Reporters from six newsrooms across six Western states, including CalMatters’ Rachel Becker, examined the shift in federal wildfire strategy in a pair of collaborative reports published this week. Their reporting found that the Trump administration has merged wildland firefighting crews from four federal agencies under a single command, part of a broader push toward what officials call a “suppression-first” approach — attacking fires immediately and aggressively rather than allowing some to burn under controlled conditions.

Federal officials argue the strategy better protects both communities and firefighters. But critics, including forestry experts and some state officials, say it abandons a more preventive approach that relies on prescribed burns and allowing low-intensity fires to clear out dry brush and dead vegetation that fuel bigger blazes later. Without that kind of fuel reduction, they warn, landscapes across the West will keep accumulating tinder for the next major fire.

Some observers have compared the administration’s new posture to the so-called “10 a.m. rule,” a decades-old Forest Service policy that required crews to extinguish every fire by the following morning. That approach was largely abandoned decades ago after research showed it contributed to unnaturally dense, fire-prone forests.

Reaction from Western states has been mixed. Jamie Barnes of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources said she backs a full-suppression strategy given the region’s prolonged drought and increasingly volatile fuel conditions, arguing it’s the safest option for both firefighters and residents.

California, however, has raised concerns — not over suppression tactics themselves, but over the administration’s broader plan to consolidate federal fire agencies. In a May letter to U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot warned that reorganizing federal firefighting operations could weaken the state’s wildfire preparedness and increase public safety risks, even as he acknowledged the goal of improving efficiency.

California’s stake in the debate is significant. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, known as Cal Fire, remains the largest firefighting agency of any state in the nation, giving Sacramento outsized influence in shaping how the state responds to federal policy changes.

In other Inland Empire news, the California Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments today on a case with deep roots in Riverside County. Justices will consider whether former Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco broke the law when his office seized roughly 650,000 ballots cast during last year’s statewide vote on redistricting.

The hearing merges two related lawsuits. In one, California Attorney General Rob Bonta accuses Bianco of unlawfully seizing and recounting ballots. Bianco, who later ran unsuccessfully for governor, maintains that his actions were legal because he had obtained judicial warrants to investigate alleged irregularities in the vote. Bonta counters that those warrants did not authorize the sheriff’s actions. Central to the case is a broader question: whether a county sheriff must halt election-related enforcement actions when directed to do so by the state attorney general.

The ballot fight traces back to last year’s statewide vote on Proposition 50, which California voters approved after Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic lawmakers sought to counter Texas Republicans’ redrawing of congressional districts to favor GOP candidates. California’s redistricting measure was designed to help Democrats in the fight for control of the U.S. House. Several other states have waged their own redistricting battles this election cycle, adding uncertainty to forecasts about which party will control the chamber after November.

Elsewhere in the state, a rural Sierra Nevada county is grappling with a very different kind of legal complication — one involving artificial intelligence. A California appeals court has appointed a judge to investigate how AI-generated errors may have affected criminal cases in Nevada County, where prosecutors used generative AI tools to help draft legal filings.

According to reporting by CalMatters’ Khari Johnson, prosecutors in the county of about 100,000 residents filed inaccurate information in at least four criminal cases last fall after relying on AI systems for writing or proofreading. A former prosecutor involved in some of the errors said in a sworn declaration that a supervisor blocked her from immediately notifying the court, defense attorneys and defendants once the mistakes were discovered. She also said the office had no formal AI policy in place, even though staff were encouraged to use the technology — tools that other studies have shown are prone to generating false or fabricated information.

Original source: CalMatters

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The consequences extend well beyond the immediate destruction. Rising wildfire risk is driving up insurance costs for homeowners, threatening iconic natural resources like the state’s giant sequoias, and putting pressure on the mountain watersheds that supply much of California’s drinking water.

Forecasters are warning that 2026 could bring another above-average fire season. Recent years have shown that dangerous fires can erupt even after a wet winter, and the numbers tell a sobering story: severe wildfires have tripled in size across the Sierra Nevada since 1990, while the financial toll from wildfire damage has more than quadrupled over that same period.

It’s understandable that Californians feel exhausted by this pattern. Generations of aggressive fire suppression allowed brush and vegetation to accumulate across the landscape, setting the stage for more destructive blazes. Add a warming climate to the mix, and the conditions for catastrophic fire have only worsened.

There is, however, reason for cautious optimism. State agencies have launched an ambitious, coordinated push to reduce wildfire danger across 1 million acres of wildland every year — a goal overseen by a state task force and matched to the scale of the crisis at hand.

A new analysis from the Public Policy Institute of California, drawing on data tracked by that task force, found real momentum building. Between 2021 and 2024, the state averaged 591,000 acres per year of treatment aimed at reducing wildfire hazard, and that pace has been accelerating.

The task force’s newly unveiled five-year action plan reinforces a “worst first” approach, targeting the most vulnerable landscapes for treatment. That strategy appears to be working: 83% of the acreage treated through thinning, controlled burns and other methods was located in zones with high wildfire potential, areas where homes and wildlands meet, or both.

One of the clearest successes has been the resurgence of what’s known as beneficial fire — a practice with deep roots in California history. Native tribes used low-intensity, controlled burns to manage the land for thousands of years before European settlement disrupted that tradition. Now, prescribed and cultural burning is making a comeback, with acreage treated this way nearly doubling from roughly 100,000 acres in 2021 to about 200,000 acres in 2024.

That growth in prescribed and cultural burning offers a relatively low-cost, ecologically sound path toward restoring forest and woodland health across the state.

But this progress faces real headwinds. Federal agencies are stepping back from commitments to reduce wildfire risk, and the U.S. Forest Service — which oversees more than half of California’s forestland, along with other federal partners — has seen significant budget and staffing cuts. That retreat introduces new uncertainty into California’s broader wildfire strategy.

State funding is also on shakier ground. California’s wildfire mitigation budget could shrink by hundreds of millions of dollars as key revenue streams dry up. Lawmakers recently voted to restructure the state’s cap-and-trade program, which charges polluters for their emissions, a change expected to cut roughly $200 million a year from wildfire prevention funding.

Without stable, dedicated funding, this work — which affects public health, housing costs, water supplies and far more — simply won’t happen at the scale California needs.

Our research points to several ways the task force could sharpen its approach going forward. That includes better tracking of how long fire-reduction treatments actually remain effective, and providing more support to smaller, under-resourced partners so that mitigation work on private land — which may currently go unreported — gets properly counted.

Above all, this effort depends on a strong working relationship between state and federal agencies, a partnership that has already produced measurable results. Protecting that collaboration should be treated as a top priority.

The risks facing California communities keep growing, but so does the progress being made to confront them. This is the wrong moment to let that momentum slip away.

Original source: CalMatters

The post California Has Made Fire Prevention Gains, But Federal Cutbacks and Funding Woes Threaten That Progress appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.