The federal government is much more to blame for California's fires than California, despite Trump's ignorant accusations.
So, while it is true that mismanagement of forest lands by government agencies, especially by federal agencies (as they own most of these lands) is a big part of the problem, it still remains true that global warming is an increasingly important contributing factor to the fire danger.With wildfires raging and smoke choking the West Coast’s cities and towns, President Donald Trump has repeatedly blamed state officials in California, Oregon and Washington for the conflagrations, suggesting they have done a poor job of managing their forests—even suggesting that they somehow rake the forests to prevent fire.
But when Trump met California officials this week for a briefing on the wildfires, CalFire director Thomas Porter showed him a map of California’s fires, most of which were located on territory the map colored green.
“All of the green," Porter told him, "is federal lands.”
As residents of the region know well, huge swaths of the American West are federally owned. Nearly 60 percent of the forests in California, 25 percent of the forests in Oregon, and 44 percent in Washington are national forests. For the most part, the forests burning across the West—the fires the president blames on state officials—are on federal lands.
Forest fire management is a complex issue, but one thing is clear: the federal commitment to it has been declining for years, and Trump has done little to reverse it. The federal government’s spending on fire prevention has been shrinking; the budget for vegetation management fell from approximately $240 million in 2001 to $180 million in 2015, a decline of 24 percent.
It's not because the need has decreased. According to the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, of the 10 years on record with the largest acreage burned, nine have occurred since 2000, including the peak year in 2015. With the increase in the number and intensity of wildfires, the cost of fighting them has grown substantially. A 2015 report by the Forest Service points out that “as more and more of the agency’s resources are spent each year to provide the firefighters, aircraft, and other assets necessary to protect lives, property, and natural resources from catastrophic wildfires, fewer and fewer funds and resources are available to support other agency work—including the very programs and restoration projects that reduce the fire threat.”
The problem, in part, is that until recently, the Forest Service had no way to increase its funding in bad fire years, so unanticipated costs of firefighting had to come out of funds originally set aside for other priorities, like land management. This same report noted that in 1995, firefighting made up 16 percent of the Forest Service’s annual appropriated budget; in 2020, for the first time, firefighting constituted a majority of the Forest Service’s annual budget.
Along with this shift in resources, there has also been a corresponding shift in staff, with a 39 percent reduction in all staff other than firefighting personnel. As a result, the agency was forced to redirect dollars and staff focused on measures that could reduce the risk of fires by improving forest health. The more money spent on fighting fires, the less was available to prevent them—clearly a “robbing Peter to pay Paul” scenario. Were this problem left unchecked, Forest Service would be devoting more than two-thirds of its budget to firefighting in 2025.
Recognizing the problem, the Obama administration went to Congress to fix it. The ask was simple—stop forcing the Forest Service to pay for firefighting with the money intended for forest management and other programs designed to protect fish and wildlife, provide outdoor recreation, and manage rangelands and wilderness areas—all part of the agency’s legislated mission—and, instead, treat these extreme fire events like the disasters they are, and pay for them out of disaster assistance funds.
After years of debate, Congress finally reached a compromise in 2018 to ease this zero-sum approach by allowing the Forest Service to tap into disaster assistance funding when firefighting costs exceeded the Forest Service’s annual fire suppression budget. They called it the “fire fix.”
. . .
Managing wildland fire is a collaborative effort that requires a coordinated approach. Efforts to politicize wildfire by questioning the connection to climate change—in spite of established science—and to cast blame or assign responsibility for catastrophic fire based on party affiliation (i.e., somehow it is a problem only for states with Democratic governors), or to short circuit required project reviews for health, safety or environmental impact are counterproductive—to say the least.
As the president engages in partisan blame-shifting about a crisis happening on his own watch, there's one positive example to draw from, and it's far from Washington. Firefighting itself, a responsibility shared by the federal government, states, local officials and tribal government, is a model of cooperation. The wildland firefighting community and the non-partisan manner in which it operates provide a model for how government should function to prevent the problem of wildfires in the first place—not by pointing fingers, debating their cause or shirking responsibility, but by working together to improve the health and resilience of our nation’s forests and the well-being of the people it serves.
As mentioned in the above article, "Recognizing the problem, the Obama administration went to Congress to fix it." I'm sure that Trump probably tried to undo that, as well as weakening or eliminating so many other laudatory environmental initiatives and/or regulations initiated by Obama.