PORTLAND, Ore. — President Donald Trump’s administration is holding up money for wildfire mitigation projects funded through legislation championed by his Democratic predecessor, threatening efforts to prevent catastrophic blazes like the ones that recently ripped through Southern California.
The decision undermines Trump’s repeated insistence that communities need to clear combustible materials like fallen branches and undergrowth — “it’s called management of the floor,” he said while visiting Los Angeles last month — to guard against wildfires.
Elizabeth Peace, a spokesperson for the Interior Department, said via email that mitigation work is “currently undergoing review to ensure consistency” with Trump’s executive orders.
The scrutiny is being applied only to projects using money from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, two centerpieces of former President Joe Biden’s administration. They included roughly $3 billion for wildfire mitigation efforts, often known as hazardous fuels reduction programs.
Peace said those programs are continuing if funded by other congressional appropriations.
Lomakatsi Restoration Project, a forest management nonprofit that develops and implements programs to reduce hazardous fuels and wildfire threat in Oregon, northern California and Idaho, has stopped work on projects funded by Biden’s legislation, which provides 65% of its $17 million budget.
Executive director Marko Bey said he laid off 15 full-time employees after being told by federal officials the funding was frozen pending review, with no information on when it would be released.
“It just doesn’t make good business sense to keep operating, not knowing if we’re going to get paid or if at some point the administration is going to rescind some of this,” Bey said. He called it a “really challenging situation.”
Mitigation work, which includes removing small and dead trees with logging equipment or through controlled burns, can prevent forests from becoming tinderboxes. It often takes place in winter and spring in preparation for warmer months when fires can be more severe. Wildfire season traditionally starts in May and ends in November, though blazes can occur year-round because of warmer, drier conditions exacerbated by climate change.
The latest example came last month in the Los Angeles area, where fires killed at least 29 people and destroyed nearly 17,000 structures in what is projected to be among the costliest natural disasters in U.S. history.
Trump has talked about forest management since his first term, when he visited California after the Camp Fire killed 85 people in 2018.
“You’ve got to take care of the floors,” he said. “You know, the floors of the forest, very important.” In Finland, he said, “they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things.”
He issued an executive order intended to improve management of federal lands, and in 2020 he complained about California officials.
“I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests,” he said. “There are many, many years of leaves and broken trees, and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”
“Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it,” he added, “because they don’t listen to us.”
Democratic lawmakers have called for federal funding to resume.
“Halting these payments is not only unlawful but also endangers our rural communities by removing a vital component of their economies and delaying critical work to mitigate the threat of wildfire,” Sens. Martin Heinrich New Mexico, Patty Murray of Washington, Jeff Merkley of Oregon and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said Tuesday in a letter to the administration.
Harrison Fields, a deputy press secretary at the White House, defended the administration’s approach.
“Just because there’s a review doesn’t mean there’s not a desire for this work to get done,” he said. “Proper oversight of the dollars is just as important as ensuring that California gets restored.”
Fields also said that “there has been no bigger advocate for restoring California to its natural beauty than President Trump, which is why he made it a point to visit the region in his first week in office and he’s continuing to put tremendous pressure on state and local government to reduce the barriers in restoring the area.”
The review ordered by Trump is also disrupting a $1 billion grant program that helps local jurisdictions better prepare for fires through neighborhood risk assessments and community outreach programs.
Kimiko Barrett of Headwaters Economics in Bozeman, Montana, who worked with counties in the state to secure Community Wildfire Defense Grants, said grant recipients were told Monday that payments had been paused for at least 10 days.
“Coming out of Los Angeles, we have learned that this is a crisis involving very specific risk reduction efforts,” Barrett said. “Without this program communities will not have the tools to continue the very important mitigation work that’s needed.”
There are also concerns about how Trump’s recent executive order on downsizing the federal workforce could affect seasonal wildland firefighters.
McLaurine Pinover, a spokesperson for the Office of Personnel Management, said firefighters are exempt from the order as public safety workers.
But confusion has caused delays. Ben McLane, a fire crew captain for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington state, said uncertainty over whether firefighters are exempt from the freeze stalled the hiring process for seasonal wildland firefighter positions.
Applicants whom McLane has selected for his crew have received some of the information they need to complete — such as medical and drug tests and fingerprinting — in order to be officially hired. But the process has not been completed because human resources lacks agency permission to move forward, he said.
“We’re very confused, and we’re not being told anything,” he said. “I don’t know whose job it is to say that firefighters are an essential aspect for public safety and are exempt from the hiring freeze. But whoever’s job it is, they need to say it, because if they don’t, then there will be situations where people call 911 and there aren’t enough firefighters to go around.”
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law allowed for some small increases to the 18,700 federal firefighters in 2022, but issues with workforce understaffing and retention remain. The attrition rate for firefighters at the U.S. Forest Service has been 45% over the past four years, a group of Democratic senators said in a second letter to the administration this week.
“We therefore need to focus on recruitment and retention of this critically important workforce, rather than place more uncertainty within it through an arbitrary freeze,” the lawmakers wrote.
___
Brown reported from Billings, Montana, and Megerian from Washington. Associated Press writer Matthew Daly in Washington contributed.
