A DEI Fight Held Up $15 Million in Wildfire Money for Spokane. Then Spokane Burned.

Washington state applied for federal wildfire-prevention money more than a year before the Old Trails Fire ever ignited. Roughly ten Spokane-area communities were slated to split $15 million in Community Wildfire Defense Grants the U.S. Forest Service announced in September 2025, money for the kind of brush-clearing, defensible-space and fuel-reduction work that fire officials say determines whether a wind-driven blaze stays a grass fire or becomes a neighborhood-eating disaster. The money never arrived. In December, the U.S. Department of Agriculture attached new political conditions to the funding, and Washington would not sign. By the time state and federal lawyers settled the fight in court this summer, the fuel those grants were meant to clear was already gone up in smoke. On Aug. 4, three fires broke out in northwest Spokane County. One of them, investigators say, was set on purpose in the exact area the delayed grants were supposed to protect.

What Agriculture Secretary Rollins's New Rules Actually Required

The trouble started on Dec. 31, 2025, when Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins issued new general terms and conditions governing every USDA partnership agreement, including the wildfire grants and contracts administered through the Forest Service. States, conservation districts and fire departments applying for or renewing federal wildfire money were required to sign pledges affirming compliance with a slate of Trump administration executive orders covering immigration enforcement, the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and gender policy, as a condition of receiving funds that in many cases had nothing to do with any of those subjects. The USDA framed the change in a news release as an effort to streamline federal regulations, protect national security and "eliminate radical left ideology" from agency partnerships, according to E&E News. The new terms applied broadly across the Forest Service's roughly $200 million a year in wildfire-risk-reduction grants, including the $1 billion Community Wildfire Defense program Congress created in 2022 specifically to help communities prepare before a fire arrives, not clean up after one.

Washington state could not sign as written. State immigration law restricts how state agencies cooperate with federal deportation enforcement, and the new USDA terms required exactly that kind of cooperation as a precondition for wildfire money. Robert Bonnie, who served as the Agriculture Department's undersecretary for natural resources and environment during the Obama administration, said the shift was "significantly disruptive" to a grant system that normally moves on a predictable annual cycle, according to NPR. Washington was not alone: other Democratic-led states hit the same wall and faced the same choice between signing conditions that conflicted with their own laws or losing wildfire-prevention money already appropriated by Congress, a group that would later coalesce into the 20-state lawsuit described below.

The $15 Million Spokane Never Got

Two Spokane-area recipients felt the delay most directly. The Spokane Conservation District had been allocated $9.3 million for fuel-reduction and forest-health work on private land bordering the city. The Spokane Valley Fire Department was set to receive $5.5 million for urban wildfire-risk projects, the kind aimed at exactly the wildland-urban interface where the Old Trails Fire later burned. Cori Turntine, the conservation district's operations director, told E&E News the grant-funded thinning and brush-clearing work would already have been underway if the money had arrived on schedule. Instead it sat frozen for the better part of a year while USDA and the states argued over the new terms in court and in press releases.

Spokane Valley Fire Assistant Chief Lance Dahl put the stakes in blunt operational terms. Fuel reduction, he said, "is really important because it has the potential to change fire behavior," the difference between a fire crews can hold at a road or a creek bed and one that jumps into a subdivision. Deputy Chief Brett Anderson said the department's project was specifically designed to blunt wildfire risk in the built-up neighborhoods that ring the city, the same neighborhoods where the Old Trails Fire ultimately destroyed hundreds of homes. Neither department's grant-funded work had started by the time the fires broke out on Aug. 4, which means the crews battling this month's fires were working the same unthinned brush and unmodified structures the grants were designed to change.

Twenty States Sued. A Judge Sided With Them, in June.

Washington did not simply wait out the standoff. In March 2026, the state joined a coalition of 20 Democratic-led states in a federal lawsuit challenging the USDA's authority to attach ideological compliance conditions to congressionally appropriated wildfire funds. The states argued the new terms exceeded USDA's statutory authority and effectively let the executive branch withhold money Congress had already approved unless states abandoned unrelated state policy. A federal judge agreed, at least provisionally, blocking enforcement of the new terms and conditions in June 2026. Washington's Department of Natural Resources sent draft funding agreements to the affected communities the following month, and grant agreements for the Spokane-area projects were finally signed in July, roughly ten months after the Forest Service had first announced the money.

That timeline left almost no runway before fire season. Fuel-reduction contracts still had to go out to bid, crews had to be scheduled, and forest-thinning work of the kind these grants funded typically takes weeks to organize even after a contract is signed and money starts moving. When the Old Trails, Autumn Lane and Fairview fires ignited on Aug. 4, the newly unfrozen money had been available for barely four weeks, nowhere near enough time to complete meaningful fuel-reduction work on the ground before the fires arrived. The litigation over USDA's underlying authority to impose the conditions is still active and has not been finally resolved.

'Insult to Injury': The Officials on Both Sides

The dispute has become a flashpoint for how national politics is colliding with wildfire policy in a state that has already declared a statewide fire emergency twice this summer. David Perk, coordinator of the Washington State Lands Working Group, called the episode "another example of the federal administration cutting off its nose to spite its face," adding that "to add the additional layer of denying wildfire funding, that's insult to injury." Brittany Fallon of Western Resource Advocates went further, calling the funding conditions a "really dangerous" instance of ideological overreach applied to programs that have nothing to do with the ideology in question. Athan Manuel of the Sierra Club made a similar point, criticizing the USDA for "applying ideological screens to things that aren't ideological." Brush clearing and defensible space, he argued, protect Republican and Democratic communities equally and were never designed to advance anyone's politics.

The USDA's own public materials have not walked back the framing. The agency describes the new terms as protecting national security and eliminating what it calls "radical left ideology" from federal partnerships. Neither USDA nor Washington's Department of Natural Resources has publicly connected the delay to conditions on the ground in Spokane County ahead of the Aug. 4 fires. What is not in dispute, on either side of the political divide, is the sequence: the money was frozen for roughly eight months and released about a month before the fires started.

Then Aaron Farinacci Set Old Trails Fire

Investigators say the largest of the three August blazes, Old Trails, was not an accident. Aaron Farinacci, a 37-year-old Spokane man with a prior manslaughter conviction, was arrested and charged with first-degree arson in connection with the fire and is being held on $1 million bond, according to the Spokane County Sheriff's Office. The three-fire complex, Old Trails, Autumn Lane and Fairview, has forced more than 65,000 people to evacuate and destroyed or damaged upward of 900 homes and other structures, figures Spokane County has revised upward several times as damage-assessment crews continue their work. As of Saturday, Old Trails itself stood at roughly 3,556 acres and 43% contained, according to incident-tracking data reviewed that day, a marked improvement from the 0% to low-teens containment crews were reporting in the fire's first week.

The Spokane Conservation District's unstarted fuel-reduction work and the fire department's unstarted urban-interface project were both sited in and around the neighborhoods Old Trails eventually reached. No fire official has claimed the grants would have stopped an arson fire outright. Deliberately set fires can outrun almost any mitigation work in extreme wind conditions, and investigators have not said the arson attack specifically targeted treated or untreated land. But fire-behavior specialists broadly agree that reduced fuel loads slow a fire's spread and give crews more defensible terrain to work from, which is precisely the rationale the Forest Service used to justify the grant program in the first place. Whether eight fewer months of delay would have changed what burned is a question nobody involved can answer with certainty, and that uncertainty is exactly what makes the timeline so uncomfortable for both sides.

The Next Grant Cycle Is Already at Risk

The court order that unlocked this year's Spokane-area grants is preliminary, not final, and the underlying lawsuit over USDA's authority to attach the conditions has not been resolved. That means the same fight could recur before next year's Community Wildfire Defense Grant cycle, with the same states, the same conditions and potentially the same delay, only this time with a burned Spokane County as the example rather than a hypothetical one. Whether USDA revises the terms, whether the litigation produces a final ruling before the next grant round opens, and whether Washington's Legislature considers any state-funded stopgap for wildfire prevention grants caught in future federal disputes are all open questions state lawmakers have not yet answered publicly.

For Spokane County residents rebuilding after Old Trails, the practical stakes are more immediate. Federal disaster aid, insurance claims and rebuilding permits move on a separate track from the prevention grants, and none of that recovery money is affected by the DEI dispute. But the episode has hardened a divide in how Washington and the Trump administration approach wildfire funding at exactly the moment climate-driven fire seasons are pushing more communities toward the wildland-urban interface the frozen grants were designed to protect. The Community Wildfire Defense Grant program is open to any eligible Washington community, not just Spokane, so how this dispute is ultimately resolved will shape whether prevention money reaches the rest of the state on schedule the next time it is needed.