The Brief

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, and four co-conspirators were indicted Wednesday on 23 counts of bank and wire fraud, allegedly committed from 2022 to 2024, during her time working for the governor.

The indictment alleges that Williamson, a longtime Democratic strategist, worked with Greg Campbell, a prominent Sacramento lobbyist, and Sean McCluskie, the former chief of staff to former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, as well as two other unnamed co-conspirators to steal $225,000 from an unnamed former official’s dormant campaign account for McCluskie’s personal use.

“Collectively, they funneled the money through various business entities and disguised it as pay for what was, in reality, a no-show job,” FBI Sacramento Special Agent in Charge Sid Patel said in a news release.

Prosecutors allege that Williamson and one of the unnamed co-conspirators, described only as a former California public official who owned a political consulting firm, used their political strategy firms to funnel money out of a campaign account, believed to be Becerra’s, into an account controlled by McCluskie. They allegedly disguised the funds as payments for McCluskie’s spouse, who was described in the indictment as a stay-at-home parent.

Williamson is also accused of falsely claiming more than $1.7 million in business expenses on her taxes. She used the funds to purchase luxury handbags, chartered jets and a nearly $170,000 birthday trip to Mexico, the indictment alleges.

Williamson, who previously held a high-level position in Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration, was well known for her negotiating ability. When she left his office, Newsom said in a statement that he would miss her "insight, tenacity and big heart.”

The indictment indicated that Becerra had no knowledge of the scheme, and he confirmed as much Wednesday afternoon in a written statement via his spokesperson, Owen Kilmer.

“The news today of formal accusations of impropriety by a long-serving trusted advisor are a gut punch,” said Becerra, a prominent candidate to succeed Newsom in next year’s gubernatorial election. He added that he had fully cooperated with the U.S. Justice Department and would continue to do so.

“As California’s former Attorney General, I fully comprehend the importance of allowing this investigation and legal process to run its course through our justice system.”

Williamson was scheduled to appear in federal court Wednesday afternoon.

A spokesperson for Newsom distanced the governor from his former top aide.

“While we are still learning details of the allegations, the governor expects all public servants to uphold the highest standards of integrity,” said Izzy Gardon, Newsom’s spokesperson, in a written statement.

“At a time when the president is openly calling for his Attorney General to investigate his political enemies, it is especially important to honor the American principle of being innocent until proven guilty in a court of law by a jury of one’s peers,” the statement said.

Patel, the special agent in charge, said in a news release that the charges were “the result of three years of relentless investigative work.”

“The FBI will remain vigilant in its efforts to uncover fraud and corruption, ensuring our government systems are held to the highest standards.”

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

A slate of popular peptide therapies has won the backing of a key advisory panel to the federal government — a step that could eventually open up broader access to the experimental drugs.

In a marathon two-day meeting last week, the panel of doctors, academics and pharmacists recommended the Food and Drug Administration reclassify almost all of the compounds under consideration so that specialized pharmacies in the U.S. could begin offering them.

Seven different peptide therapies — none of which are FDA-approved drugs — were under consideration.

Currently, these peptides can't be made in the U.S., except for research purposes, leading many peptide users to buy unvetted substances sold online, with disclaimers such as "for research use only" and "not for human consumption."

By narrow margins, the panel voted in favor of all but one. The FDA isn't required to follow advisory committee recommendations but typically does.

The outcome represents a win for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has publicly supported peptide therapies, and the broader wellness and longevity industry, which stands to profit substantially.

These peptides are promoted for a wide range of uses and are often taken together, including for injury recovery, muscle growth and fat loss, improving athletic performance, enhancing metabolism and more.

If the agency takes the panel's recommendations, clinicians could have the ability to prescribe six peptide therapies: BPC-157, MOTS-c, KPV, TB-500, Epitalon and Semax.

A compound called Emideltide, sometimes used for insomnia, was the only one to receive a down vote.

The panel's endorsement of peptides was a striking rejection of the FDA's stance against them.

While the level of evidence for each compound varies, all of them lack the kind of large, well-controlled trials in humans that are necessary to establish safety and effectiveness, which is required for drug approvals. Peptides are strings of amino acids — smaller than a protein — that often act as signaling molecules in our bodies and carry out many critical functions.

They can be synthesized and delivered as drugs, often by injection. Some of those, like insulin, are naturally occurring in the body. Others are modified versions, as with the blockbuster GLP-1 obesity drugs.

Scientists for the agency spoke extensively about the lack of reliable data for any of the seven peptides before the committee. They advised the panel to vote no.

In some cases, they couldn't find any published clinical studies in humans — and there were safety concerns like the potential to encourage cancer growth or to trigger a massive immune response.

A "foundational challenge" was simply defining the substances, because the chemical composition for peptides labeled with the same name varied considerably, explained FDA official Russell Wesdyk.

"You will see many, many different forms," he said. "We can't create quality standards until we actually know what it is."

The divide among the experts on the panel was a study in contrasts.

Ahead of the meeting, eight new members were appointed. Most have ties to the peptide industry and include physicians who work for medical practices and companies that promote them.

In almost all cases, they voted in favor of lifting restrictions.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services pushed back on criticism about potential conflicts of interest and said all underwent the standard ethics and vetting process.

"I think it's about patient access," said Dr. Asare Christian, one of the panel members who runs a Pennsylvania-based clinic that advertises peptide protocols and hormone optimization.

That sentiment was echoed throughout the many hours of public comment.

Compounding pharmacies, large telehealth providers and others from the industry underscored the perils of the unregulated marketplace, with some offering anecdotes of patients obtaining unmarked vials from sketchy suppliers.

"What we are advocating for is not the Wild West," said Brigham Buhler, who runs a telehealth company that offers hormone optimization and peptides and is an ally of Secretary Kennedy.

"What we are advocating for is to slow down or shut down the gray and black market and to allow patients to have a safe and effective manufacturing process," he told the panel.

But some panelists were skeptical of that argument.

"I'm concerned that we are responding to market-induced demand rather than a decision based in solid science," Dr. Elizabeth Rebello, an anaesthesiologist at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, commented after casting a no vote.

The FDA committee was tasked with reviewing data that supports using these peptides to treat a variety of specific conditions, such as BPC-157 for treating ulcerative colitis, an inflammatory bowel disease.

However, if the FDA ultimately reclassifies them and they are produced by compounding pharmacies in the U.S., clinicians would have discretion to write prescriptions outside of those narrow indications.

During the meeting, industry groups — and some on the panel — repeatedly criticized the FDA presentations for not reflecting more recent scientific data on the substances, including results from other human studies that had been submitted ahead of time.

FDA staff said they had considered everything submitted by the meeting deadline and would still take new information into account as they weigh next steps.

The decision to place the products on the FDA's official list for compounding doesn't come close to the standards for drug approval, but some worry that nuance will not be clear to the public, which may not be aware of the limited data for humans.

"I think this endorsement can be potentially harmful and I cannot in good conscience vote yes," said Dr. Brian Lee, a member of the panel and an associate professor at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

If the FDA moves to reclassify the peptides so that compounding pharmacies can make them, it will be through a formal rulemaking process that could stretch into next year or 2028. There is a possibility that Kennedy could invoke special authority to make them available sooner.

The panel is scheduled to meet again in February to consider additional peptide therapies.
Copyright 2026 NPR

On a beautiful summer day in July, 7-year-old Penelope is turning into a mermaid.

"I like playing mermaid," she says, with her feet dangling in the swimming pool at Beauvoir Summer Camp in Washington, D.C.

"Like, I'm a human, and then I turn into a mermaid, and I use one of the pool noodles as a dolphin, and I play with my friends," she says.

It's Friday, which means free swim, and the kids are splashing around on blue kickboards and sinking miniature torpedo toys. In the kiddie pool, the littlest campers jump in and show off their twists and turns with screeches of delight.

Penelope and her best friend Sam, also 7, say pool time is their favorite activity at this camp. NPR is only using the kids' first names because they are minors.

The pool was empty during the last free swim. Campers spent the day indoors to avoid hazardous air quality from wildfire smoke. And, earlier in the summer, the heat forced them to cut down their outside play time, says Drew Mackay, the director of auxiliary and summer programs at Beauvoir School.

This summer has brought no shortage of extreme weather and wildfires across the country. In northern Minnesota and Canada, fires devastated communities and caused dangerous smoke to blanket large swaths of the Midwest and Northeastern U.S. Deadly floods prompted disaster declarations in parts of Texas. And an extreme heat wave in July was dubbed the "new normal" for July Fourth celebrations.

As the climate warms due in large part to the burning of fossil fuels, research shows that heat waves, droughts, hurricanes and floods have become more intense and more frequent.

Families are feeling it. Further north in Pennsylvania, Lauren Smith and her kids have had a summer full of dangerous weather. First, it was the extreme heat that disrupted normal activities at a soccer camp, with temperatures reaching almost 100 degrees Fahrenheit on a big, treeless field. Then, wildfire smoke kept the family in the house. When the nonstop rain hit, it was almost a blessing.

"The kids are going crazy in the house — that's it, we're going for a walk," she remembers thinking. "Then, they're like, 'It's starting to rain.' I'm like, 'Doesn't matter. It's an adventure.' "

Smith added that, surprisingly, her kids have enjoyed helping her declutter the house. They also took up baking and painting acorns. But on the few days of sunny bliss, she can't get them back inside, she said. "The summer is just like a waiting game — just waiting to do some stuff outside," Smith says.

This generation of school-aged kids has already dealt with the isolation of COVID-19, the global pandemic that forced students to work from home. Now, they're up against extreme weather.

Throughout the summer months, parents scramble to get kids out of the house. But with weather conditions that make outdoor fun not just impossible, but dangerous, parents, summer camp leaders and school-aged kids told NPR how they're experiencing the effects of the changing climate.

"It's changed my summer a lot," Penelope, the mermaid, says. She describes climate change as "the areas around you are just, like, changing all around you all the time."

Summer camps confront 'a new reality'

For many kids, summer is an around three-month break from school routines and homework.

A 2024 Gallup survey found that 55% of U.S. parents reported their school-aged kids attend at least one structured summer program. Henry DeHart, the CEO of the American Camp Association, which provides resources and accreditations to hundreds of camps across the country, says the skills kids learn at camp — independence, problem-solving and teamwork — will equip them for the future, especially in an increasingly AI-centric world.

"Kids need camp now more than ever," DeHart says.

While dealing with the whims of weather is nothing new for camps, and accredited ones are required to have thorough safety plans, DeHart says the frequency of these extreme weather events is noticeable.

In the past few decades, he says, "A camp might have had three or four or five days with the heat index over 105 [Fahrenheit]". Now they may have eight or 10."

The impacts on specific camps across the country are varied. In Ohio, Ellen Watkins directs Miakonda Day Camp on a 160-acre site for Scouting groups. When wildfire smoke filled the air, they were able to move inside and provided masks.

While inside, they did swim exercises on dry land and pulled out an inflatable archery set. She said she got many comments from parents thanking them for finding a way to keep the camp running.

"Was it stressful to have campers inside of buildings all day when they would rather be outside? Yes. Did it stress our program? No, we were fine," Watkins said.

But for some camps, switching up activities to deal with the smoke wasn't an option. That was the case in Ely, Minn., at Camp Widjiwagan. The camp, which hosts over 700 kids each summer and leads programs across North America, evacuated in July.

The camp drew considerable attention after a haunting photo showing 19 of its canoes under water was widely seen online. Ben Hoffman, the camp's executive director, said they decided to submerge the historic canoes that were too fragile to move to safety.

"This is a pivotal moment," Hoffman said. "We have never sunk canoes at camp."

Camp Widjiwagan submerged some of their canoes in lake waters to protect them from the wildfires.

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Eleanor Pitts, a 17-year-old camper at Widjiwagan, went on the camp's 26-day backpacking trip in Willmore Wilderness Park in Alberta, Canada, starting in June with four other girls and a counselor.

"It was an experience like no other," Pitts, who has attended the camp for seven summers, said. "We become the closest group of people. They were genuinely my family by the end."

The last day of the trip was supposed to be a homecoming back at the base camp in Ely with a huge celebration of hot dogs and watermelon and campfire skits. Her group found out the day before that the wildfire smoke would force them to miss that last day. " 'Wait, so this is our last night?' " Pitts said she and her fellow campers asked their counselor. "And we all just started crying."

Pitts said it brought the reality of climate change right before her eyes. Beyond the wildfires, throughout the trip, her counselor pointed out flooded rivers in Canada because of extreme heat melting snow runoff.

"Going forward, trips are just going to be different because of this climate change situation," Pitts said. "It hasn't affected me until I'm seeing it right now and I'm just like: Now it's too late."

In D.C., at Beauvoir Summer Camp, summer programs director Mackay said adapting to extreme weather is now part of the summer camp job. "For us, it's a new reality," he said.

The kids, on the other hand, are just worried about getting as much pool time as possible.
Copyright 2026 NPR

An advisory council packed with allies of President Trump voted on Friday to weaken federal oversight of construction projects affecting historic sites.

Critics, in anticipation of the vote, told NPR that the move would not only clear a path for President Trump's controversial projects in D.C., but also endanger the preservation of historic and cultural places across the United States.

"Every American who has any place in their heart that is historic or culturally significant to them should be concerned about this attempt to gut historic preservation protections," said Greg Werkheiser, founding partner at the law firm Cultural Heritage Partners.

The National Register of Historic Places contains over 100,000 properties, encompassing more than 1.8 million buildings, structures, sites, objects and districts. They take many forms, from a house to a burial ground, a shipwreck to a landscape, a single tree to an entire neighborhood.

"It's the thing that defines America," Werkheiser said. "The places that you go where your family has an attachment over generations … There are millions of these sites in this country, and all of them are made less protected by this effort by the Trump administration."

The White House and the Department of the Interior did not respond to NPR's request for comment.

Part of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, known as Section 106, requires federal agencies to evaluate how new construction projects would affect historic places.

Under the Section 106 review process, the federal agency overseeing a project must invite interested parties — like preservation groups and local and tribal governments — to weigh in. Currently, agencies are required to consider whether the project would cause "adverse effects" to a historic property and, if so, explore ways to "avoid, minimize, or mitigate" those harms.

The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, the federal agency responsible for overseeing the Section 106 review process, is packed with Trump appointees. And now, 60 years after the law took effect, the council wants to water it down drastically.

Ashley Fry, the council's director of external engagement, confirmed to NPR on Friday night that members voted to advance proposed changes to Section 106. The outcome was widely expected.

"Because President Trump controls 21 of the 24 members of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, it's very likely that they will proceed with doing what the administration wants for them to do," Sara Bronin, who served as the Senate-confirmed chair of the advisory council under President Biden, said Thursday.

Bronin is the most recent chair of the council, as that position is currently vacant. President Trump has yet to nominate a new one, instead appointing its vice chair, Travis Voyles, to serve in an acting capacity.

Last Friday, Voyles sent an email to council members asking them to vote on proposed revisions to the wording of Section 106. According to draft language obtained by NPR, those changes include redefining what kinds of properties can be considered historic in the first place, making public comment on new projects optional and removing the requirement to consult with Native American tribes.

"What it means is that the federal government, in its own discretion, can decide whether — if ever — to tell an American community that it's about to do a major project that could harm or destroy a historic resource," Werkheiser said. "The public will be completely cut out of any conversation around the future of places that matter to them in this country."

The changes do not take effect immediately after Friday's vote. They need to clear several more steps of the federal rulemaking process, including a roughly 30-day public comment period.

Werkheiser called the vote a "foregone conclusion," but said it sets the stage for a legal fight later.

"As sure as the sun rises and sets over Washington, D.C., there will be litigation in an attempt to stop this absurd gutting of protections of American history," he said.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation says "significant cultural landscape features" like the Grand Canyon would no longer be considered historic properties under the proposed new language.

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Why does the Trump administration want these changes?

After World War II, an era of urban renewal and federal highway construction destroyed high-profile buildings like New York City's Penn Station and devastated many historically Black neighborhoods.

The advisory council's memo describes that period as "one of the greatest, yet most destructive building streaks in American history." It prompted public outrage and resulted in Congress passing the National Historic Preservation Act in 1966.

"Small wonder, then, that Congress enacted a requirement that all Federal agencies take into account historic preservation concerns in future Federal actions," the memo reads. "Consideration, however, was not the same thing as a mandate that historic preservation concerns trump all others."

The memo says the current regulations under Section 106 "create confusion and uncertainty for both the public and regulated entities and contribute to agency delays." It cites a 2019 study that found consultation can take nearly seven years in extreme cases.

And it proposes revisions that it says would help "agencies strike a more appropriate balance between evaluating effects on historic properties and advancing critical federal projects."

The changes would limit the type and number of historic properties that will receive protection, ruling out "significant landscape features" like the Grand Canyon. Bronin says it would also change the type of actions that will be reviewed in the first place, with an "alarming number of exemptions," including for federally funded projects carried out by local authorities.

"Things like state highway widening, which in the past have been highly destructive of historic places, including not only whole neighborhoods but also burial sites … won't [undergo Section 106 review] under the new rules," she said.

The new wording would also narrow what is considered an "adverse effect" to anything that is directly and foreseeably tied to the project (as opposed to indirect or cumulative effects). And it allows agencies to condense much of the process into a written report, which they would then share with third parties for review instead of consulting them along the way.

"This change in consultation will have the effect of not surfacing the location, significance and effects on historic sites, meaning that they could have the potential to be destroyed at scale," she said.

The new wording would also remove requirements for public comment, eliminating the phrase: "views of the public are essential to informed Federal decisionmaking."

That stands out to Charles Birnbaum, the founding president and CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, an education and advocacy organization based in D.C. He told NPR over email that he sees similarities between the revised law and the reason it exists in the first place.

"Consent of the governed is being replaced with my way or the highway," he wrote. "This is the same haughty, retrograde, and myopic attitude that resulted in urban renewal, which decimated cities with highways and destroyed countless neighborhoods nationwide, especially underserved communities."

The Cultural Landscape Foundation has already sued over the administration's repainting of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, saying the National Park Service improperly used — by its own words — a "streamlined" Section 106 review. A judge has not yet ruled in the case, as the pool saga continues to unfold.

Trump's building projects in D.C., like the White House ballroom construction pictured on Wednesday, have prompted pushback and lawsuits from historic preservation groups.

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What happens next? 

Simplifying the Section 106 review process could help to fast-track some of the Trump administration's renovation projects in D.C.

The requirement for third-party consultation — which many historic and cultural preservation groups say is happening too fast or not at all — has been one of the few hurdles in the already fast-moving approval process for Trump's arch.

Bronin says under the proposed new language, near-constant construction noise near Arlington National Cemetery would not be considered an adverse effect, and the 250-foot arch's disruption of historic views would not be considered under the review process.

"Although I would encourage listeners to not simply focus on D.C.'s iconic landmarks, because this proposal would have far-reaching effects, the proposal for the arch in front of Arlington Cemetery is an excellent example of what's at stake with these changes," Bronin said.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers and the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers have all issued statements opposing the Section 106 changes, taking issue both with the substance and the brief voting timeline. They each have representatives on the advisory council board.

Elizabeth Merrit, deputy general counsel for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, wrote in an open letter that she would vote against the proposed changes, calling them "likely to cause widespread chaos and confusion, and … curtail the consultation process that has led to thousands of win-win outcomes around the country."

Werkheiser agreed that the proposal would be "terrible for developers," who want predictability and information early on to avoid delays and issues down the road. He said that's why the existing Section 106 process generally works so well. Trying to speed it up by even a few days, he said, would be "a losing trade for America in the long-term."

"Folks who complain about the relatively little time it takes to pause in front of a massive development project and say, 'Are we destroying something that can never be replaced?' I think those folks need to ask themselves, what legacy are they handing to their children and their grandchildren?" he said.

Both Werkheiser and Bronin encouraged people who oppose these changes to speak up not only during the public comment period, but to their legislators directly.

"As chair, I saw the topic of historic preservation as a bipartisan issue, and one that unites people who care about their communities, whether they're in red states or blue states," Bronin said. "I think that the public comment on the regulations will really help to send a powerful message that we care about our historic places and we don't want them to be destroyed."

Congress could potentially take action, including passing legislation to strengthen Section 106.

Democrats on the Senate Natural Resources Committee released a statement this week opposing the changes. They urged the council to "go back to the drawing board and work directly with Tribes and states on a new proposal that actually improves the consultation process without undermining the rights and voices of those most directly affected."
Copyright 2026 NPR

A windowless warehouse on the outskirts of Davis shelters pieces of California’s forests.

Icy air swirls and fogs around 42,000 pounds of seeds — the past and the future of these trees, frozen in cardboard boxes. It smells like the woods on a snowy day.

“This is like the mothership of forestry in California right here,” said Stewart McMorrow, staff chief for wildfire resilience at Cal Fire, standing outside the heavy metal door of the state seed bank at Cal Fire’s Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis.

Private landowners especially rely on these seeds — some now more than a half-century old — to reforest property destroyed by wildfire.

At the pace California is burning, it’s nowhere near enough.

Climate change and more than a century of overzealous fire suppression are now fueling wildfires so severe that they’re wiping out the very forests that need fire to thrive — leaving iconic landscapes at risk of turning into brush and scrub, permanently.

Over the past quarter century, high-severity wildfires have burned 2.3 million acres of California’s forestland so completely that the trees are unlikely to return on their own — according to a working draft of the state’s new reforestation strategy obtained by CalMatters.

California is counting on these forests to store carbon, protect water supplies, clean the air, and shelter wildlife. By 2071, one recent analysis reports, half of California’s forest area could be gone.

“Reforestation,” said Malcolm North, a scientist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station, “is pretty damn important.”

Yet to replant even a quarter of the privately owned forestlands in the state, California would need to increase seed bank capacity by roughly 300%, according to Cal Fire — which means more seeds, more people, more space. And that wouldn’t solve the problem on federal land, which accounts for more than half the forests in the state and most of the lands that need replanting.

CalMatters reviewed a working draft of California’s reforestation strategy; the USDA California Climate Hub is developing it with state and federal agencies, the conservation non-profit American Forests, and the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force.

But both Sacramento and Washington have spent decades letting the money and staff needed to grow back California’s forests wither.

“We need to focus on reforestation as an emergency, as a state,” McMorrow said. “We are slowly losing our forestland, and we’re not catching up.”

Leilani Villeda prepares to fire a weighted line into the high branches of a pine tree using an air-powered launcher during Cone Camp, an annual training session where participants learn how to survey and collect pine cones, in Pollock Pines on July 15, 2026.

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Bleeding the federal workforce

Timber harvests once paid for much of the U.S. Forest Service’s efforts to replant trees.

But as new laws tightened endangered species and other public lands protections, logging in national forests declined. Severe wildfires also increased.

The combination devoured the Forest Service’s resources, and people: from 1998 to 2015, non-fire staff tasked with managing National Forest System lands decreased by 39%, according to a 2015 report.

With ever-increasing demands, a 2022 Forest Service document warned, there is a “critical need” to increase the number of staff “substantially dedicated” to reforestation.

Congress and the Biden Administration unstoppered additional money for a reforestation trust fund in 2021, a move championed by the conservation non-profit American Forests. Just a few years later, the Forest Service reported that it had replanted roughly 285,000 acres nationwide — the highest yearly total in more than a quarter century.

But the need still dwarfs action, and federally-directed work is lengthy and intense. Crews must clear dead and dying trees quickly to reduce the danger to people and the chance of reburns, a Forest Service spokesperson said. Finding seeds and growing seedlings can take a year or two, even before planting.

The federal government’s capacity to replant forests eroded away over time, and it will take time to rebuild it, said Solomon Dobrowski, a professor of landscape ecology at the University of Montana. Dobrowski’s research found that the reforestation gap spans millions of acres across the West and is likely to double or even triple in the coming decades.

“You don’t turn that ship around on a dime,” Dobrowski said.

Instead, the Trump administration cut the Forest Service significantly. The agency lost 20% of its staff last year.

“It just makes me cry at night … it’s basically a child swinging a wrecking ball,” said Hugh Safford, a forest and fire ecologist with the UC Davis Environmental Science and Policy Department and a former regional ecologist for the Forest Service. “Morale is down, capacity already was really minimal.”

And California keeps burning.

Stewart McMorrow, staff chief of wildfire resilience for Cal Fire, opens a box of seeds in the seed bank at the Lewis A. Moran Reforestation Center in Davis on July 15, 2026.

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A widening gap

The loss of forests “is one of the least-known impacts of climate change and megafires,” said wildfire task force director Patrick Wright.

The draft strategy for California obtained by CalMatters comes with no dedicated funding. The goal, Wright said, is to put every agency and organization trying to replant California’s scorched forests on the same page.

The strategy calls for streamlining planning, prioritizing projects tackling critical human safety concerns and ecosystem issues like water supply, and increasing the supply of seeds, seedlings and workers.

It urges land managers to avoid adding more fuel to the fires, and recommends replanting at lower densities and with more natural spacing instead of the classic, closely-packed “pines in lines” grid. Scientists have linked high-density plantings to high-severity fires.

The most startling pieces, though, come from the draft strategy’s look at the current landscape. California would need to scale up reforestation by 35% annually to meet the state’s existing post-fire replanting goals, which start at 280,000 acres per year in 2030. The increase would take “significant funds,” the report said, because reforestation can cost up to $6,400 an acre.

But the current pace is lagging. Statewide, land managers have replanted roughly 254,000 acres of severely burned forest since 2020 — or around 16% of the area stripped of forest cover by high severity fires between 2020 and 2024 alone. The number is just 8% on federal lands, outside of wilderness areas.

Safford said the numbers are actually even more dire: Factoring in both wilderness areas and excluding forests likely to regrow on their own, his recent study reports that the U.S. Forest Service replanted just 1.2% of the agency’s California lands that wildfire denuded between 2016 and 2023.

It wasn’t always like this, said Safford. The Forest Service’s replanting efforts mostly kept pace with wildfires until around 2006.

“And then,” Safford said, “it just falls to shit.”

‘Nowhere near prepared’

For all the vitriol between Gov. Gavin Newsom and President Donald Trump over the care and raking of California’s forests, state and federal money — and people — often intersect on the landscape.

On California’s end, Cal Fire funds and conducts research, and provides grants for forest restoration on private, state and even federal land. Cal Fire also runs the reforestation center in Davis, where flats of glossy young conifers are gently misted with water in the summer heat.

McMorrow — tall and crisp in his navy Cal Fire uniform — can’t help but dig his hands into the dirt to pull out weeds tangling with the seedlings.

One of the most challenging chokepoints, McMorrow said, is finding the right seeds to grow these seedlings — getting climbers to the right spot, at the right time, to pluck ripe cones from the treetops.

“Believe me, I do it,” said McMorrow, who created a tree-climbing program at Cal Fire. “We are trying to meet the demand that’s in front of us, and it’s crushing.”

Yet the money for Cal Fire’s efforts — cobbled together from the state budget, federal grants and other one-time funds — represents a relatively small and ever-changing fraction of Cal Fire’s multibillion-dollar budget.

The nursery in Davis shut down in the early 2000s, a casualty of across-the-board state budget cuts. Though the seed bank freezer stayed on, the reforestation center didn’t fully reopen until after the Legislature in 2017 tapped a 2012 fee on wood products to bring it back online.

Scaling up and upgrading the facility now carries an estimated $26.2 million price tag; this year’s state budget included about $1.2 million to fund preliminary planning.

Meanwhile, other funding is on the line. California’s climate regulators — chaired by Newsom appointee Lauren Sanchez — voted in May to overhaul a key climate program  in ways that could substantially reduce, or even eliminate, up to $200 million a year for wildfire resilience. Grants for reforestation are among the many competing priorities for this funding.

While the Proposition 4 climate bond includes $1.5 billion for wildfire and forest resilience, state leaders are spending down the bond quickly.

“The truth of the matter is that California is probably, infrastructurally speaking, in a better place than any other western state,” Safford said.

“What that tells you is how piss-poor the capacity is in general in the Western U.S., because California is nowhere near prepared for the scale of this.”

Cone hunting

On the banks of Jenkinson Lake in the Sierra Nevada foothills, Stella Krone and Elyse Wohlenberg wrestled with a slingshot that towered over the two of them. It took their combined strength to slot the bungee into position, then Wohlenberg stepped back.

“All clear?” Krone asked, kneeling in a clearing and pointing the slingshot at a Douglas fir 50 yards away. “Firing!”

Krone, Wohlenberg, and dozens of other hard-hatted people were there, crunching over conifer needles, for Cone Camp — a training program led by American Forests with support from Cal Fire and the Forest Service.

The campers — some forestry professionals, some interested laypeople — peeled off with oversized slingshots and souped-up potato guns to learn how to knock cones loose from tree branches. That’s how they check the cones for ripeness and viability, before sending someone up the tree to collect them for a seed bank.

The problem was, there were hardly any. Last year’s dry cones rattled to the forest floor as Krone and another camper jiggled the rope they’d shot into the canopy.

“So far, not a great cone year,” said Leana Weissberg, American Forests’ California director.

In the clearing, the instructor asked whether the group was ready to try again.

“Let’s go,” Krone said. “We’re cone hunters for a reason.”