Elias: Playing fireman, Trump has actually increased California’s fire risk

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” to prevent fires. He conveniently ignores the fact that the federal government he controls owns most of the lands he wants raked and that any money to do it would have to come from the federal budget.

Facts have rarely dissuaded Trump from things he believes in or disputes, though, 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 where languages they may not recognize or understand are spoken.

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 wants to reduce the risk of gigantic wildfires, as he says he does, right now he would deploy many thousands of U.S. Forest Service workers in the 18 national forests around California, along with further thousands of National Guard troops. They could reduce 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 U.S. 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.

Trump has said these cuts in staff and office closures will help eliminate government waste and save billions of tax dollars. However, 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.

Aside from 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 full-time firefighters but instead are one who 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 (and former lumber executive) Tom Schultz told a reporter.

Meanwhile, Trump’s budget proposal would shift firefighting and prevention to a new agency under the U.S. 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.

Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com, and read more of his columns online at californiafocus.net.