The secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack; the secretary of the interior, Sally Jewell; and the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Shaun Donovan, sent a letter on Sept. 15 to members of Congress calling on them to treat wildfires more like other national disasters. Annually recurring fires are obviously different from, say, a catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina, but the idea is that the agencies would be allowed to tap emergency funds in bad fire years when costs exceed a certain percentage of their budgets.

A recent report by the Forest Service shows in glaring detail how the growing cost of fighting fires has reduced its capacity to do everything else it’s supposed to do. As the number of employees involved in dealing with fires has increased by 114 percent since 1998, to more than 12,000 people, the number of employees managing the service’s lands has fallen by 39 percent, to less than 11,000.

Meanwhile, the amount of money the Forest Service spends on watersheds, facilities and upkeep of roads, trails and other infrastructure have all dropped sharply. It is no surprise then that the service now has a deferred maintenance backlog that totals $5.1 billion.

Congress needs to respond soon, because fires are only becoming a bigger burden. The Forest Service estimates that two-thirds of its annual budget could be dedicated to fire suppression and management by 2025. Climate experts are cautious about linking any single natural disaster — a major hurricane or flood, for instance — to global warming, and that reluctance extends to wildfires as well. And besides, forests fires have been a regular feature of the Western landscape for years. But scientists are widely agreed that climate change is creating the conditions that are likely to make fires bigger and more intense in years to come.

Those members of Congress who reject or belittle the science of climate change should pause for a moment and try to imagine a future with even more devastating fires than the ones they see now on the evening news.