With wildfires raging pretty much everywhere, the U.S. Forest Service has returned to a rather rudimentary approach to stanching blazes—smite them all. The practice isn’t a back-to-basics maneuver or even one that the Forest Service sees as wise. It’s all about the money.

“We don't want to do this long-term,” Forest Service Deputy Chief Jim Hubbard told USA Today. “We know being able to use fire makes good sense, and we know some forests are very good at it. And in their ecosystems, it's the thing they should be doing.”

For decades now, foresters have seen the value of letting wildfires—especially remote and uncontrollable fires—burn basically unhindered. The practice is often results in hardier ecosystems and creates natural firebreaks that can stave off bigger, future fires.

This year, though, steadily dwindling funds have made it more cost effective to fight blazes while they’re small, rather than chance letting a naturally burning fire grow to the point where it threatens homes and other assets and requires significant resources to control. The sticky wicket led Hubbard to issue a May 25 memo that requires regional foresters to approve any exceptions to the suppression directive.

“Fire on the landscape in the right place under the right circumstances is still something we want to occur,” Hubbard told Richard Manning for an OnEarth article. "We’re just under the gun on a suppression budget.… This is not a policy shift because we thought we were headed in the wrong direction. It is a financial shift.”

A financial shift that could cost more money in necessary fire suppression efforts later, according to critics.

“At a time of both drought in the interior West and overall increases in average global temperatures, we will be seeing more fire on the landscape and not less,” Andy Stahl, of Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics told USA Today. “Yet this policy attempts to put our hands over our eyes and deny that reality.”

Even so, the Forest Service has little choice but to pinch firefighting pennies—and that’s not entirely because of this year’s record wildfire season.

The scores of blazes are estimated to cost the agency more than a $1.4 billion before the year is out (the Forest Service only has $948 million budgeted for suppression this year, about $500 million less than last year, according to OnEarth). Even though that’s a significant overage, the Fire Service should be fiscally assured, thanks to 2009 legislation that created a contingency fund for just such an outsized fire season.

But it’s not. As it turns out, those contingency funds were appropriated for other purposes by Congress during the 2011 budget standoff, according to McClatchey News. The news service reports that $200 million was taken from the fund in 2011 and another $240 million in 2012. There’s no mention of how much, if any, remains in the fund.

While the appropriations seem arbitrary, there are claims that the Forest Service might have made its own bed this season by stalling efforts that would have pooled resources with other land management agencies.

An in-depth Denver Post article on Sunday detailed how an 11-year effort called the Fire Program Analysis aimed to use a data-crunching program to look at factors such as wilderness acreage value, wildlife habitat, cultural resources, and forested acres near homes to determine where budgets should shift to provide the most benefit.

Although the U.S. Agriculture Department's Forest Service and five Interior Department agencies—the Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Indian Affairs—began the program with seeming objectivity, a trial run of how the system might redistribute resources spooked the Forest Service and caused it to drop anchor, according to the article.

“We're talking about a couple of billion dollars in federal wildland-fire funds here,” former National Park Service Fire Program Planning Manager Stephen Botti told the Post in an earlier article on the same subject. “Any time you tinker with that, it becomes political in a hurry. There was pushback from the bureaus that the answer was not acceptable. This was mainly the Forest Service objecting to that.”

The Forest Service denies that it tried to thwart the program and cited concerns about the model, according to Sunday’s article.

"It was more a matter of the feedback we got from the planning units," Hubbard said. "The politics just didn't come into it."

It’s unclear what difference implementing the original FPA would have made this season. The Forest Service is starting to use a revised model as a decision-making tool to allocate fire fighting resources and plan national budgets, Hubbard told the Post. But under the present fight-everything mandate, there may be precious little to plan.