The U.S. Government Blames Los Angeles for Fires on Federal Lands.
This column is co-published and produced by Zócalo Public Square. Photo: Backbone Trail, in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, Photo by Seanydelight via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0
Shut up, Uncle Sam. Or put up.
Yes, I’m talking to you, my federal government, the Trump administration. And I don’t care if you don’t like my tone.
Because, while shamelessly and falsely blaming California and its politicians for devastating fires, you never acknowledge the hard fact of your own culpability and responsibility:
You are the arsonist, and not just politically.
Because half of California is yours.
In fact, more than 47% of the land in this state belongs to the federal government. Just 3% is managed by the state.
The flames that leveled much of Pacific Palisades and Malibu are believed to have started in the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area (italics mine), which is managed by the National Park Service.
The blaze that turned much of Altadena to ash burned through the Angeles National Forest, managed by you, via the U.S. Forest Service, which is part of the United States (you again!) Department of Agriculture. The U.S. Forest Service is our state’s largest landowner.
The clueless national media allows you to get away with this game—blaming California for fires you’ve helped make worse, as part of a larger strategy of political “retribution”—but that doesn’t mean California has to.
Let’s be clear: Our firelands are actually your firelands. And you’ve managed your California land so poorly for so long—suppressing fire instead of managing it, letting fuels accumulate, providing insufficient personnel and resources to handle our national parks, monuments, forests, trails, wilderness, and recreation areas—that you’ve helped turn California into a tinderbox.
When you and your leadership—President Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, members of Congress—blame California’s land and natural resource management for our fires, you aren’t just lying or playing dirty politics. You’re trying to shift blame.
And we can see through you and your bad faith.
Now, if you had any honor—which you don’t, but let’s just say you did for the sake of argument—you wouldn’t just provide us with all the disaster aid we need, right now. You’d announce that you were going to make major new investments in federal land management in California and across the country. After all, you own more than a quarter of all the land in the United States.
Instead, you are shamelessly working to make your land management even worse.
Project 2025, the governing blueprint devised by the leaders of the new administration, outlines deep cuts to the already-diminished number of federal workers, which would exacerbate understaffing and poor management on federal lands. The cuts are now beginning, with a federal hiring and funding freeze preventing the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies from filling positions, including wildlands firefighting roles, and putting public lands projects in jeopardy. Project 2025 also calls for boosting the number of gas and mining leases, reducing prescribed burning, and increasing logging—all measures which will make public lands more fire-prone and less resilient.
You propose to do all this, while your administration, run by climate deniers, rolls back green energy infrastructure and investment, and encourages more climate-altering burning of fossil fuels.
You and your current regime better hope hell isn’t hotter than our mega-fires.
Even saying that, I want to make clear that I’m not like you. I don’t want to issue condemnations and shift blame. I want to solve the problem.
Our state and its leaders need to press you—not just for disaster aid but for massive investments in public lands. And if you won’t make those investments, then we have to insist that you surrender ownership of all federal lands in California to state and local governments and institutions, immediately.
That surrender should come with authority and money to handle all the deferred maintenance that you haven’t done over the last century. I’m thinking $500 billion, but we can negotiate.
If you refuse these terms, California’s elected leaders should use every dirty trick in the Congressional toolbox to force you to fork over. That should include attaching this transfer of public lands to every must-pass piece of legislation in Congress, starting with the debt limit.
California’s state and local governments can add to the pressure by immediately ceasing the collection of federal withholding tax dollars from their employees. If you’re going to try to put conditions on our aid, or pull funding from our cities, our governments shouldn’t help you collect taxes.
If you won’t manage or turn over your land, you and California could be headed toward divorce. A new YouGov poll commissioned by the think tank Independent California Institute found 61% support among Californians for peaceful secession from the United States. We’ve have had enough of your nonsense.
Or maybe you can trade us to Denmark in exchange for Greenland, which you actually seem to care about, and which is five times bigger than California. I don’t know why the Danes or anyone else would ever trust you to manage one of the world’s wildest and least populated places, but I guess that would be the Greenlanders’ problem.
Like I said, Uncle Sam, the choice is yours. Either do your job, or turn over your land so we can.
But, either way, shut up.
