The Brief

A year ago, California officials had to report under a new state law how they used automated systems to make important decisions about people’s lives.

They said they never did — a startling answer for a number of reasons, sources told CalMatters at the time, including that there were several prominent examples to the contrary.

Now, the state has issued a more expansive answer: It is currently using six automated systems to make consequential decisions about the lives of Californians.

The systems are used to do things like:

• Predict whether incarcerated people will re-offend 
• Evaluate whether unemployment claims are fraudulent
• Remotely administer exams for California State University students 
• Detect when college students use generative AI to write assignments.

That's according to a report released Friday by the state's technology department. The report is required under a 2023 law mandating that that state agencies annually disclose their use of “high-risk automated decision systems,” which the law defines as systems “used to assist or replace human discretionary decisions that have a legal or similarly significant effect, including decisions that materially impact access to, or approval for, housing or accommodations, education, employment, credit, health care, and criminal justice.”

The law was pushed by civil rights, privacy, and civil liberties groups concerned about harms from AI-like systems. Numerous such systems have been shown to produce results biased against marginalized groups, including those used for high-stakes testing, predicting recidivism, and detecting AI-generated texts.

CalMatters flagged last year’s report as surprising, noting that the state corrections department had reported using software to predict post-release behavior and that the employment department used a fraud detection system that paused benefits for 600,000 Californians between Christmas and New Years in 2020, according to a Legislative Analyst’s Office report.

Though the report names six high-risk systems in use today, state agencies have used some for several years now. Those include COMPAS, which has been used by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to assign recidivism scores to inmates for at least a decade.

The technology department said in the report that it found more systems for its report this year because it evaluated responses from state agencies more thoroughly, including by meeting with agencies and questioning them about their systems.

In addition to the six high-risk systems, the department’s report disclosed an additional six systems initially flagged as high risk but later determined not to be. One was AI used for legislative bill analysis by the California Department of Finance.

The report also notes two high-risk systems that are not currently in use: the Department of Cannabis Control is developing artificial intelligence to analyze whether marijuana packaging violates a law against appealing to children and California State University discontinued use of a language model for reviewing job applications.

Results of the second annual survey come after cities like San Jose and San Francisco released their first AI inventories in recent months. They also come at a time when California-based AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are going public and seeking government contracts. Americans are split on whether they trust AI and surveys last year by TechEquity and Carnegie California found that the majority of Californians want safety over innovation. A Gallup poll to evaluate the opinions of Americans found similar results.

Senate Bill 1248, a bill that would have prohibited state employees from using automated decision systems as the sole basis for decisionmaking, was killed last month in the state’s rapid-fire appropriations process.

What’s missing

While the newly-released report shares more information than last year’s, several questions remain about the state’s use of artificial intelligence and other automated systems.

The report does not include generative AI pilot projects underway with support from the governor’s office to do things like help businesses file taxes, support state employees who work on homelessness, and an AI assistant named Poppy that uses language models like Anthropic’s Claude to do things like draft documents, research policy, or build custom AI tools, according to a state website. The website says that 67 state departments provided input during the pilot phase and statewide rollout of Poppy begins next month.

A California State University contract with OpenAI to provide a version of ChatGPT is also not mentioned, though surveys of AI use in educational settings have found that the technology can do more harm than good.

The 2023 law mandating the annual high-risk systems report excludes reporting by a number of state agencies, including the judicial branch and the University of California college system. Reporting by CalMatters last month found that a majority of the roughly 60 courts that operate statewide have adopted generative AI use policies. Courts in Los Angeles and Riverside counties have begun testing an AI tool to act as a clerk, drafting orders and producing research memos.

CalMatters is compiling an inventory of automated decisionmaking systems in use by state and local agencies throughout California in order to provide transparency into how governments are using decisionmaking systems and AI. Know about an AI system in use by a state or local agency? Email khari@calmatters.org.

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

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Wildfires once ran on deadlines.

After a series of catastrophic blazes in the early 20th century, the U.S. Forest Service sought to show it was able to control and protect forests under its care. In 1933, the agency mandated the “10 a.m. rule,” declaring that any wildland fire should be extinguished by 10 a.m. the day after it was reported.

Snuffing all fires quickly, the agency reasoned, would prevent disasters like the Big Burn of 1910. That incident scorched more than 3 million acres along the Montana-Idaho border during a 36-hour rampage, killing at least 85 people and destroying five towns.

Unlike earthquakes or tornadoes, wildfires have weaknesses. We can suppress flames with water or retardant chemicals. Wildland fire crews remove fuels with hand tools and bulldozers. Sometimes they use tactical burnouts — literally fighting fire with fire.

These tools can obscure crucial facts about wildfire and reinforce strategies that can backfire.

Tales of heroism following the Big Burn established the Forest Service as a necessary government service. As New York Times reporter Tim Egan put it, “To this day, I think that agency owes its existence to this fire.”

But Egan also described the consequences of that successful effort to control wildfire: “Actively trying to put out every fire left a lot of standing dead timber. So some of the big fires we had in the latter 20th century, including the Yellowstone fires of 1988 and some of the Idaho fires of the late 1990s, and fires still to come, are the result of having timber that probably should have burned every now and then during the seasonal fires.”

Rocky Mountain Research Station scientist David Calkin described the phenomenon as the “Wildfire Paradox” in a 2013 article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Using wildfire suppression to eliminate large and damaging wildfires ensures the inevitable occurrence of these fires,” Calkin wrote. “Wildfire suppression, effective 95% to 98% of the time, inevitably leads to ecologically significant wildfires with higher intensities and rapid growth that are unable to be suppressed.”

Fire researchers began to notice the paradox in the 1960s, and began implementing “let burn” strategies in remote forests to reduce those fuel loads. The Forest Service modified the “10 a.m. rule” in 1971 to allow some fires to burn, and officially abandoned the policy in 1978.

Over the following decades, wildfire managers adapted to a changing climate, shifting public opinion and funding challenges.

A mid-century moist period began drying out toward the tail of the 20^th century. The 1988 fires in and around Yellowstone National Park burned 1.4 million acres in one of America’s best-known landscapes. Colorado’s South Canyon fire in 1994 killed 14 wildland firefighters and prompted major federal fire policy reviews.

One of the most consequential shifts was the growing focus on the wildland-urban interface, or WUI — the increasing overlap between private homes and fire-prone landscapes.

Several record-breaking fire seasons in the early 2000s made federal budget watchers aware that the Forest Service was spending more to fight fire than almost anything else in its mission, and frequently didn’t have enough funding to do so. In 2017, federal wildfire suppression costs topped $2 billion — six times as much as was spent in the 1990s.

The year 2018 produced one of the worst wildfire seasons in history and included the Camp Fire, which killed more than 80 people in and around Paradise, Calif.

More recently, political pressure for a more aggressive response to wildfire has renewed fire suppression.

Last June, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response,” which in its first sentence declared “The devastation of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires shocked the American people and highlighted the catastrophic consequences when State and local governments are unable to quickly respond to such disasters.” 

Draft versions of the policy included a return to the 10 a.m. rule, according to numerous sources in the wildfire community.

“No one was dumb enough to use 10 a.m. policy language, but there was fear of a fire getting away,” said Bobbie Scopa, a 45-year firefighting veteran who worked at the local, state and federal levels and now is vice president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters.

“Anytime you light a fire or purposefully don’t put out a fire, you own it and you own every bad thing that can happen. You’re taking a risk when you do that,” Scopa said.

Draft versions of the Fix Our Forests Act also included a call for full suppression of all wildfires.

Matt Weiner, CEO of the advocacy group Megafire Action, said putting that into law would have had dangerous consequences.

“We were able to get that out of it,” Weiner said. “And long-term, we will push aggressively against the 10 a.m. rule being included in statute anywhere. We don’t want to just create a suppression super-agency. We want a system that recognizes the need for a lot more beneficial fire on the landscape.”

Nevertheless, at a July 22 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Forestry and Horticulture, Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz told members of Congress his agency remained committed to prioritizing aggressive initial attack on wildfire this year.

“Keeping fire small protects firefighters, communities and also saves funding,” Schultz said. “I assure you every fire has a full-suppression strategy.”

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

With the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing opening to the animal world in about 100 days, officials are announcing ways for humans to also mark the milestone.

There will be a community festival at King Gillette Ranch in Calabasas on Dec. 2, as well as a ribbon cutting ceremony at the crossing that will be broadcast live to the public.

According to officials, the wildlife crossing will be the largest of its kind in the world, reconnecting habitat for Southern California mountain lions, bobcats, deer, bats, birds and other animals — big and small.

Here’s what you need to know.

About the grand opening events

The festival at King Gillette Ranch will include exhibits, music and special guests, according to organizers. The ribbon cutting will be played live on a large screen with visitors invited to cut their own ribbon through a virtual display.

Ticket donations are required to get in and will go toward the National Wildlife Federation’s #SaveLACougars campaign.

• When: 11:30 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. Dec. 2
• Tickets: $5 for children 12 and under, $10 for everyone else
  
  • You can buy them here
  • Schools and other groups may be eligible for discount pricing or scholarships. You can learn more by emailing: lgill@wildlifecrossingfund.org

A rendering of what the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing will look like once construction is complete.

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National Wildlife Federation and Living Habitats

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Officials with the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing announced that SoCal animals will be able to traverse the crossing as of Dec. 2, 2026.

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Destiny Torres

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LAist

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Project partners, including members of its plant nursery team, posing for a picture with installed native plants on the wildlife crossing.

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Makenna Cramer

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LAist

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A stuffed mountain lion plush in front of where the first native plants were placed.

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Makenna Cramer

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LAist

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Beth Pratt (right), leader of the Save LA Cougars campaign, placing a native plant with a member of the nursery team.

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Makenna Cramer

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LAist

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The native plants that are installed on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing include dozens of distinct species sourced from within a five-mile radius of the structure in the Santa Monica Mountains.

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Courtesy of the #SaveLACougars campaign

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The view from near the top of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing in March 2025.

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Makenna Cramer

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LAist

)

There will be a private reception and fundraising event after the ribbon cutting for donors and sponsors. The event will support the National Wildlife Federation and the Wildlife Crossing Fund.

• When: 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Dec. 2 
• Where: Agoura Hills
• How it works: There are different gift levels inspired by animals, such as the “Monarch Butterfly” starting at $10,000, which will get two guests into the reception and a group tour of the crossing.
  
  • You can learn more here

Details on how to tune in to the ribbon cutting ceremony online have not been shared yet.

Collin O'Mara, president and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said the crossing is a profound testament to what’s possible when people refuse to accept the fragmentation of the natural world.

“When we cut this ribbon, we will not just celebrate a single bridge — we will be celebrating a global movement to restore wildlife connectivity,” he said in a statement.

You can keep an eye on the crossing's progress through three livestream cameras here.

Listen to our podcast

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.