A lobbying blitz is underway in Trump's Washington to secure funding for drones, AI cameras and other technologies being used to prevent and limit wildfires.

It won't be easy. The K Street forces working for the emerging fire tech sector must persuade an administration that has carried out a dramatic about-face on environmental issues, halting broader climate action and rejecting the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is leading to more damaging infernos.

Federal money and support could be within reach nonetheless. A new cadre of startups is making its case to a tech-friendly administration that has learned from experience it cannot escape the costly fallout from wildfires. These companies are also pulling strings in Congress to rally support for legislation and funding to promote more wildfire technology.

The clock is ticking. Forecasters have warned that California and the rest of the West, which is parched after a snow drought, could be in for a particularly destructive peak wildfire season this year. Major blazes are most common in the western U.S. from July through September.

"We're all asking for money," said Phil Hardy, a lobbyist from Idaho now working with wildfire startups in the nation's capital. He sees this year as a crucial moment for a sector that barely existed five years ago, which now has friends on both sides of the political aisle.

Companies have been building fire-fighting technologies, like wildfire-detecting satellites, smoke-spotting sensors and fire management software for more than a decade. The most well-funded startups are German dronemaker Quantum Systems, Boston-based weather satellite operator Tomorrow.io and the emergency communications provider RapidSOS of New York.

In 2020, though, Silicon Valley investors saw an opportunity. After wildfires caused record-breaking damage and turned the sky orange in San Francisco, venture capitalists invested hundreds of millionsin a crop of Bay Area start-ups, including wildfire-spotting camera company Pano AI and brush-clearing robot company BurnBot. 

Investors have poured more than $3.5 billion into the space since 2012, according to funding data compiled for POLITICO by Currence, a market intelligence firm.

Now, buoyed by their experience in deep-blue California, the small but increasingly organized group of companies is trying to win over Trump's Washington. They want to convert years of federal pilot projects and contracts with state and local firefighting agencies — not all of which have gone well — into a steady stream of U.S. funding.

The fledgling industry's wishlist includes a wildfire technology research center with a $20 million annual price tag, language in annual spending bills to encourage agencies to buy new tools, and legislation to create a federal home for wildfire intelligence and technology programs.

As destructive wildfires and other extreme weather in the U.S. become more common, the companies have ramped up efforts. In 2020, just two groups — the utility Puget Sound Energy and the nonprofit XPRIZE Foundation — disclosed lobbying on wildfire technologies, according to a POLITICO review of disclosure filings.

By last year, at least 17 outfits reported contacting policymakers about new wildfire management tools. The tally includes startups such as Sceye, a stratospheric monitoring firm, major defense contractor Lockheed Martin, and Megafire Action, a nonprofit that advocates for policies to limit wildfires.

As part of its lobbying effort, Pano AI, a wildfire camera operator, put on a demonstration of its technology across the street from the Capitol in March. CEO Sonia Kastner and other executives pitched Pano's services with laptops, big screens, and models of their surveillance cameras to lawmakers, staffers and reporters at the event, which included an open bar.

The San Francisco startup already has deals with several Western states, and the U.S. Air Force Academy recently decided to award them a federal contract.

Catastrophic wildfires are "not just a California problem," Kastner told POLITICO. Pano's chief executive said she'd been visiting the Hill for several years and had received an increasingly warm reception from lawmakers, who saw the promise of fire tech. "The only obstacle is funding," she added.

Pulling strings in Congress

In Congress, fire tech allies have found bipartisan support.

The Fix Our Forests Act, a forestry bill that would promote wildland fire research and calls for the deployment of fire tech "through expanded public-private partnerships" and "multiagency contracting," is central to the industry's ambitions to secure long-term federal funds.

The bill cleared the Republican-controlled House in January 2025 with the support of 64 Democrats, and advanced through the Senate Agriculture Committee last October by an 18-5 margin. It has since stalled due to Democratic concerns about Trump's federal workforce cutbacks, and a crowded Senate calendar.

"We've got the votes to get it passed," Senate Agriculture Chair John Boozman (R-Ark.) told POLITICO in June. "We just need to find some floor time."

Western Democrats who have co-sponsored the bill said in interviews last month that they are also trying to keep it alive. Sen. Alex Padilla of California called the wildfire research provisions in the bill "huge," while Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado said he is "guardedly bullish" about the measure's prospects. In recent weeks, they have proposed adding the legislation to the defense authorization bill for fiscal 2027, one of this year's last remaining must-pass bills.

Meanwhile, Democratic opponents have softened their opposition to the legislation.

"I'm hoping that we can improve the bill before it moves forward," said California Sen. Adam Schiff, who was one of the handful of Democrats who voted against the legislation in the ag committee.

Schiff's wariness comes from concerns "that we may not be fixing our forest with the bill so much as giving a windfall to industry." (It wasn't clear what industry Schiff was referring to and his office didn't respond to follow-up questions.)

Boozman acknowledged that the forestry package still has its critics, including those in the environmental community. Some environmentalists are concerned that the bill would give the Agriculture secretary wide latitude to declare "emergency" situations on millions of acres of federal land that would open them to logging and limit opportunities for the public to push back on those claims.

"Some of the Democrats would like some changes made," he said. "We can work those things out."

To increase their chances for federal funding, fire tech startups are also targeting the agriculture appropriations bill. In a letter to the lawmakers who allocate federal funding, industry representatives urged Congress to provide the $20 million a year needed for the wildfire technology research center, a facility they said could help agencies test emerging tools and move the most promising ones toward broader use.

They've failed so far at getting the line item into House or Senate markups of the spending legislation. But the House Appropriations Committee did publish report language aimed at improving how federal agencies evaluate and buy wildfire technology, a priority for companies that say the government is too slow to move tools from field tests into regular use.

"The Committee supports efforts to develop new strategies and technologies for wildfire prevention, enhance risk communication and management tools, and strengthen science-based approaches," the April report said.

Other U.S. policymakers remain more dubious. At the end of 2024, the Department of Homeland Security discontinued a four-year wildfire detection contract with N5 Sensors.

The Maryland-based startup "did not consistently detect fires or alert state and local partners to aid response efforts," an inspector general review of the contract found. Those shortcomings could "result in the increased loss of life and property, and otherwise avoidable costs associated with rebuilding damaged communities."

N5 sharply contested the inspector general's findings. The audit "is not accurate," CEO Abhishek Motayed said in an email. He emphasized DHS was only using N5 prototypes and that they were not deployed "at a scale to make these sensors effective."

Trump allies warm to fire tech

Trump has stated repeatedly his unfounded belief that climate change doesn't exist. That would seem to present an insurmountable barrier for companies trying to make the case that a warming earth is driving a wildfire crisis that their devices and technology can counter. But his administration has also signaled an openness to Big Tech, and some of his allies have appeared receptive to the new sector's requests for funding.

Republican Sen. Tim Sheehy of Montana is alead sponsor of the Fix Our Forests Act and was one of the lawmakers in attendance at Pano's cocktail reception in March. One of the richest members of Congress, Sheehy's nine-figure fortune is mainly due to the aerial firefighting contractor Bridger Aerospace, which he founded in 2014. The company has now expanded into wildfire mapping technologies.

Sheehy's office didn't respond to a request for comment about the senator's potential conflicts of interest.

Other high-profile members of Trump's bench who are involved in wildfire issues include Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a former software executive and North Dakota governor, and Michael Boren, the Agriculture Department's undersecretary for natural resources and environment.

Together, they've advised Trump on fire policy, which has already translated into a leg up for fire tech: The president issued an executive order on wildfires in June 2025 that directed agencies to use technology — including artificial intelligence, data sharing, mapping and weather forecasting — to improve the detection and response of blazes.

The Trump administration's appetite for overhauling federal systems could also work in the industry's favor. As part of a reorganization of the federal fire bureaucracy, Brian Fennessy, a longtime California fire official with deep ties to many of the tech startups, has been elevated to lead a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service that unifies the federal government's disparate firefighting agencies.

"This administration has demonstrated writ large a desire and willingness to break things and remake things," said Hardy, who lobbies for Bridger Aerospace, Overwatch Aero and other fire tech companies. "In wildfire, this was a system that needed breaking and rebuilding."

Andres Picon contributed to this report.