16 U.S.C. § 580p–2 — Deposit of fees collected under regulations relating to “Smokey Bear”; availability

This section tells the Secretary of Agriculture what to do with money collected under rules about "Smokey Bear." The Secretary of Agriculture writes regulations governing use of the name and image of "Smokey Bear." Those regulations can include fees, for instance when someone licenses the character. This section assumes such fees already exist under those separate regulations. The Secretary must take every fee collected this way and deposit it into a special account. The Secretary cannot treat this money as ordinary government revenue to spend anywhere. Every fee tied to "Smokey Bear" regulations must go into this one dedicated account, without exception. The account exists for a single stated purpose: to be available for furthering the nationwide forest-fire prevention campaign. Smokey Bear is the symbol of that public campaign. So money earned by licensing the character's name and image flows back into the very effort the character promotes. In short, this section creates a closed funding loop. Fees connected to "Smokey Bear" cannot be diverted elsewhere; they must fund fire prevention nationwide.

The record. The source credit indicates this section was originally enacted May 23, 1952, by chapter 327, § 3, of the act commonly known as the Smokey Bear Act, 66 Stat. 92. It was subsequently amended once, by Pub. L. 93–318, § 7, June 22, 1974, 88 Stat. 245. Beyond these two enactments and the single amendment, the source credit does not indicate further legislative activity affecting this section. Historical context. The 1952 act is generally understood to have established federal protection for the name and image of "Smokey Bear," the symbol used in the cooperative federal-state forest-fire prevention campaign that began in the 1940s. That campaign, associated with the U.S. Forest Service and the Advertising Council, sought to reduce human-caused wildfires through public education, and the Smokey Bear character became its central emblem. Provisions of this kind—directing fees from licensed or regulated uses of the character into a dedicated account—are commonly understood to have been intended to ensure that revenue generated from use of the Smokey Bear name and likeness would be channeled back into supporting the prevention campaign itself, rather than being treated as general federal receipts. The specific reasons Congress structured the fee-deposit mechanism as it did, or the purpose of the 1974 amendment in particular, are not established by the record before me, and no further detail should be inferred beyond what the statutory text and source credit provide.