The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a bill that would force government agencies to more accurately keep track of forest health treatments.
It follows revelations that some public lands agencies regularly overstate the amount of hazardous fuels reduction they conduct.
The bill known as the ACRES Act would force public lands agencies to update how they report the number of treated acres and standardize tracking procedures for fuels reduction work.
For years, federal oversight officials have criticized the U.S. Forest Service and other public lands managers for submitting data that could misrepresent the scale of wildfire danger in the U-S.
A 2022 NBC News investigation found that the Forest Service has overstated its hazardous fuel treatments by more than 20% nationally, frequently counting the same treated plots of land multiple times in its reports to Congress.
Backers of the new bill say the inflated numbers obscure the amount of actual risk reduction to communities and create public confusion.
“Americans have been victims of the scourge of wildfires for far too long in part due to decades of poor forest management, and it’s past time for Congress to change the way our overstocked public lands are managed,” said the bill's sponsor, Wisconsin Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany.
The U.S. Senate will now consider the legislation.
It comes as climate change drives larger and more catastrophic wildfires throughout the country.
