At 9:36 a.m. June 27, Hutcherson, Sydney Watson, 27, and Emily Barker, 38, were dispatched to a rugged part of the Colorado Plateau to put out the Knowles Fire — at the time less than an acre in size. As anticipated red-flag conditions intensified, the crew died when multiple nearby fires combined and overtook them. Nathan Matthews, their 43-year-old fellow crew member, succumbed to burn injuries from the fire a few weeks later. They were the first of 21 wildland firefighters to die this year, according to data from the Lessons Learned Center, a federal organization that tracks wildland fire safety, and confirmed by the U.S. Forest Service. This has been the third-deadliest year so far for wildland firefighters since at least 2016, according to a Washington Post review of two federal datasets.

The deaths have exacerbated concerns from firefighters, lawmakers and experts about how the Trump administration is reshaping the way the nation fights fires across broad swaths of the U.S., and has prompted new questions about decisions to send crews directly into certain remote, burning terrain.

Interior Department officials this year issued an edict: All fires on public lands should be swiftly attacked in an effort to extinguish them as soon as possible. The shift came as federal forest and agricultural agencies had lost scores of workers in part because of government budget cuts and were fusing into the Wildland Fire Service, a new unified agency that decides when and how to dispatch firefighters.

The directive made what’s known as “full suppression” a permanent default, countering the ability federal managers have had for decades to determine when fires should be suppressed, left to burn, or managed. Fighting wildfires is an inherently dangerous job, and responding to them is anything but cut and dry, federal fire officials, firefighters and experts said. But now, those same people say, the mandate means more crews will default to going directly into a fire even if conditions are dicey — even when it is burning far away from people or property. Interior officials have said they consider firefighter safety when determining fire response.

The Knowles Fire, and what happened there, encapsulates that risk, according to 10 federal wildland firefighters and independent experts. There were several factors that may have indicated a need to wait a day or so to send in Hutcherson’s crew, they said. There were powerful gusts and low humidity forecast; the fire was small and in the middle of the wilderness, and thus otherwise could be monitored; the area was difficult to get out of. Two federal wildland firefighters said still, they understood why officials deployed them: Better to put out a fire while it’s small than to have it blow up — the nearest community was under a pre-evacuation order.

The federal report shared with Hutcherson’s family in October and released this week paints a picture of a chaotic day that led to missteps, which caused operations to fracture further. It noted that staff vacancies, a lack of experienced personnel, and poor information flow prevented leaders and those on the ground from having the full picture while crews were responding to at least eight fires simultaneously. High winds kept thwarting critical aircraft, and there was one main helicopter responsible for crews up to 30 miles apart. When pressed, officials could not tell the family whether key Wildland Fire Service officers, who deployed the crew, knew where they were at all times and whether anyone will be held accountable.

Months before the war in Iran, U.S. Army officers called for the deployment of cheap Ukrainian interceptors to the Middle East. The Pentagon ignored them.

The Trump administration plans to redirect or withhold nearly all funding that Congress had slated for international family planning aid this year – about $605 million – according to an internal US State Department budget report and a memo to lawmakers that were obtained by CNN.

The budget plans also involve an effort to move nearly a billion dollars into a global health innovation fund benefiting US corporations, while sharply cutting global health funding for low- and middle-income countries.