Los Angeles authorities have evacuated some 30,000 people as of Wednesday, as flames tear through the Pacific Palisades, threatening more than 10,000 homes. And even though the fires are literally in its own backyard, Los Angeles hasn’t exactly prioritized its ability to respond to the fiery devastation.
The city’s 2024–2025 budget slashed about $17.6 million from the fire department, while increasing the budget for the city’s police force by $126 million, according to figures from the Los Angeles City Administrative Office.
Exactly why the fire department was deprioritized amid escalating wildfire seasons is unclear, but the unfortunate budget decision comes at a time when state firefighting reserves are also facing the heat. Depending on the year, low-wage incarcerated inmates compose somewhere between 30 and 40 percent of the firefighters with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection—but their ranks within the reserve have been drained by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Los Angeles Times.
“We’re here today to lay out a path forward for Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said of the proposed budget in April. “This budget continues our momentum toward change by prioritizing core city services, but using this as an opportunity as a reset, so that our budgets moving forward are more honest, transparent and more focused.”
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders tossed some blame for the ongoing crisis at climate change deniers in Congress, slamming the country’s continued inaction on the “existential” threat.
“The scale of damage and loss is unimaginable. Climate change is real, not ‘a hoax.’ Donald Trump must treat this like the existential crisis it is,” Sanders wrote on X Wednesday.
But the incoming government is less than likely to prioritize green initiatives. Trump’s transition team has already prepared executive orders for the president-elect to once again withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, an international climate treaty limiting greenhouse gas emissions. What’s more, Trump reportedly resisted sending wildfire aid to California in 2018 because the state voted Democratic.
Republicans have also proposed nixing the nation’s clean energy programs, including dismantling the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 in order to save some $700 billion from the federal deficit so that they can barely dampen the blow of extending Trump’s 2017 tax plan to the benefit of corporations. Nonpartisan budget groups predict that such a move could balloon the deficit anywhere between $5 trillion and $15 trillion.
Killing President Joe Biden’s key legislative victory, however, would kill tax credits for electric vehicles and spur fossil fuel production on federally protected land.
