CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, AUGUST 15, 2025 OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“ ‘FIREMAN’ TRUMP INCREASES FIRE SEASON DANGERS”
Many politicians love to play
fireman, often visiting disaster scenes and advising real firefighters on how
they can do things better.
No politico does this more
than President Trump, who frequently advises California governors they need to
“rake the forests” in order to prevent fires. He conveniently ignores the fact
that the federal government he controls is the owner of the vast majority of
the lands he wants raked and that any money to do it would have to come from
the federal budget.
But facts have rarely
dissuaded Trump from things he believes in or disputes, including items like
climate change and whether captured undocumented immigrants have the right to
court hearings before they are summarily dumped back into their home countries
– or others whose languages they may not recognize or understand.
So it’s also been this year
when it comes to firefighting preparation, as the state faces an unusually
fire-prone fall season, with more than two years of unusually heavy rain- and
snowfall contributing to thicker than usual underbrush.
If Trump really wanted to
reduce the risk of gigantic wildfires, as he says he does, he would right now
be deploying many thousands of Forest Service workers in the 18 national
forests around California, along with further thousands of National Guard troops.
They could be reducing a genuine danger if they cut and removed underbrush
rather than standing around in front of federal buildings, as they did for
weeks after mostly peaceful protests broke out in Los Angeles against
Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps aiming at producing record numbers
of deportations.
But no, Trump isn’t doing any
of that. Instead, he is maintaining cuts designed by the now relatively
inactive Department of Government Efficiency, once headed by billionaire
political donor Elon Musk. The firings relevant to California wildfires involve
thousands of workers from the Forest Service, the National Weather Service, the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Emergency
Management Agency, usually called FEMA.
Trump has said these cuts in
staff and office closures will help eliminate government waste and save
billions of tax dollars.
But those four agencies all
play critical parts in California’s wildfire prevention and response efforts,
from forecasting and forest management (yes, raking and cutting underbrush is
included here) to post-fire disaster relief.
The cuts, coming just when
climate change is making California wildfires steadily more severe, put this
state at a disadvantage compared with past fire seasons, when blazes grew
steadily larger and more destructive even as the now-fired federal employees
worked to hold them down.
Besides forecasters and
analysts who help predict where fires will go once they’ve begun, more than
1,400 “red card” Forest Service employees were also cut. These are not fulltime
firefighters, but deploy to large firestorms and help with operations. Officials
are now trying to call many of them back, but a large proportion have moved on
to other jobs.
What’s more, Trump has
ordered the Forest Service to change its priorities and emphasize logging,
mining and oil and gas drilling on federal lands, rather than making fire
resistance its top task.
State officials say the
change in priorities combined with much lower staffing levels will leave
California more vulnerable to big fires than it has been in recent years.
“We are getting back to the
basics of managing our national forests for their intended purposes of
producing timber, clean water, recreation and other necessities for the
American taxpayer,” Forest Service chief Tom Schultz told a reporter. Schultz
is a former lumber executive.
Meanwhile, Trump’s budget
proposal would shift firefighting and prevention to a new agency under the
Interior Department, but give it less funding than before. That worries some
Western state senators who fear it may spawn the biggest wildfire season in decades
later this year.
That may be what California
and the West get with a president who dabbles in firefighting, an area where he
has almost no expertise, but loves to throw around verbal platitudes.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment