historic wildfire crisis, devouring an average of 7 million acres every year for the last two decades. This alarming figure is more than double the annual losses seen during the 1990s. This worsening problem is directly linked to insufficient forest management, which has created a dangerous build-up of hazardous fuels in our forests.

Despite the clear need to confront this crisis head-on, Federal land management agencies like the Forest Service are still failing to increase the pace and scale of their treatments. Alarmingly, investigative reporting from ``NBC News'' found that the Forest Service is overreporting the number of acres they treat annually by over 20 percent, but that is not all. The same report found that overcounting was worse in areas of greater risk, such as California, where the total acres treated were overcounted by 35 percent in the wildland-urban interface. In one example, the Forest Service reported that they treated 744 acres of land when, in fact, only 173 acres of land had been treated.

This means that the Forest Service suggested to Congress and the public that they had done four times more work than they had actually accomplished. This is unacceptable, particularly in an area where wildfire risk and the risk to communities and lives is extremely high.

This inaccurate and misleading reporting results from the Forest Service counting the same piece of land towards its risk reduction goals multiple times if different treatments, such as prescribed thinning and burning, are completed on that land. In some cases, the Forest Service counted the same parcel of land 30 times, meaning the agency reported to Congress that they reduced hazardous fuels on 30 acres when, in fact, only 1 acre received treatment.

This legislation simply requires the Forest Service to submit data to Congress annually that details their hazardous fuels reduction work by only counting each acre once, even if multiple treatments were performed. This exact idea has been supported in reports from the Government Accountability Office and the USDA's Office of Inspector General.

The fact that we even need to pass legislation to tell the Forest Service how to count makes it clear just how deep this problem runs when it comes to confronting our catastrophic wildfire crisis. Holding our Federal land managers accountable for their actual work on the ground is a good first step. We need to improve the health of our Nation's forests as we fight against these catastrophic wildfires, and this bill will help us do that.

Madam Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support the legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.

House of Representatives,

Committee on Agriculture,

Washington, DC, January 10, 2025.

Hon. Bruce Westerman,

Chairman, Committee on Natural Resources,

Washington, DC.

Dear Mr. Chairman: This letter confirms our mutual

understanding regarding H.R. 204, the ``ACRES Act.'' Thank

you for collaborating with the Committee on Agriculture on

the matters within our jurisdiction.

The Committee on Agriculture will forego any further

consideration of this bill. However, by foregoing

consideration at this time, we do not waive any jurisdiction

over any subject matter contained in this or similar

legislation. The Committee on Agriculture also reserves the

right to seek appointment of an appropriate number of

conferees should it become necessary and ask that you support

such a request.

We would appreciate a response to this letter confirming

this understanding with respect to H.R. 204 and request a

copy of our letters on this matter be published in the

Congressional Record during Floor consideration.

Sincerely,

Glenn ``GT'' Thompson,

Chairman.

Madam Speaker, I thank my friends across the aisle, Mr. Huffman and the minority, for supporting forestry bills both small and large. This is, I think, a small step in the right direction, and it shouldn't cost any more to report accurate data than to report inaccurate data.

I look forward to passing this bill as well as some larger bills like the Fix Our Forests Act that we hope to have before the body this week.

Madam Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Tiffany), who is the lead sponsor of the bill.

Mr. Speaker, I have no further requests for time, and I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, as we continue to pray for communities across the Nation that have been impacted by wildfire, we do need to put feet to our prayers to ensure that our forests are being properly managed.

The ACRES Act is a step in the right direction and a commonsense solution to a problem that really shouldn't even exist in the first place.

Mr. Speaker, I urge adoption of the bill, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The Forest Service manages millions of acres of forestland, including vital watersheds, critical wildlife habitat, and countless outdoor recreational areas.

The Forest Service's 10-year wildlife crisis strategy implementation plan stresses the importance of fire-adapted landscapes and hazardous fuel treatments to build resilient forests. These critical wildfire risk reduction projects are complex, multistep processes requiring significant planning and investments often carried out over several years.

In order for these projects to operate effectively, we must receive accurate, transparent, and accessible data on how they are planned and implemented. This bill proposes requiring the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior to include in the President's annual budget a report on hazardous fuel activities carried out in a given fiscal year to account for each treated acre.

The ongoing reporting requirement would enhance transparency and accountability, providing critical information that could help guide investments in the management of our national forests, including how we deploy the historic funding for wildfire risk reduction efforts that were included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and in the Inflation Reduction Act if we can hang on to that historic funding in the coming months. I certainly support this bill for proposing that idea of an ongoing reporting requirement. However, I want to clarify that the bill does not actually require or even authorize it. The Congressional Budget Office found that the reporting requirements proposed by this bill would need significant funding, including for hiring 30 additional Federal employees.

Now, I think that would be a worthwhile investment for wildfire risk reduction. These days the Freedom Caucus tends to call the shots on these matters, and they don't allow us to consider bills that authorize that kind of money without spending reductions elsewhere.

So what we have before us is a revised version of the bill, a workaround, that doesn't even authorize the reporting activities that it describes. It is right there on the last page of the bill in all caps: No additional funds authorized.

Madam Speaker, you will notice that the CBO score on this bill is now zero. That is because the revised bill doesn't actually do anything.

We need to do better than this. We have a serious, real fire crisis in front of us. We can't fight climate change with window dressing or thoughts and prayers. I am going to support this bill because it doesn't do any harm and it does bring attention to a good idea, but this is nowhere near enough.

I will point out that the Biden-Harris administration achieved record acres of annual forest treatments thanks to the investments secured by House Democrats in both the IIJA and the IRA. This includes vegetation management to reduce hazardous fuels and prescribed burns.

That is important work worth doing, and I look forward to continuing to work with the majority and the new administration if they are willing to make those investments. We have to ensure that agencies have resources so they can continue reporting back with record-breaking numbers that we achieved under the last administration.

Unfortunately, this bill and the so-called Fix Our Forests Act that we will be considering later this week simply fail to provide any resources. Team extreme might be unhappy with a bill that includes a price tag, but I guarantee that it would be far less than the cost of the mass destruction from fires that we are seeing in places like L.A., and it is certainly worth the lives that would be saved.

Madam Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, I look forward to working with our friends across the aisle on the accounting issue that has been discussed here today. Obviously, we want to make sure that the Forest Service is not taking advance credit for phases of projects that haven't happened yet.

I think that is for the most part what has happened that the gentleman from Arkansas identified. I don't believe there has been any actual double or triple counting, but either way, we want it to be accurate. We all need good, accurate data on that reporting.

We will work together on that. In the meantime, I urge my colleagues to support this bill. I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

Madam Speaker, in spite of what was just said on the other side of the aisle, I want to invite the gentleman from California to Wisconsin. He can get some good fishing in in northern Minnesota, good musky fishing, but if the gentleman wants the best, then come to northern Wisconsin. I have an invitation for my friend.

This bill will bring transparency, Mr. Speaker, to the misleading and inaccurate way hazardous fuels treatments are reported.

Decades of mismanagement of our Federal lands have left our forests overstocked with trees and created tinderbox conditions, and we have long known the reported pace and scale of forest management has been insufficient to truly address our catastrophic forest health crisis.

There is a better way to actively manage our public lands, and that starts with holding our Federal land management agencies accountable by requiring accurate reporting on the effectiveness of their work in fuel reduction.

According to troubling reports, the situation is even worse than we have been led to believe, as agencies have been overstating their treatments by over 20 percent. Accurate reporting is necessary to broadly track the progress made on our larger wildfire mitigation targets as well as individual projects.

The ACRES Act is a simple solution to hold our Federal agencies accountable to see the actual work they are doing to reduce the enormous risks of wildfire. American taxpayers deserve to know they are getting what they paid for. This bill will help ensure that happens.

Mr. Speaker, this is a small step in what needs to be a number of steps to get back to active forest management to protect the life and health of our forests and the people who live around them in the United States of America. I hope this incoming administration and this Congress are active in getting us back to active forest management here in America.

Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote ``yes.''