The Brief

The fast-moving Dove Fire near a Yosemite gateway town jolted California out of a relatively quiet fire summer, forcing road closures and the evacuations of hundreds of homes.

Former U.S. Forest Service firefighter John Buckley wasn’t surprised to see the fire taking off last Sunday. Driving through the area in the Central Sierra foothills earlier that day, he remembers telling his wife those fuels looked ready to burn.

“We drive back, and they're burning over at the city of Sonora,” said Buckley, now the executive director of the Central Sierra Environmental Resource Center. “The fuels are now quite primed for burning, and they're only going to get drier.”

Firefighters have gained the upper hand against the 226-acre blaze, which Cal Fire suspects was set by a reckless 30-year-old man. But high temperatures are looming — and new research puts numbers to the intuitive follow-on: with heat, comes fire.

It’s far too early in California’s fire year to make any conclusions or predictions. But with fires devouring millions of acres in the Western U.S., Canada, and Europe, California stands out for what has been, so far, a below-average summer.

To date, roughly 4,030 wildfires have burned a little over 208,000 acres in the state — down from a five-year average of nearly 5,300 fires burning more than 300,000 acres at this point, according to Cal Fire data.

Still, Cal Fire Battalion Chief David Acuña says he avoids the word ‘quiet.’

“There is a superstition that when you use words like ‘quiet, slow, bored’ in the fire station, that just means that you're about to get hit with an amazingly busy shift,” he said.

California has benefited from lucky weather conditions so far, despite a low snowpack and blistering March, according to John Abatzoglou, a professor of climatology at UC Merced.

That’s about to change. “Now, of course,” he said, “we have a heat wave on our doorstep.”

National Weather Service offices across the state are warning of soaring temperatures starting later this week. The Los Angeles/Oxnard office said conditions will shift to “dangerously hot” by Friday.

That combination — heat waves and fire activity — is a common feature of western wildfires, Abatzoglou’s team found in a recent study published in the journal Science Advances and led by scientist Dmitri Kalashnikov. 

The paper found that just under half of the burned area in warm-season months from 2001 to 2024 occurred during or in the wake of a heatwave, particularly in forests.

Heatwaves, defined as at least three days in a row with temperatures soaring past the 90th percentile, make up 15% or less of the warm season. But climate change is fueling an increase.

Abatzoglou pointed to a few reasons for the link. Heatwaves create chronic conditions that lead to drier, more flammable fuels. They also mean hotter nights, which previous research found increases nighttime fire intensity, shuttering a critical window for fire suppression. The researchers found that heatwaves can also prime conditions for lightning, which has sparked some of California’s biggest blazes.

“And then it’s off to the races in terms of fire activity,” Abatzoglou said.

The paper’s findings don’t mean all heatwaves will bring an uptick in fire activity, he added. That still requires ignitions in the right place, at the right time.

Acuña cautioned Californians against creating those sparks. That means mowing before 10 a.m. on hot days or skipping the yard work during a red flag warning. It also means securing tow chains so they don’t drag and spark against the road, and not parking hot cars on dry grass.

California sought and received federal funding assistance related to the Dove Fire within hours. But a separate, monthslong fight between Sacramento and Washington continues over slower-moving wildfire recovery funds — including hundreds of millions in aid tied to last year's L.A. fires that Gov. Gavin Newsom said in May FEMA was still sitting on.

As for predictions for the season ahead, Acuña likes to make them about as much as he likes the word ‘quiet.’

“It depends on what the weather brings us,” he said. “If it brings us hot, windy, red flag warning conditions, then that could certainly be a problem. If it brings us rain, well, that brings us a totally different concern. We are ready to respond.”

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

Mayor Karen Bass is stepping down from the governing body for the L.A. region’s embattled lead homeless services agency, she told KFI last week.

The decision comes after LAist reported Bass skipped more than half the L.A. Homeless Services Authority Commission meetings held since appointing herself in 2023.

Details on the exit plans

Bass told KFI’s Gary and Shannon she’s leaving the LAHSA Commission, citing time constraints.

“I am going to be stepping down because I just — in terms of time and all,” Bass said in a live radio interview on Friday.

Bass’ office did not respond to interview requests and questions from LAist.

The backstory

LAist reporting found Bass missed 13 of the 21 LAHSA Commission meetings held over a recent year period, well above the four absence-threshold that can trigger potential removal under LAHSA’s bylaws.

Bass’ three-year term on the LAHSA Commission expired June 30, but she still remained on the commission as of Tuesday.

LAist reviewed three years of meeting records and found that Bass was among two sitting commissioners who had four or more absences over a single 12-month period.

L.A.’s mayor appoints half of the board’s members and Bass must appoint her replacement soon.

Paul Rubenstein, LAHSA's chief of staff, told LAist on Tuesday that Bass has not informed the agency that she will step down from the commission. Other members of the commission did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

What’s next?

LAHSA is a joint powers authority between the city and county, created three decades ago to manage the region’s response to homelessness.

The agency has come under scrutiny for alleged mismanagement of taxpayer dollars, including the Trump administration's attempt to suspend LAHSA.

In response to the agency’s documented dysfunction, L.A. County pulled most of its money from the agency and created its own homelessness department.

Bass now appears fed up with LAHSA and eager for the city to follow suit.

“I took the step of being on the commission so that I could learn much more and I could see what we needed to do,” Bass told KFI. “And I came to the conclusion that the city needs to have its own system.”

The state has approved money to help create a special district for childcare within Riverside County — the first of its kind in the state.

Special districts are local government agencies in California created to provide a specific service to a community, like water or healthcare.

The district would serve Moreno Valley and Perris. State Assemblymember Corey Jackson said $2 million in state funding would help with local startup costs.

What happens now?

Voters living in the area will still need to approve a funding mechanism for the initiative, like a tax.

“I believe it's my obligation to set up families and children for success, but I was equally tired of waiting for the state to provide enough childcare slots, for the federal government to provide childcare slots," Jackson said. "So I figured why not give my district an opportunity to decide for themselves whether they wanted to invest in childcare?”

A bill he sponsored that would have created the special district as a pilot for five years failed to pass the Legislature this year.

Jackson said the details of the special district, including who will sit on its board, still need to be worked out.

A vote could come before voters in 2028 on how to fund the district to support childcare services.

Jackson said he hopes that additional funding could help create universal childcare for families in the district, regardless of income, but the exact services and subsidies will have to be determined based on the revenue.

“ We are at a crisis point and our families are begging for help, and it's time for us to do everything that we can to deliver, ” Jackson said.

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 former 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.

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 last 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.

“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 Joe 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 historical 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 monthly 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.

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 such as asylees 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. Last 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—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.