The Brief

When Kekoa Gittens was 3, his preschool teacher told his mother he was a problem. He couldn’t sit still. He didn’t participate. When other kids learned the alphabet, he didn’t pay attention.

The next year, Kekoa’s classroom problems worsened. His mother, Sonia Gittens, took him to his pediatrician, who referred the boy to an eye doctor.

That doctor looked at the back of Kekoa’s eyes and diagnosed him with myopic degeneration, a dramatic form of nearsightedness.

“They are too little. They don’t know how to express themselves and say, ‘I cannot see it, teacher,’” said Sonia Gittens, who lives in the Marin County town of Corte Madera.

Today, Kekoa is a successful high schooler, but too many kids don’t get their eyes checked until they’re far behind in school.

Vision problems, particularly nearsightedness, have grown more common among American children. Roughly one in four school-age kids, or 25%, wear glasses or contacts, a proportion that increases as kids get older, according to 2019 federal survey data.

In California too few children on Medi-Cal like Kekoa are getting their eyes checked, and the problem is growing worse. Just 16% of school-age kids on Medi-Cal saw an eye doctor between 2022 and 2024 for first-time eye exams, continuing vision check ups or glasses, according to a report commissioned by the California Optometric Association. That’s down from 19% eight years earlier. The report, based on two years of Medi-Cal data, suggests that the state is moving in the wrong direction even as eye problems become more prevalent among kids.

Medi-Cal provides insurance for low-income Californians and those with disabilities.

“Every day when I see these children it is always a surprise to me that the kids are not getting the care they need,” said Ida Chung, a pediatric optometrist and an associate dean at Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona.

The trend indicated in the report is alarming, Chung said. In her clinic, where about half of children are on Medi-Cal, it’s common for kids with congenital vision problems to visit for the first time when they’re in first grade or later. That indicates to Chung that many kids don’t have enough access to eye care.

Though kids might be getting basic vision screenings at school or from a pediatrician, some eye problems are still overlooked. “It’s something the child had before they were born,” Chung said.

Eye exams decrease statewide

Colusa County, a rural farming region north of Sacramento, saw the sharpest drop in kids’ eye doctor appointments in the state from 20% between 2015-16 to just under 2% between 2022-24.

Nearly all counties — 47 out of 58 — performed worse on vision care than they did in the past, the report shows, with some, like Colusa, declining significantly.

Most of the severe declines happened in rural areas, although urban counties like San Francisco and Los Angeles also saw decreases. Only seven counties improved the rate of children receiving eye exams or glasses. Four counties were excluded for comparison in the report because the numbers were too small.

“The decline in performance here is so widespread that something really needs to happen,” said David Maxwell-Jolly, a health care consultant who authored the report and the former director of the Department of Health Care Services, which oversees Medi-Cal. “These numbers are way lower than what you would expect to be seeing if we’re doing a good job of detecting kids with treatable conditions.”

A spokesperson for the Department of Health Care Services said in an email the state could not confirm the accuracy of an external report, noting that vision services can be difficult to track because “not all encounters are captured in a single, comprehensive dataset.”

For example, many initial vision screenings take place in the pediatrician’s office during well-child visits, which include eye and hearing screenings as well as immunizations and developmental checks. State data shows about half of kids with Medi-Cal receive well-child visits.

Still, experts say the low numbers tell a real story: if children were reliably getting follow-up care from initial screenings, the share who get comprehensive eye exams and glasses would be closer to 25-30% — in line with the known prevalence of vision problems among kids — rather than the 16% found in the optometric association’s report.

Maxwell-Jolly said the analysis he conducted replicated an internal, unpublished department report tracking vision services between 2015 and 2016. His analysis, based on data obtained through a public records act request, updated the results for more recent years.

The state’s most recent Preventive Services Report, which measures how well Medi-Cal delivers preventive care to children, shows the rate of comprehensive eye exams for children and young adults ages 6-21 is similar to the optometric association’s analysis at 17%.

Contra Costa County experienced the third largest decline in children’s eye care in the state. A spokesperson for Contra Costa Health Plan said Medi-Cal health plans are not required by the state to track vision benefits and that it would take time to understand the data. The state, however, does track vision services internally, according to the health care services department.

A bill sponsored by the optometric association and authored by Assemblymember Patrick Ahrens, a Democrat from Cupertino, aims to require the state to establish vision benefit quality measures and report performance data publicly. The goal of the legislation is to track where kids do not have enough access to vision services and to ensure that Medi-Cal providers are improving services.

Rural challenges

Amy Turnipseed, chief strategy and government affairs officer for Partnership HealthPlan of California, said rural parts of the state struggle to find enough providers. The nonprofit health insurer provides Medi-Cal for 24 northern counties, including Colusa and Modoc.

In Modoc County, which borders Oregon and Nevada, one optometrist serves a 90-mile radius. Partnership has worked closely with that optometrist to ensure they continue accepting Medi-Cal patients, Turnipseed said.

“In rural counties with lower populations, losing even one provider can exponentially impact the access to services to families,” Turnipseed said. “In the past few years we’ve seen vision providers reduce or limit their Medi-Cal, which makes it harder for families to see providers.”

An assortment of glasses at Vision to Learn mobile optometry clinic at Esther Lindstrom Elementary School in Lakewood on March 20, 2026. Photo by Ariana Drehsler for CalMatters Modoc is one of just seven counties where more children have received vision care in recent years, according to the report.

Providers frequently cite low reimbursement rates from the state as a reason for not accepting Medi-Cal patients. The California Optometric Association estimates only about 10% of its members accept Medi-Cal. The reimbursement rate for a comprehensive eye exam is about $47, said Kristine Shultz, association executive director.

“Our reimbursement rates haven’t increased in 25 years. Imagine getting paid what you were paid 25 years ago,” Shultz said.

Schools check kids’ vision, but follow-up is spotty

State law requires schools to periodically check kids’ vision starting in kindergarten. Those screenings are a good bellwether for if a child is struggling to see in class, said Chung with Western University. The problem is getting the kids who fail the screening to an eye doctor.

Chung runs an academic optometry clinic that works with local schools in Pomona. Each year up to 35% of students fail the screening, meaning they likely have a vision problem. But based on conversations with school nurses, Chung said only about 7% of those children then go to an eye doctor and come back to school with glasses.

Chung, who chairs the children’s vision committee for the California Optometric Association, said colleagues who work with school districts around the state report similar experiences.

“If a high number of those children are not getting the follow up care, we may just be fooling ourselves and checking a box,” Chung said. “We’re in compliance with the law in California but are we really helping the children?”

For some families, the answer is no. That’s what happened to Kekoa when he was 3. The school checked his eyes and said he might have vision problems, but his mother, Gittens, waited. Her son was still learning his numbers and letters. How would he be able to read an eye chart, she reasoned. It wasn’t until his problems got worse that Gittens took Kekoa to an eye doctor.

Now, at 15, Kekoa wears contacts and likes athletics. He needs to see to compete in capoeira martial arts competitions and surf on the weekends, his mother said.

First: Dr. Kiyana Kavoussi shows letters on a monitor during Noah Mattison’s, 11, visual acuity test. Last: Optician Maya Ortega looks at Italia Martin’s, 6, eyes before she chooses new glasses inside the Vision to Learn mobile optometry clinic at Esther Lindstrom Elementary School in Lakewood on March 20, 2026. Photos by Ariana Drehsler for CalMatters Many parents lack the resources to take their kids to the doctor, or simply wait. Notes from school nurses flagging that a child failed a vision screening may also get lost in a backpack on the way home, educators say. The California Department of Education does not track the results of school vision screenings.

Vision To Learn, a nonprofit, created a mobile eye clinic to help bridge the gap between kids failing school vision screenings and getting glasses. The group brings an optometrist to campus, meaning kids that need an eye exam can get one the same day and go home having gotten a prescription and ordered glasses.

Damian Carroll, chief of staff and national director, said Vision to Learn’s numbers tell a similar story to Chung’s. About one-third of students screened are unable to read the eye chart, but very few of those kids have adequate glasses.

In the California schools where the program operates, around 70% of kids who have been prescribed glasses did not own a pair. Another 20% had glasses with outdated prescriptions, according to internal data, Carroll said.

And that gap can drastically affect learning outcomes or behavior in school.

“First and second graders who try on glasses the first time are blown away because they just thought that’s how the world looked,” Carroll said. “They can see the leaves on the trees and the math on the board, and it’s shocking to them.”

For the record: This story has been updated to reflect that Maxwell-Jolly’s study replicated the methodology of an earlier one by the Department of Health Care Services, but did not republish department findings.

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Four firefighters, two helicopter pilots and a contractor bulldozing a fireline have died in Colorado, Utah and Oregon this year.

Fast-moving fires have burned millions of acres and destroyed hundreds of homes and buildings in the West. California, which is having an unusually quiet fire summer, has deployed engines and crews to fight fires raging in Colorado and the Pacific Northwest — but even this well-resourced state continues to feel vulnerable.

The U.S. has been at Preparedness Level 5 since July 18, a status that means the federal government is committing the highest possible level of crews, aircraft and firefighting resources to wildfires across the country. And yet requests for help or equipment are going unanswered.

This dangerous fire season hit as the Trump administration has reshaped how America fights wildfire — consolidating crews from across Interior Department agencies into a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service. The new agency and the U.S. Forest Service are pursuing “full suppression” of every new blaze.

Administration officials say the aggressive approach is essential to protect firefighters and communities during a hazardous summer in an abnormally hot and dry West. Critics, though, worry it could worsen a long-standing problem: Decades of extinguishing wildfires and climate change-induced drought have left Western forests full of dry fuels, contributing to conditions that can produce catastrophic fires. Making full suppression the default response, they argue, could perpetuate that problem while demanding more firefighting resources than the government has available.

People gather along Highway 78 after having been forced to evacuate Beulah, Colorado as the Aspen Acres fire raced toward the small town on June 29, 2026.

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Mike Sweeney

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The Colorado Sun

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A coalition of nonprofit newsrooms in six Western states conducted roughly two dozen interviews with federal and state officials, former agency leaders and firefighters, experts and advocates. Reporting from California, Colorado, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming shows how on-the-ground changes made by the Trump administration have affected our ability to fight fires amid increasingly destructive conditions.

Federal officials dispute that the reorganization played any role in the deaths of firefighters this year. And while officials in several Western states say the new fire service has so far caused few disruptions on the ground, interviews with former government officials, firefighters and researchers show there are concerns about what the administration’s broader changes could mean for how the country lives with fire over the long term.

The 10 a.m. rule

Some see the full suppression strategy as the return of a discredited 1930s-era “10 a.m. rule,” a former Forest Service directive to put out new fires by the next morning. Today, that strategy demands vast resources, critics point out, while removing the option used by the agency in more recent years to allow carefully chosen fires to burn naturally for the benefit of forests. They argue that will leave forests more vulnerable to catastrophic fires in the future.

Planned burning, or “prescribed fire is never even going to scratch the surface of the number of acres that need to burn every year,” said Johanna Nosal, a professional forester who worked for the U.S. Forest Service in California, Colorado and Montana for 15 years before accepting a federal buyout in 2025.

“We're putting these fires out, and sometimes we’re successful at it … but it’s just a year-to-year Band-Aid,” Nosal told the collaboration, “and what eventually happens is you have a lack of resources and these weather periods that will create these huge blazes that no matter what you will do will keep spreading.”

U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz argues full suppression is essential for this hazardous summer. And Brian Fennessy — former fire chief for the Orange County Fire Authority, now director of the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service — defends a policy shift it’s made: Federal officials who want to promote forest health can no longer make the final call about whether to let a fire burn.

Previously at the Interior Department, “when it was a fire for resource benefit, fire [officials] may have had a say, but they did not hold the final decision,” which was made by agency land managers, he told The Colorado Sun. “Now, we hold, on the fire side, that final decision.”

At the Forest Service, underlying policies still provide the authority to manage wildfire to benefit forests. But a proposal to move the Forest Service (USDA) firefighting program into the U.S. Wildland Fire Service is stoking fears that could change.

This summer, Schultz said, the Forest Service has not revived the 10 a.m. rule: “We aren't making any commitment to that time frame.”

U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz speaks during a media tour at the fire camp for the Widemouth 2 Fire in Kanosh, Utah on Aug. 6, 2026.

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Bethany Baker

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The Salt Lake Tribune

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Instead, he told the collaboration, its full suppression strategy includes two approaches: Direct and indirect.

“Direct is when you go right at it. Indirect is when you look at the topography,” he said. “The tactics will be different. Firefighter safety is critical, but also looking at the values at risk. We're looking at structures. We're looking at timber. We're looking at grass. We're looking at fencing. All of those things go into how we prioritize,” he said.

Adrienne Freeman, a Forest Service spokesperson based in California, said the approach ultimately comes down to firefighter safety, the structures and people at risk, and the agency’s firefighting capacity nationwide.

With crews stretched thin on fires raging across the country, she said, there simply isn’t the bandwidth to manage a fire for ecological benefit right now.

“If something goes funny, we don't know if we're going to get the resources to manage it — and we pretty much know we aren't because that's not where houses are,” Freeman said. “No one is going to make that decision when we're at PL5” — the nation’s highest level of fire activity and response.

Even past fires that drew public criticism over the perception that the Forest Service “let them burn” often weren’t being managed for ecological benefit at all, according to a 2023 Forest Service analysis. Researchers found that concerns for firefighter safety — not nature — drove delayed suppression far more often.

“This is the thing: people think this is black and white, and nothing about land management is black and white,” Freeman said.

Utah supports the full suppression policy, “mainly because of where we're at condition-wise, the historical drought, the dry fuels, and the intensity of these fires,” to protect firefighters and communities, said Jamie Barnes, recently appointed as director of the Department of Natural Resources.

“We will never put people in an area that is unsafe for firefighters. We will always take an indirect approach from that if we have to,” she said.

With the country at its highest level of preparedness, resource allocation will vary by fire, Schultz acknowledged.

“But in terms of this time of the year, right now, we are not going to just sit back and let fire go and achieve other objectives,” Schultz said. “We're going to be aggressively suppressing.”

‘Fear of fire’

Bobbie Scopa is a 45-year firefighting veteran who worked for local, state and federal agencies, primarily in Western states. When she began in 1974, blazes were smaller, she said. “They weren’t ripping like they do now.”

The Forest Service shifted away from the 10 a.m. policy and began allowing some fires to burn for landscape health in 1971. But pressure from states has sometimes discouraged that federal policy, said Nosal, who now lives in Butte, Mont.

“Pretty much every administration I worked under,” she said, “there’s been at least one year when they're like, ‘We’re not gonna let managed fires happen, we want to get everything under control as soon as possible.’”

Hand crews continue to work on the Bonneville Fire in Salt Lake City, on June 22, 2026.

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Chris Samuels

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The Salt Lake Tribune

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Nosal spent her 15 years with the Forest Service removing and thinning trees and other vegetation that would have been cleared out by smaller fires, she said. In the sagebrush ecosystems that cover the Great Basin, suppression has led to encroachment by pinyon-juniper woodlands and other trees.

“Even in those really dry forest types, you’re seeing denser forests and more continuous forests than would have been there,” she said. “That means when a fire does roll through … you just get these really intense fires that burn everything, which historically isn’t the natural fire regime.”

In other areas, such as the Sierra Nevada, the forests are just too dense, she said.

“Historically, California state agencies have funded wildfire safety projects on federal lands in response to a lack of federal investment,” California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said in a letter to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins in May.

Since the start of the Newsom administration alone, Crowfoot said, the state has invested nearly half a billion dollars in projects on federal lands.

The spread of homes and other development into the wildland-urban interface (WUI) also has changed firefighting, Scopa said. “If a fire starts before there are houses, and firefighters show up, the Hot Shots cut lines, firefighters lay lines along the edge of the fire, they have a simple fire,” she said. “They’re going to come up with a strategy to anchor and flank the fire while it’s small.”

Add just a few houses, and “some of the firefighters are going to go to the houses and start prepping to protect the properties,” she said. “Now, you have fewer firefighters on the fire. It totally complicates work for the firefighters. And it requires more people.”

Scopa estimated federal agencies would need another 30,000 to 40,000 firefighters to be able to implement full suppression, “and you still wouldn’t be successful.”

Multiple requests for hand crews and engines went unfilled on the Widemouth 2 Fire, Tony DeMasters, incident commander of Great Basin Team 2, told The Tribune. The fire has burned nearly 130,000 acres in western Utah.

“We’re getting international help,” he continued. “That’s just how severe the fire season is, and we’re only in August. We got another 8, 10, maybe 12 weeks to go.”

It’s common for resources to be this scarce, DeMasters added, when the Great Basin region and nation are at Preparedness Level 5. “When we go to those planning levels, that means everything is strapped.”

The Forest Service has roughly 14,000 employees who manage and respond to fires, including around 11,800 firefighters.

The Wildland Fire Service employs fewer than 6,000 federal personnel and supports around 900 tribal personnel to cover more than 500 million acres of public and tribal lands across the country.

A new fire service

To create the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, the Trump administration combined firefighters from four Department of the Interior agencies: Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Fennessy comes to the role after nearly eight years as chief of the Orange County Fire Authority, where he built one of the country's first all-hazard incident management teams and pushed an aggressive aviation strategy that became a model for regional wildfire response.

“The goal of this is to reduce internal redundancy,” Brock Uhlig, a chief at the new service, told Nevada lawmakers at a May interim committee meeting. “Members of the public will see the exact same product.”

By July in Nevada, it was “kind of business as usual and everyone’s still collaborating and responding to fires,” said Ryan Shane, State Forester Firewarden. But, he acknowledged, it was early in the season. “Time is going to tell what improvements we are going to see … or if there are any gaps.”

Utah officials have seen the transition go “very smoothly,” said Jamie Barnes, recently appointed as the director of Utah’s Department of Natural Resources. “We haven't seen any issues with firefighters on the ground or financial resources.”
In California, for all the local, state and federal borders within the state, firefighters from different agencies often converge on the same wildland fires.

As the Timber Fire scoured steep, coastal national forest lands around Big Sur, Cal Fire stepped in with its own incident management team to orchestrate the firefight — the federal teams were busy on other fires, or taking mandatory rest.

Earlier this summer, the fast-moving Dove Fire took off near a Yosemite gateway town. As the fire burned, Emily Kilgore, a public information officer for Cal Fire's Tuolumne-Calaveras Unit, said she hadn’t noticed any changes to the deployment of federal resources.

“They were requested. They responded. They worked in tandem as one of our cooperators to assist us to gain containment on the Dove Fire,” Kilgore said on the phone, over the beat of a helicopter responding to another fire that had just ignited nearby.

Cal Fire headquarters agreed, saying there have been no changes to its fire suppression relationship with federal agencies.

The “field-level folks” who have spoken with Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a nonprofit based in Sparks, Nevada, haven’t seen any negative impact, president Riva Duncan told the collaboration.

“But speaking to fire managers, they said it was pretty clunky for them,” Duncan said. “They’ve restructured decision-making authority, so there’s a lot of ‘Where do I go to now if I need something approved?’ There’s not as much communication as folks had hoped for.”

“Clunky” communication may be occurring at times, Fennessy said. “I mean, we’re talking about thousands of people. I’m sure that probably occurs. But that’s not the feedback I’m getting and it’s not from my people.”

Officials are still investigating whether the transition played any role in the late June deaths of three federal firefighters who were killed while battling the Knowles Fire in Colorado and a fourth who died later from his injuries. Fennessy said he finds the suggestion that there may be a connection “offensive. It is absolutely wrong. … It’s just ludicrous.”

There is “absolutely zero connection between the rollout, the unification and these fatalities,” he said. “I am close enough to the investigation that is still ongoing, to certainly say that.”

The California Firefighters Memorial on the state Capitol grounds on March 4, 2022.

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Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters

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The firefighters were part of a helitack crew that got trapped near the Colorado-Utah border when high winds drove small, lightning-started wildfires in Utah. Sydney Watson, 27, of Warrior, Alabama, worked for the Wildland Fire Service, as did a fourth firefighter, Nathan Matthews, 43, of Lincoln, Nebraska, who was injured in the burnover and died later.

Emily Barker, 38, of Clinton Township, Michigan, and Nick Hutcherson, 27, of Glendale, Arizona, worked for the Forest Service.

Duncan stressed that investigations remain ongoing and no conclusions are available. “But fatalities really affect the workforce,” Duncan said. “There’s a lot of fire season left and people are fearful. The investigations take a long time to come out, and it’s frustrating if there are important lessons to learn.”

Fears for the future

Rep. Andrea Salinas, an Oregon Democrat, pointed out to Schultz in July that removing fire personnel from the four Interior agencies separates them from former colleagues who are responsible for restoring forests and reducing fuels.

"This proposal would fracture the critical communications link between land management and fire management," Salinas said at a July 22 House Agriculture Committee hearing.

The disconnect could mean that decisions once made between colleagues will have to be negotiated among agencies, said Brad Washa, an assistant professor of Wildland Fire Science at Utah State University.

“Down the road, will [fire personnel] be sitting in a different office and not next to the folks that are managing the natural resource?” asked Washa, a former BLM firefighter.

When working together, for example, a land manager could easily alert firefighters to not bulldoze lines in areas that could affect endangered species or cultural resources, he said. That may become more difficult now. “The land management agency might lose some of its ability to exert its authority in managing the natural resource,” Washa said.

These issues are why the National Association Forest Service Retirees opposes the creation of the new fire agency, president Bill Avey said.

“We don’t think wildfire should be divorced from the land — that’s been a policy failure,” he said. “We continue to stand on the fact that this national wildland fire service is the wrong solution.”

But Fennessy argues there is no disconnect.

“We’ve not moved anybody on the Interior side out of where they are stationed. Offices that hold both land managers and executive firefighters, those offices haven’t changed,” he said. “They talk to each other every day. … I question the motive or intent of those that want to make that argument.”

Fennessy said his agency recognizes that “land managers are the resource experts” and that they are “intimately involved and engaged.” Fire officials and land managers “need to be in lockstep,” he said, “when we’re doing prescribed fire or preparing for whatever treatment it may be.”

The Forest Service is undergoing its own reform right now. Its headquarters are moving west from Washington, D.C., to Salt Lake City and regional centers will be closed, with research consolidated in Fort Collins, Colorado. The Forest Service has lost 16% of its workforce since 2024, Salinas noted.

“This sweeping reorganization creates more questions than answers and the fact that it’s being implemented right as wildfire season is upon us is alarming,” Salinas told Schultz. “Doing so threatens the Forest Service overall — the loss of staff, and the institutional knowledge they have, should not be casualties in the Trump administration’s reorganization of the Forest Service. Each is too valuable to be lost.”

Few states are better equipped to weather the federal firefighting changes than California. 

California has invested billions in firefighting, a strategy that has carried through multiple administrations, with different emphases at different times. But it all amounts to this: California has its own people and equipment to rely on, including the world’s largest aerial firefighting fleet.

Cal Fire — officially the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection — is the largest state-run fire department. As California experienced some of its most destructive wildfires on record, Cal Fire’s staffing skyrocketed — climbing past more than 12,000 employees, according to the agency.

It now employs more wildland firefighters than any agency in the world besides the U.S. Forest Service, according to a 2025 white paper led by researchers with Stanford University’s Climate & Energy Policy Program.

CalFire firefighters carry a fire hose up a hillside during the Sandy Fire in Simi Valley on May 18, 2026.

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Zin Chiang

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CalMatters

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The department is primarily responsible for rural, mostly privately owned wildlands that make up about one-third of the state’s acreage.

But federal agencies are tasked with protecting about half of the state.

California spends big because it has a lot at stake. Last year’s catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles alone killed 31 people, hastened the deaths of hundreds more, and cost up to $131 billion in total property and capital losses, according to one UCLA analysis.

California’s leadership is concerned about the Trump administration’s reorganization of the Forest Service, its staff cuts and its closure of research facilities.

California has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on wildfire safety projects on federal lands under Newsom — spending Crowfoot said has often compensated for a lack of federal investment.

“While I understand the intention to operate a more efficient federal agency, many of these changes could impact our state’s wildfire readiness and create added public safety risks,” Crowfoot said in his May letter to Rollins.

Crowfoot said that it’s critical to work with federal partners who have enough money and staff to get ahead of the next disaster.

“If we fail to do so, we will again be faced with disaster recovery costs that far exceed the costs of preventing disasters from happening in the first place.”

No simple answer

The Department of Agriculture’s 2027 budget proposes transferring the departments, which includes the Forest Service, wildland firefighting resources and responsibilities into the new Wildland Fire Service.

The department awarded a $1.16 million contract to study consolidating all federal wildland fire operations into the new agency, according to a statement on Aug. 4. The department expects the report to be complete by Feb. 15, 2027, which means its results won’t be available for the fiscal 2027 budgeting that begins in September.

The Forest Service extinguishes more than 95% of the fires on its forests, Scopa said, but pursuing full suppression permanently wouldn’t be realistic.

“There’s no simple answer. We’re not gonna put [out] all the fires,” she said. “We’re never going to be successful. … The environment is not conducive to that, the fuels are not conducive to that, the staffing is not conducive to that.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story first appeared on Long Beach Post.

Tens of thousands of households lost power Sunday night in and around Long Beach’s coastal neighborhoods, including Bluff Park, Alamitos Beach and Belmont Shore. Crews were still trying to restore power to many of them on Monday morning.

The outage began at about 6:40 p.m. when an underground electrical vault caught fire near the Bluff Heights neighborhood.

Firefighters extinguished the vault on Broadway near Newport Avenue, said Long Beach Fire Department spokesperson Brian Fisk, and SCE crews de-energized the line.

The blackout initially affected 26,626 customers, according to the Southern California Edison outage map.

The boundaries of the outage were:

• West of Quincy Avenue
• East of Alamitos Avenue
• North of East Ocean Boulevard
• South of East 7th Street

As of 6 a.m. Monday, power had been restored to several thousand customers, but 16,456 households remained out, according to the outage map.

SoCal Edison estimated power would be restored by noon Monday.

The blackout occurred as much of the region remained under a high heat advisory. Temperatures in Long Beach were expected to be in the 80s by noon with high humidity.

Where you can go to cool down

The Long Beach Senior Center (1150 E 4th St.) has electricity and is open from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. on Mondays.

Karen Bass became the first Los Angeles mayor to serve on the influential governing board for the region’s lead homelessness agency when she appointed herself to it three years ago.

Since joining, the mayor has skipped more than half of the meetings held by the L.A. Homeless Services Authority Commission, according to an LAist analysis of public records.

LAist reviewed three years of meeting records and found:

• Bass missed 13 of 21 LAHSA Commission meetings held between mid-August 2025 and now.
• Since Bass named herself to the board in late 2023, she’s been absent for 25 of 47 meetings.
• That's well more than enough to trigger potential removal under the agency's bylaws.

The Mayor’s Office told LAist that, regardless of Bass' attendance record, she has kept up to date on what LAHSA — which is responsible for managing the region’s homelessness response — has been doing.

But the optics could be a problem, especially as Bass fights for reelection in November and as LAHSA, which has been under intense scrutiny, fights for its survival in and out of court.

LAHSA Commissioner Justin Szlasa told LAist that attendance at the commission meetings, which require a majority of commissioners for a quorum, is important, whether it’s the mayor or any other appointee.

“That’s why we have a commission,” he said. “It's not just about achieving a quorum. It’s about people who are focused on considering the issue, tracking the things as they unfold and being part of that deliberative process.”

“If people don’t show up, they can’t do that,” Szlasa said.

Wendy Greuel, the former L.A. city controller and a member of the commission, said Bass’ attendance record hasn’t been a problem.

“There’s never been a mayor that has understood more the issue of homelessness and been as engaged as Mayor Bass,” said Greuel, who was reappointed to the commission by Bass after being named a decade ago by former L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti.

“Her voice, whether in a commission meeting or outside of the commission meeting, has been important and greater than any mayor in my history,” she told LAist.

Why the LAHSA Commission matters

The members of the LAHSA Commission make policy and funding decisions for the agency, including approving its nearly $500 million budget and its contracts with local shelters and nonprofit service providers. LAHSA directs 86% of its funding to those providers, and commissioners are responsible for overseeing how hundreds of millions of public dollars are spent.

Representation on the commission is split evenly between city and county. L.A.’s mayor chooses half the commission’s voting members. Each of the five county supervisors choose one appointee.

Commissioners are unpaid volunteers, most of whom have full-time jobs and other responsibilities.

According to the bylaws, commissioners who are absent four times within a year may be subject to removal. The elected official who appointed them “shall be notified that an appointment needs to be made to fill a vacancy.”

But LAHSA said it did not notify Bass’ office about her own pattern of absences, or any other commissioner. The agency has interpreted the bylaws to give it discretion on whether or not to make those notifications.

“The Commission and its committees have consistently achieved a quorum and fulfilled their responsibilities, so LAHSA has not notified the City or the County regarding commissioner attendance,” said Ahmad Chapman, LAHSA’s communications director, in a statement.

At least six of 10 members must be present to open the public meeting or for the group to vote on anything.

A spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office told LAist that Bass’ four other appointees “alerted her when her attendance was needed,” and kept her informed about its activities.

“It is unprecedented for a mayor to sit on the Board of LAHSA,” Ilanna Morales said in a statement. “She was on the Commission to make key decisions and participate in key discussions that impacted the City.”

A LAHSA Commission meeting on April 25, 2025. Mayor Karen Bass was not in attendance.

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Samanta Helou Hernandez

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LAist

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How LAist checked attendance

LAist reviewed three years of meeting records and found that other commissioners had four or more absences over a single 12-month period.

Those records show that one of Bass' appointees, Tanisha Saunders, missed 12 of 21 commission meetings between Aug. 15, 2025, and Aug. 15, 2026. Since Bass appointed Saunders in May 2023, Saunders has been absent from 18 of 53 LAHSA Commission meetings, with an uptick in absences this year, according to an LAist analysis of meeting records.

Saunders is a former foster youth and a former child development advocate who manages a permanent supportive housing site for an affordable housing nonprofit in Venice, according to her biography on LAHSA’s website. She did not immediately respond to LAist’s interview requests, or questions about her attendance record sent by email.

Greuel told LAist that Saunders is an important voice on the board.

“I value the perspective Commissioner Saunders brings to the Commission, including being a person with lived experience and a full-time job who understands firsthand the systems and communities affected by our decisions,” Greuel told LAist.

“If she has a conflict due to her work schedule or other obligations, she routinely confirms proactively whether the meeting has a quorum so her absence will not impact the commission's work," Greuel continued.

Bass reappointed Saunders to the commission in May to serve through 2029. 

Last month, county Supervisor Holly Mitchell replaced her appointee Yasmine-Imani McMorrin on the commission. McMorrin, a Culver City Council member, had missed half of the 22 meetings held over the previous year. It is unclear whether that’s the reason she was replaced.

Neither Mitchell nor McMorrin responded to requests for comment.

Szlasa, an entrepreneur and homelessness policy advocate, said a seat on the commission is more than a part-time job. He has argued the agency should offer an optional financial stipend to the commissioners.

“This is a lot of time, a lot of commitment,” Szlasa told LAist. “It’s something valuable that’s happening and the commissioners should receive a stipend, if they opt for it, for the meetings they attend.”

In addition to the 21 LAHSA Commission meetings over the past year, commissioners are also assigned to working committees focused on specific subject areas. Each of those groups has its own regular meetings.

For example, Saunders serves on the audit committee, which directs internal audit reviews of LAHSA’s spending, policies and performance. Saunders missed just one of 13 audit committee meetings during her time, according to public records.

Bass served on the same audit committee for several months, until January. She did not attend a single meeting, recording five straight absences before being replaced by another commissioner.

Why another elected official left the LAHSA board

While Bass was the first L.A. mayor to appoint herself to the LAHSA Commission, she was not the first or only elected official to do so.

County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath appointed herself to the commission nearly a year earlier. Horvath told LAist she originally appointed herself to the board to try to reform LAHSA, encouraging her colleagues to do the same.

“Broken systems can’t be reformed from the sidelines,” Horvath said.

After serving two years, Horvath said she determined LAHSA could not make necessary changes. She last attended a meeting on Nov. 15, 2024, and said her commission experience "helped drive the County’s decision to fundamentally change the homeless services system."

Within months of Horvath resigning from the commission, the Board of Supervisors voted to divert more than $300 million in annual funding from LAHSA. By then, a string of reviews found LAHSA had failed to properly manage the tax dollars she and other regional leaders have entrusted to it.

Horvath told LAist she worked to stop "millions of County dollars from flowing through LAHSA when it failed to deliver the accountability and results taxpayers deserve.”

LAHSA's future remains deeply uncertain.

In June, the Trump administration suspended LAHSA from federal grant activity, citing financial mismanagement. LAHSA sued to overturn the suspension, and a judge paused it. A trial is now set for April 2027.

A tent in downtown Los Angeles on June 11, 2026. Mayor Bass has said eliminating street homelessness is a top priority.

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Apu Gomes

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AFP via Getty Images

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How homelessness factors into the race for mayor

Bass is running for reelection in November and one of her key promises is to make progress on homelessness. After celebrating two years of decreases in the annual homeless count, this year's annual count found street homelessness rose 8% in the city of L.A. That increase has weakened Bass’ pitch to voters.

Bass says she’s still working to end street homelessness. She's promising a shift away from pricey motel rooms to cheaper types of shelter and services for unhoused Angelenos, including on city-owned land.

“We actually need to transform the entire system,” Bass said last week at a mayoral debate hosted by the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association. “The city needs to be in control.”

“Right now, one of the fundamental dysfunctional features of the system is it's governed by the city, it's governed by the county, and it's governed by LAHSA,” Bass continued.

As of this year, LAHSA is funded primarily by the city of L.A., which now provides 73% of the regional homelessness agency’s budget. City officials have been slowly considering L.A.’s next steps for managing the city’s approach to homelessness, including whether LAHSA will remain involved.

Bass made absenteeism an issue in mayoral debate

During last week's debate, Bass brought up meeting absenteeism, accusing Councilmember Nithya Raman, her rival on the November ballot, of skipping Los Angeles City Council meetings specifically — and missing “thousands of votes.”

Raman said some of her absences were because she was attending other board meetings she served on as a city representative. Raman noted that Bass had appointed her to serve on some of those boards.

“Other council members have outside appointments, too,” Bass fired back. “You are not the only one. But they find their way to work.”

Bass serves on various governing boards, including chairing the board of directors for the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She has faced some criticism for absences on the Metro board.

Metro has a reserved board seat for L.A.’s mayor, making that role a requirement of Bass’ full-time job — unlike the LAHSA Commission.

Bass’ self-appointed three-year term on the Commission expired June 30. LAHSA and a spokesperson for Bass’ office said she is still a member, but did not confirm whether she had formally reappointed herself.

The next LAHSA Commission meeting is scheduled for Friday.

How to attend

When: Friday, Aug. 28 at 9 a.m.

Where: LAHSA, 637 Wilshire Blvd., 1st Floor commission room, Los Angeles

How to watch remote: Live stream link

By the time Democrat Xavier Becerra left Washington, D.C., more Americans than ever had health insurance, owing partly to his work over the years to pass, defend and expand the Affordable Care Act.

It's an achievement the former congressman and U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services often touts as he campaigns for California governor against Republican Steve Hilton, a former Fox News commentator.

But should Becerra cruise to victory in November, as polling suggests, he will face what may be the steepest decline in health insurance coverage in a generation, one that will land especially hard in his home state.

Federal cuts mean more people uninsured

By 2030, the number of uninsured Californians under 65 is expected to nearly double from 2.4 million to 4.6 million as recently enacted state and federal cuts to Medicaid and ACA marketplaces begin to roll back historic gains in health coverage, according to a May analysis by the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center. The anticipated rise in the uninsured population could have broad implications for hospital systems, insurers and the economy.

In February, Miranda Dietz, the labor center's healthcare program director, told legislators the changes could end up costing California about 200,000 jobs, mostly in the healthcare industry.

Hospital executives have begun reporting more unpaid medical bills, and experts warn health plans will raise premiums further as they're left with enrollees who are, on average, sicker and more expensive to cover.

"It's triage," said Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California, the nation's largest state-run health insurance marketplace. "That's what the next governor is walking into."

California achieved one of the most dramatic drops in its uninsured population in the nation, largely credited to the state's robust adoption of the ACA. If tapped to lead the wealthy, progressive state, Becerra would wrestle with how uninsured Californians get care and who pays as the Trump administration shrinks a federal safety net he once oversaw.

Becerra has some experience pushing back against Washington, D.C. As California attorney general, he successfully defended many provisions of the Affordable Care Act, including access to birth control.

Becerra said he would issue an executive order to keep those affected by federal cuts insured. But he has not detailed how the state would backfill as much as $30 billion in federal funding California stands to lose annually.

At a policy forum hosted by Politico this month, Becerra promised Californians would not lose health coverage despite federal cutbacks, saying he would push the industry to eliminate waste from "attorneys, accountants, pencil pushers" that cost consumers billions.

"I'm going to ask them to help me extract some of that waste and put it into healthcare, which helps us cover the cost of keeping Californians insured," he said.

His opponent, Hilton, is trying to appeal to voters opposed to President Donald Trump, despite receiving the president's endorsement, and has stumped on cutting off coverage for Californians without legal status, which is paid for with state funds. Hilton has vowed to use those savings to issue state income tax breaks, calling it an immediate antidote to high costs.

Steve Hilton, the Republican candidate for governor of California, campaigns at a Sheraton hotel on July 27 in Pomona.

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"We all understand that the healthcare system is a mess and needs major reform," Hilton said in an interview. "The quickest thing we can do on healthcare costs is actually to tax people less."

Left behind?

In 2010, Becerra was part of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's leadership team and helped whip up votes to pass the law. He also had a hand in crafting it, though his attempt to include a government-backed coverage option failed.

A decade later, when lawmakers considered him for the nation's top healthcare job, Becerra said his primary mission would be to carry out President Biden's vision to expand access and cut costs under the Affordable Care Act.

Before the ACA, some 50 million Americans — roughly 1 in 6 — were uninsured. Within a few years of the law's passage in 2010, its expansion of Medicaid eligibility and financial aid to lower-income marketplace enrollees helped slash the U.S. uninsured rate by nearly half.

Millions more gained coverage during the COVID-19 pandemic after Becerra implemented a freeze on Medicaid disenrollment and administered generous but temporary tax credits that put the cost of Obamacare plans within reach for more people.

As Biden's health secretary, Becerra launched aggressive public awareness campaigns, loosened enrollment rules and distributed hundreds of millions in grants to pay consumer assistants, also known as healthcare navigators, to help enrollees wade through paperwork.

"One of the common things we would hear from him as a leader was, 'Who's being left behind?'" said Benjamin Sommers, a Harvard health policy professor who was a deputy assistant secretary under Becerra.

Under Biden and Becerra, the percentage of people with health insurance reached a historic high of 92%, or 310 million Americans having health coverage in 2024.

Republican response

But conservatives said those policies inflated enrollment by attracting fraudulent and wasteful coverage. In response, the second Trump administration has tightened enrollment windows and toughened income reporting.

"It's simple and easy to say, well, the numbers are up so the program must be working," said Edmund Haislmaier, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. "My argument would be that's the wrong metric."

Last summer, the GOP-led Congress passed Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Republicans argued preserves Medicaid for those who need it most while rooting out fraud and waste. Altogether, the law is expected to cut Medicaid spending by $900 billion-plus over a decade.

Congress also allowed enhanced premium tax credits for Obamacare plans to expire last year, spiking premium payments for middle-income Americans and driving down enrollment by nearly 3 million this year.

"We are now witnessing almost a wholesale reversal of pretty much all those policies" that helped cover millions more Americans, said Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.

For Eric Maciel, the $800 cost of a Covered California plan is too much. To avoid injury, the 28-year-old stays home more and rarely plays pickup soccer at the park — the other players, he added, can get pretty rough.

"That's another car note," Maciel said. "I'd be left with nothing."

Health economists say Maciel is the type of customer insurers need to stabilize their risk pools: young, healthy and less costly.

Hilton criticized state leaders for passing a revised provider tax he asserts will send premiums soaring and said he wants to inject more competition into California's health insurance market — but he offered no specific ideas.

Playing defense

Higher-than-expected state costs coupled with federal cuts have prompted California to retreat on healthcare coverage. Federal funds account for one-third of the state's budget and more than 60% of spending by Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program.

Xavier Becerra served in the House of Representatives when the Affordable Care Act passed and as health secretary under President Biden. He's the frontrunner in California's governor's race.

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Genaro Molina

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Gov. Gavin Newsom has frozen enrollment for immigrants without legal status, enacted monthly premiums for some, and plans to only temporarily backfill federal assistance for legal immigrants and refugees.

Newsom and Democratic lawmakers agreed to delay some cuts until July 2027, leaving the next governor to weigh further rollbacks against increased taxes. Becerra, a California native born to Mexican immigrants, opposes what's known as the billionaire tax, on November's ballot. This month, he said he supported legislative efforts to penalize large corporations whose workers rely on Medi-Cal, arguing that taxpayers are subsidizing employers' low wages and paltry benefits.

County governments, which are legally required to provide healthcare to uninsured residents too poor to afford care, are lobbying lawmakers for funding to treat what they describe as a fresh deluge of patients who need free care.

"It's a pretty big cliff if all this stuff goes into effect," said Dietz, the labor center's healthcare program director. And there's a choice whether to make it less bad and maintain coverage for folks."

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.