IAFF Spent $2.3M on Federal Candidates While Shaping Who Fights Fires

The nation's largest firefighter union has systematically deployed campaign cash and lobbying to ensure federal wildland firefighting remains union employment — and the public record shows it worked.

The single most documented fact in the money trail connecting union politics to federal firefighting policy is this: the International Association of Fire Fighters, through its political action committee IAFF-FIREPAC, ranked as the tenth largest PAC in the United States by federal candidate spending, directing $2.3 million toward federal candidates in a single midterm election cycle, according to DTIC Publication AD1126407 citing IAFF data, while simultaneously lobbying the very agencies that decide whether wildland firefighting is performed by federal employees or private contractors. That is not an allegation. It is what the public filings show.

The IAFF is a 501(c)(5) labor union representing approximately 320,000 professional firefighters and emergency medical personnel, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Its OpenSecrets Organization ID is D000000135, and its lobbying disclosures are filed with the Senate Office of Public Records, with data released as recently as January 23, 2026. The union's former General President, Harold Schaitberger, wrote in Fire Fighter Quarterly, Vol. 103, Winter 2020, page 42, that 'the IAFF held the line for Joe when it mattered most, making it clear that our union is a force to be reckoned with' — a direct reference to the union's early 2019 endorsement of Joe Biden during a contested Democratic primary. That statement, preserved in DTIC Publication AD1126407 at page 50, is the union's own characterization of electoral leverage as a tool of policy influence.

The policy return on that investment is documentable. The Biden administration pursued federal wildland firefighter pay reform, and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 included provisions raising the minimum pay for federal wildland firefighters to $15 per hour — a stated IAFF priority. The Office of Personnel Management, which governs federal civilian pay classification, and the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, which are the primary federal wildland firefighting employers, are among the federal entities identified in Senate SOPR filings as IAFF lobbying targets. The Lobbying Disclosure Act, as cited in the ACC InfoPAK Rules of the Game at page 29, requires disclosure of any communication to a covered official regarding 'the negotiation, award, or administration of a Federal contract' — meaning IAFF contacts on staffing policy and pay classification are matters of public record, filed quarterly.

The structural goal of IAFF's federal policy posture is not subtle. The union consistently lobbies for permanent, full-time federal employment status for wildland firefighters rather than seasonal temporary classification or private contract crews. It advocates for minimum staffing ratios on federal fire apparatus — requirements that, when codified into contract terms, raise the floor cost of any private competitor. It has opposed implementation of OMB Circular A-76, which governs competitive sourcing of government functions, in the firefighting context. Each of these policy positions, if successful, shrinks the market for private contract firefighting and expands the pool of union-eligible federal employees. The SAFER grants — Staffing for Adequate Fire and Emergency Response — which the IAFF lobbies to fund and reauthorize, directly pay for firefighter hiring at agencies where IAFF represents workers, a feedback loop from federal appropriation to union membership to dues revenue to FIREPAC contributions.

The legal architecture enabling this is asymmetric by design. Under 52 U.S.C. Section 30119(a)(1), federal contractors face an outright ban on campaign contributions — they cannot legally do what the IAFF does. The union operates FIREPAC as a separate segregated fund under FEC rules, funded by voluntary member contributions and legally distinct from union treasury funds. Union treasury funds may still be used for political communications to members. This asymmetry, documented in the Government Contracts Navigator analysis of 52 U.S.C. Section 30119(a)(1) and the ACC InfoPAK, means that the private companies competing for federal firefighting contracts are legally prohibited from the same political activity the union conducts routinely. The playing field is not level, and it is not level by statute.

The quantitative evidence that political connections translate into contract outcomes comes from BIS Working Paper 1058, which used the September 11, 2001 attacks and subsequent Afghan War as a natural experiment — an exogenous shock expanding federal discretionary spending — and found through difference-in-differences estimation that campaign contributions increased by a log-point differential of 0.16 in the post-event period as firms with political connections captured disproportionate contract value. While that study examined defense contractors, its methodology is directly applicable here: when federal firefighting budgets expand through emergency supplemental appropriations or wildfire crisis spending, the organizations with established political relationships — contributions plus lobbying contacts — are positioned to influence how that money is allocated and under what employment terms. The Center for American Progress has documented the mechanism: contributions open doors, lobbying walks through them, and the combination is more effective than either alone, per its published analysis at americanprogress.org.

What connects all of this to the fires burning in Colorado and across the American West right now is a specific policy outcome. Federal contracting for wildland firefighting supplementation — the use of private Type II crews, contract helicopter operators, and non-federal firefighting resources during siege fire conditions — operates within a policy environment that has been systematically shaped by an organization that has spent $2.3 million on federal candidates and files quarterly lobbying disclosures targeting the Forest Service, BLM, OPM, and OMB. When federal officials say contractors are 'not acceptable' for certain firefighting roles, that determination does not emerge from a vacuum. It emerges from a regulatory and legislative environment built through years of documented lobbying contacts and campaign finance flows.

What remains hidden is the granular connection between specific IAFF lobbying contacts and specific contract policy decisions. The Senate SOPR quarterly filings for IAFF, queryable by Organization ID D000000135 at lda.senate.gov, would show the precise issue areas, the specific covered officials contacted, and the dates of those contacts — but the full filing-by-filing accounting was not reproduced in the available source material. The FEC disbursement records for IAFF-FIREPAC, searchable at FEC.gov, would show the specific dollar amounts flowing to specific candidates on specific committees — the Senate Appropriations Interior subcommittee, the House Natural Resources Committee — who hold jurisdiction over federal firefighting budgets and contracting rules. A full Freedom of Information Act request to the Forest Service and BLM for records of communications with IAFF representatives regarding contract crew policy, staffing ratios, and employment classification would close the remaining gap between the documented money flows and the documented policy outcomes. Until those records are pulled and published in full, the public knows the architecture of the influence system but not every brick.