Digging Into the Federal Wildfire FUD
and finding more fud
A brief report that ends with an invitation. There’s a whole bunch of this in the news:
I live a few minutes outside an enormous national forest, so I’ve been trying to test these warnings locally. But so far no one, and I mean no one, has answered any of my questions about wildfire staffing in the Angeles National Forest (ANF) — including the person in charge of it. So I drove into the mountains today, which was remarkably pleasant.
The local verdict, which may not apply to wherever you live: While the news is warning about apocalyptic staffing cuts, the Angeles National Forest is currently well-staffed to fight fires. Every federal fire station I made it to today in the mountains above Los Angeles had firefighters on duty, and the firefighters I asked said that the forest is currently staffed somewhere close to normally for wildfires — there’s no current emergency in staffing levels there. And the fire chief for the ANF posted this three days ago:
So there’s a bunch of seasonal firefighters in the pipeline, right around the moment you would expect them to start training.
But the other thing I heard at fire stations today was that federal wildland firefighters are working in a state of disturbing uncertainty, which is causing a sense of chaos even where daily reality is normal. The Trump administration is hinting at a bunch of tentative plans, and a draft executive order, aimed at changing the way the federal land agencies deal with wildfires. Washington Post headline, yesterday:
Sample details from that story:
Creating a federal agency devoted to fighting wildfires is not a new idea. Advocacy groups including the Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a non-profit that advocates for active and retired federal wildland firefighters, have pushed for this for years.
Several wildfire officials said they support the concept of consolidation and reform. They say a new wildland firefighting agency could streamline operations and improve coordination on a task now spread across several federal agencies including the Forest Service, Interior Department, Bureau of Land Management, and others — agencies that don’t solely focus on fire.
So we may end up in a much healthier place, with new policy that improves wildfire responses on public land, but for now none of the people in the firehouses know what the future looks like for them. And they don’t seem to be that happy about it.
There are ways to deal with that uncertainty, but those paths aren’t working. One of the places I’ve been trying to get answers about local fire staffing on federal lands has been the office of Rep. Judy Chu, whose district I live in. If you don’t know Judy Chu, she’s one of the idiots who appeared in the sub-moronic “choose your fighter” video that crapped itself out onto social media a few weeks ago. Screenshot, if you need a reminder:
This video still makes me cringe hard enough to cramp up, but let’s move on: In a congressional district with a portion of a national forest in it, and a significant urban interface, at a moment when wildfires are a uniquely sensitive topic…
…I can’t get anyone in my congressional offices to say anything about wildfire staffing on federal land, apparently because they’re very busy making tween girl TikTok videos and doing worthless symbol performance. This is a place for Congress to exercise budget authority and detailed oversight, but, forgive me for using complex technical language from the academic field of political science, Congress sucks. They’re all very busy doing high school theater and war tourism and repulsive battlefield cosplay and MS-13 tourism.
With a giant void where the representative government is supposed to be, my impression is that we’re all stuck asking these questions ourselves. If you can get a sense of the local staffing outlook for the federal public lands where you live, send word. And I know I have readers who work for, or are family to people who work for, the US Forest Service and other land agencies. I’d be glad to hear from you: Are our public lands staffed for wildfire?
Parting note about questions of principle, which are not the animal I’m hunting at this exact moment: If you read the Politico story that I linked to at the top, you’ll find a few non-useless elected officials talking about the value of shifting excessive federal land to state control, so states can take charge of more wildland firefighting and do, let us sincerely hope, a better job of managing it. I agree with the idea, but it’s too late in the year for that discussion to matter if we’re talking about what might burn this summer. For now, we need bodies in the big green trucks. I think the federal government should own less land, at some point, but I think they should protect what they currently own, and the communities around it.
ADDED LATER:
I should mention that the US Forest Service has been the bastard child of the federal government for years, and the current sense of chaos and worry in federal fire stations is neither a new development nor unique to the Trump administration. Sample headlines, and notice the dates:
These are old problems in their new form, not new problems.
So much to unpack and discuss ...
For starters, my first Forest Service seasonal ff job was in 1980, seems like, well a long time ago.
The bottomline up front; the wildland firefighting agencies in the US (USFS, BLM, NPS, FWS, and most state agencies, here it's CalFire) have been on a long slippery slope of dysfunction for decades. Education from liberal (ie not based on reality or historical fact) universities, and quota fulfilling gender or ethnicity points overshadowed decades of hard work. People (mostly those filling in those quota goals) with a BS in Forestry (and often near zero real world, out in the woods experience) got management and leadership positions, and faced near zero recourse when they failed. Those with the experience left, kept their heads down until retirement or converted to the prevailing trend (DEI before it was called DEI).
In my area (central Sierras) there has been a lot of fake news about cuts, but little if any ever took place. It is a bit early, north of the LA basin, most seasonal ff come on between mid May and mid June, but as of today I have not heard of any cuts.
As to combining all the federal agencies, I see a very mixed bag of possible outcomes.
The positive would be a significant reduction in upper level management duplication.
On the negative side, each federal land management agency has very different purposes, directives and doctrine. That hurdle, making firefighting strategies and tactics uniform across the country would be difficult at best. Making the Park Service take on the same land management rubrics as the Forest Service would be like asking Catholics to adopt Scientology.
The problem isn't so much the various agencies, it is the disfunction of government "experts" and the myopia of their perspectives. The forests (and homes, and people, and infrastructure, and wildlife, and watersheds) will burn to dust before some will base their actions on current and expected fire behavior.
And forest (and chaparral) "management" was lost thirty years ago when spotted owls, condors and obscure salamanders took precedence over human life.
Trying hard not to sound like the curmudgeon old guy, but here's one example. "Back in the day" when we weren't actually on a fire, we spent one day every two weeks training, and the rest were spent working on a fuelbreak, or actual forest management project. Now, at least in my area, zero fuelbreaks are cut, let alone maintained, zero.
So what's the answer(s)? No, the agencies are not being gutted. And if anyone decides to "fix" them it will have to be a cultural sea change.
If the forestry service practiced good land management, they wouldn't need to worry as much as about fires.
Clear the underbrush, get rid of the trash, and create a few firebreaks. Set up reservoirs, and so on. Be proactive.