The U.S. Forest Service began this week transferring money from some of its programs to help fuel its dwindling firefighting budget, according to an internal memo from Chief Tom Tidwell to regional foresters.

The memo, dated Aug. 25, outlines a two-step process to transfer $450 million from various program budgets to the fire suppression fund, which pays for the agency’s firefighting efforts around the country. Forest Service officials announced this summer that, for the first time in the agency’s 110-year history, firefighting makes up more than 50 percent of the agency’s overall budget.

In his letter to staff, Tidwell said that the so-called practice of fire borrowing would begin during the week of Aug. 24.

“The Washington Office budget staff will work directly with your budget staffs to collect information on significant impacts these transfers will have on your units,” Tidwell said in the letter.

Congress has worked for years to change how the Forest Service funds firefighting, but efforts to change fire suppression funding have stalled. The latest effort to pass the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, from the House of Representatives, would add severe wildfires to a list of disasters that qualify for additional funds from the federal government. The act would end the Forest Service’s need to rob its own budgets to fund wildfire suppression.

For 2015, the Forest Service’s fire suppression budget was set at $1.01 billion, with $174 million left for the fiscal year, which ends in September. With massive wildfires burning in California, Oregon and Washington, the agency expects fires to continue to burn for the next couple of months, further depleting the firefighting budget.

In July the agency predicted that it would spend between $869 million and $1.53 billion fighting fires before the end of the fiscal year.

The first fire transfer will add $250 million to the fire suppression budget, according to Tidwell’s memo. The second transfer, which has not been given a date, will move $200 million into the fire suppression budget.

The last fire transfer, done in 2012, affected land management projects in forests around the country. In 2014, the Forest Service released a state-by-state study of the impacts of that fire transfer process. Several Colorado land management projects around the state went unfunded due to a lack of money.

“I recognize that this direction will have significant effects on the public whom we serve and on our many partners, as well as agency operations, target accomplishments and performance,” Tidwell wrote. “We will strive to reduce impacts, but cannot avoid them altogether.”