Montana GOP Senate Hopeful Accused Wildland Firefighters Of “Milking” Infernos For Extra Pay

Montana GOP Senate hopeful Tim Sheehy, who made his fortune as the founder and CEO of an aerial firefighting company that has relied largely on lucrative federal contracts, has repeatedly accused wildland firefighters of dragging their feet to put out blazes and “milking” disasters for overtime pay, a HuffPost review of his recent statements found.

In his 2023 book “Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting,” Sheehy described a discussion he had with fellow firefighters during a series of blazes in Idaho in 2015.

“I was hanging out at the base, shooting the breeze with some other guys, talking about how intense the fires seemed to be, just trying to make conversation and contribute to the cause,” Sheehy wrote. “‘Hopefully we can hammer this thing down quickly and get it under control,’ I said. Most of the other guys nodded solemnly, but one person, a pilot, kind of straightened up and grunted. ‘Well, we don’t want it to go too fast,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of overtime pay to be earned out there! We put it out, it’s back on salary!’”

That conversation led Sheehy — an ex-Navy SEAL who founded a Bozeman, Montana-based firefighting company called Bridger Aerospace in 2014 — to confront what he described as a “troubling undercurrent of complacency, of embracing or at least accepting the status quo because, frankly, there was so much money at stake.”

“I’ve since come to realize that this is not a feeling shared universally, but it does exist, and to deny its existence is to impede the efforts of those who understand the importance of change,” he wrote.

At the time of that 2015 encounter, Sheehy was still working to get Bridger Aerospace, a startup with a focus on using infrared cameras and other surveillance technology to monitor fires, off the ground.

While Sheehy would go on to make millions from the same pot of federal money that wildland firefighters rely on, his writings and more recent public comments suggest he came to view many in the field as bad actors competing for and ultimately wasting the government’s limited resources.

The 2015 conversation “smacked less of concern or common sense than it did laziness — or, worse, greed,” he wrote in his book. “I wouldn’t call it malevolence; anyone who climbs into a plane or picks up a shovel to fight wildfires clearly has a capacity for goodness and a desire to help. That said, even in positions that are demonstrably service-oriented, there is the potential for self-interest, if not outright corruption, leading to a response that is not necessarily in the public’s best interest.”

″If there is no fire, there is no money,” he added. “And the faster that a fire is extinguished, the sooner the money dries up or goes elsewhere. It might seem ridiculous to worry about a shortage of work to keep the wildfire industry busy given the extraordinary expansion of the season in recent years, not to mention the gnawing sense that firefighters will forever be overmatched against nature. But old beliefs and protocols die hard, and clearly there were some in the industry who saw nothing wrong with milking every fire for what it was worth despite the risks and the blurring of ethical boundaries.”

Sheehy echoed that same sentiment during a book signing in Huntsville, Alabama in March, months after he launched his bid against three-term incumbent Democratic Sen. Jon Tester. He told the crowd that his company’s use of technology to fight fires more quickly and effectively was “not received well” within the broader industry.

“There’s a very real dynamic in wildfire that a lot of those people don’t want to put the fire out,” he said at the event, according to a recording obtained by HuffPost. “It’s called ‘let it burn.’ And they don’t want to put the fire out because that’s where they get their overtime, that’s where they get their hazard pay. And for a lot of these folks out there — I don’t mean to cast them in a negative light, but it’s just a fact — they don’t want that fire to be put out, because … they make half their annual income on hazard overtime pay during the summer fires.”

Since the early 1970s, the U.S. Forest Service has increasingly allowed certain wildfires, usually those that start naturally in remote areas, to continue burning — not so that firefighters could rake in overtime pay, but in hopes of slowly reversing the devastating impacts of decades of aggressive fire suppression, which has left many forests overloaded with fuel and more prone to extreme infernos.

Scientists have come to understand the critical role fire plays in many forest ecosystems, from clearing away dead vegetation to controlling invasive species. But the Forest Service disputes that it has ever had a “let it burn” policy. And the vast majority of fires — roughly 98% — are still suppressed before they consume 100 acres.

In his book, Sheehy does dive into the complex set of factors driving increasingly catastrophic wildfires, including climate change and the nation’s long history of racing to extinguish every fire as quickly as possible. He describes fire suppression as a “double-edged sword” and notes that “putting every single fire out immediately all the time isn’t the answer.” And he sympathizes with wildland fire crews, describing them as “highly motivated and skilled individuals who make little more than minimum wage and usually have a passion for both the work and the lifestyle.”

But aside from that single comment from an unnamed wildland firefighting pilot in 2015, he offers nothing to back up his claim that a significant number of firefighters are standing around watching fires burn for personal financial gain.

Sheehy’s campaign did not respond to any of HuffPost’s questions about his portrayal of wildland firefighters. Instead, in a short email statement, campaign spokesperson Katie Martin touted Sheehy’s military and business credentials and condemned HuffPost’s reporting on the GOP candidate as “embarrassing.”

Ben McLane is a captain of a Forest Service fire crew and a board member of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit that advocates for federal firefighters. He told HuffPost he “respects the heck out of” aerial firefighters and applauded Sheehy for starting a company that provides an essential service to communities threatened by fire, but condemned Sheehy’s statements about wildland firefighters as “fundamentally flawed.”

“I’ve never seen firefighters let something burn for the sake of keeping the good times going and for monetary reasons,” McLane told HuffPost. “You’ve got to take into account all you’re sacrificing to be out there.”

“For him to basically accuse firefighters of retreating intentionally — these same people who represent the kind of patriotic attributes in action that he claims to represent in words — is a contradiction that is just hard for me to fathom,” he added.

Sheehy resigned as CEO of Bridger Aerospace in July to focus on his Senate bid. Polls show Sheehy leading Tester in the race, which many say could ultimately decide which party controls the Senate next year.

As HuffPost previously reported, Sheehy was once outspoken about the need to combat global climate change and supported major climate initiatives. But since launching his campaign, Sheehy has repeatedly railed against what he calls the “climate cult” and the “disastrous socialist Green New Deal.”

Meanwhile, in public documents, Bridger Aerospace has made clear-eyed assessments of the effects of worsening climate change. In its most recent annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bridger wrote that the “consequences of these climate-driven events may vary widely and could include increased stress on our services due to new patterns of demand, physical damage to our fleet and infrastructure, higher operational costs and an increase in the number [of] requests for our services.”

Fossil fuel-driven climate change, misguided fire suppression policies and increased development in forested areas have triggered an an era of megafires that pose a growing threat to many communities. Yet the wildland firefighters on the front lines of this emergency remain woefully underpaid, earning a base salary of just $15 per hour while facing extreme physical and mental health risks, as ProPublica recently reported. The surge in overtime pay among wildland firefighters is largely due to a shortage of people willing to do this dangerous job, and for many firefighters, overtime pay is the only way to make a living wage.

“A lot of the work of Grassroots has been advocating for a livable wage for firefighters, which we still have not attained,” McLane said. “I don’t think it’s greedy to identify pathways to balance your call to service and adventure with the need to feed your family and wanting to be out on assignment to do that.”

He noted that a bill to hike wildland firefighters’ wages has stalled in Congress. If lawmakers decide to move the bill, “that will be a great day, because no longer will we have to face that moral conflict,” he said.

Sheehy is not the first Montana Republican to accuse wildland firefighters of being lazy and mismanaging infernos.

In July 2006, then-GOP Sen. Conrad Burns famously accosted a crew of highly trained wildland firefighters, known as hotshots, that were in the state to help battle a large fire near the town of Worden. At the Billings, Montana airport, Burns accused the crew of doing a ”piss-poor job” fighting the blaze.

According to a state official’s report of the incident, Burns pointed at one particular firefighter and said, “See that guy over there? He hasn’t done a God-damned thing. … You probably paid that guy $10,000 to sit around. It’s gotta change.”

The state official noted in her report that she “offered to the senator that our firefighters make around $8-$12 per hour and time-and-a-half for overtime. He seemed a little surprised that it wasn’t higher.″

Burns later apologized for his outburst, saying he should have “chosen my words more carefully” and that his criticism “should not have been directed at those who were working hard to put [the fire] out.” A few months later, Tester narrowly defeated Burns, a three-term incumbent.

On the 2-year anniversary of Burns’ attack on wildland firefighters, Wildfire Today, a publication of Missoula, Montana-based nonprofit International Association of Wildland Fire, summarized the incident like this:

“Burns was up for re-election, running against Democrat Jon Tester. Soon, 1,000 ‘Wildland Firefighters for Tester’ bumper stickers appeared. Tester won by about 2000 votes, and the leading political columnist for the Lee Newspaper chain credited the ‘firefighter flap.’ The Democrats took control of the U.S. Senate by a margin of one.”