Federal wildfire crews are stretched thin. California is stepping in to help

California’s last working nuclear power plant sits cradled in a landscape that would worry any firefighter when the wind picks up.

The Pacific Ocean and its perpetual fog lick the western edge of the coastal bluffs holding the Diablo Canyon Power Plant. But the Irish Hills rise steeply to its east — their slopes rugged, dark with scrub and oak. Difficult to access, and full of fuel.

“Any fire within the Diablo power plant area could be catastrophic,” said Dave Erickson, a division chief and forester with the Cal Fire San Luis Obispo unit. The property, he said, is in a very high fire severity zone. “So we just take precautions.”

It’s one of the many places where California is now stepping into federal gaps created by Congress’ long-term underinvestment in fuels management on federal lands, the Trump administration’s cuts, and firefighters stretched thin by blazes raging across the West.

A local organization with state funding, the San Luis Obispo County Community Fire Safe Council, started carving a fuel break into the surrounding ridgelines. And Erickson put his crews to work closing the gaps, to create a critical toehold for firefighters to get ahead of flames.

In the past, the patchwork of landowners around the power plant — which includes the U.S. Bureau of Land Management — could have derailed Erickson’s plans.

But a 2023 agreement Cal Fire signed with the bureau enabled Erickson to use state resources on federal land to complete the fuel break earlier this year. The bureau managed key environmental surveys, planning and approvals.

“The project was designed from the beginning as an interagency effort,” said Philip Oviatt, a spokesperson for the Bureau of Land Management California in an email to CalMatters. “No single agency could have achieved this outcome independently.”

The stakes are high for California, where wildfires have burned through millions of acres in the last decade — killing more than 220 people, hastening the deaths of tens of thousands more, and racking up tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.

But the costs are high, too. California has spent nearly half a billion dollars in grants for wildfire resilience and forest health projects on federal lands since Gov. Gavin Newsom took office, according to the California Natural Resources Agency.

Jonathan Fitch, manager of Cal Fire’s vegetation management program, spearheaded three new agreements Cal Fire reached last year with the U.S. Forest Service. The deals allow California to clear fuels, collect cones for seed banks, replant burned lands, manage timber and more on California’s national forests, according to Fitch.

The Forest Service kicked in $4 million for the agreements across the state, some of which will go toward fuels-reduction projects, Fitch said. But the overall need far exceeds the federal funds.

“The true value is unlocking the state’s potential and resources on the federal landscape,” Fitch said.

It’s a question Fitch says he hears often: why should California put its money, people and equipment to work on federally-managed lands?

“My response is, well, wildfires don’t stop at boundaries,” Fitch said. “We cannot disregard what happens in the federal space, because we’re one state. We’re one landscape.”

‘A finite number of firefighters’

Ever since President Donald Trump accused California of failing to adequately rake its forests — more than half of which the federal government manages — Sacramento and Washington have been feuding over fuels management and federal funds.

Gov. Gavin Newsom taunted Trump with a “Make America Rake Again” model executive order last year, and blasted him for withholding roughly $1.5 billion in federal aid following the catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires in January 2025.

But for all the fighting, California frequently crosses federal borders to manage land and fire.

As the Timber Fire kicked off in Los Padres National Forest near Big Sur — burning nearly 6,000 acres of rugged terrain and forcing the closure of Highway 1 — federal incident management teams were busy.

Some were on other fires, in Hoopa and the Pacific Northwest. Others were taking mandatory rest, according to U.S. Forest Service spokesperson Adrienne Freeman.

“So we were going to be looking at ordering a team from across the country, and even those are few and far between,” Freeman said.

Instead, the federal agency called in a Cal Fire Incident Management Team to orchestrate the fire response and manage logistics, food, planning, finances, repairs, showers and medical care.

Freeman, Cal Fire and others say that the federal drawdown of incident management teams reflects surging wildfire activity across the West.

But Bobbie Scopa, retired firefighter and vice president of the organization Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, said that the Trump administration’s cuts to the Forest Service have exacerbated long-term staffing problems.

“When we DOGED everybody, we lost people from the teams,” Scopa said — referring to Elon Musk’s ill-fated government efficiency program. “We’ve been having a hard time staffing the teams for the last 10 years.”

Freeman said the decision to have Cal Fire coordinate the Timber Fire helped keep federal resources free to deploy to other places they were needed.

“This is not the first time we’ve done this, but it’s something fairly unique to California,” Freeman said. “There are a finite number of firefighters, but California is in a better position than some states — than most states — because of this relationship.”

Federal blind spot

In other areas, it’s harder for California to fill federal gaps.

As the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency slashed federal agencies, the Forest Service lost at least 20% of its staff last year, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

The administration’s reorganization and proposed closures to research facilities have destabilized the agency and gutted morale. Key California scientists left after Trump took office, two former U.S. Forest Service employees told CalMatters.

Alan Talhelm, assistant deputy director for climate and energy at Cal Fire, said federal staff losses and job changes have gutted the personnel and expertise that he and his colleagues need to incorporate federal data into the Governor’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Task Force’s fuels treatment dashboard.

“Those data still exist… But we have nobody to help us interpret those data,” Talhelm said. “If we see something that looks unusual, it’s harder for us to verify that it is what it should be and that it’s accurate information.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Forest Service said that because the agency tracks fuels treatment differently, it’s “challenging to consolidate our data with our state and local agencies.”

The data, which lag by a couple of years, are important for tracking California’s progress toward state and federal fuel management targets.

The dashboard provides a bird’s-eye view of who is thinning or burning fuels, and where. It’s critical information for state agencies targeting grant dollars and staff towards reducing fire risk — and can help plan where to send firefighters to take a stand against a blaze, Talhelm said.

“They can look at this database and say, ‘Oh, there was a prescribed burn here. Oh, there was a fuel break here,’” he said. “That’s a consequence right there. If we don’t have the correct information, it makes the data less useful.”

Talhelm said federal cuts are also slowing the U.S. Forest Service’s portion of surveys needed to update the Forest Inventory and Analysis — a census of the nation’s forests.

The data help scientists and land managers understand how climate change, drought, fire, disease and pests are changing forests — and what that means for fuels, fire risk and even timber in California.

“It’s literally the foundational information that then goes into everything from where you site your mills, to what carbon is doing, to the benefits of wildfire mitigations,” said John Battles, a professor of forest ecology at UC Berkeley.

But the data rollout is slow: California ties with Alaska for surveys that date back as far as 2021.

Cal Fire has tried to increase the pace — sending out contractors to survey California’s forests. The federal government, according to Talhelm, isn’t keeping up.

“We’re not there yet. And we’re not there in part because of the reduction in forest service staffing,” Talhelm said. “I don’t know that they have scaled back their ambition, but they’ve scaled back their ability to implement that mission.”

A spokesperson for the Forest Service said the agency is doing a final review of forest inventory data collected from 2022 through 2024, and plans to release it publicly within the next few weeks.

“We share CAL FIRE’s interest in seeing more plots measured and more frequent update(s),” the spokesperson said in an email, adding that several unspecified factors pushed California’s review cycle to seven years, rather than the hoped-for five.

The pace is a problem, Battles said: “Think about how many fires there have been since 2021 that don’t show up yet in the dataset,” he said.

“There’s always a lag in the data, because it takes awhile. But now it’s just getting to be five years … You’re making decisions with wrong, not up-to-date information.”

Funding the fight against fire

California has been able to fill federal gaps because of its outsize spending on fire, which has skyrocketed to reach roughly $4 billion a year. But the money devoted to forest health and fuels management has always made up a relatively small proportion — and now, it’s in trouble.

The Newsom administration’s changes to a key climate program have already gutted a critical pot of polluters’ money that historically funded up to $200 million a year for wildfire resilience projects.

That number is rapidly dropping — down to $38 million, according to the Department of Finance’s latest numbers, which won’t be final until next year. The Legislative Analyst’s Office reported this spring that the Newsom administration’s climate overhaul risks zeroing-out the money completely.

This pot of money has funded many of the grants Cal Fire has awarded for work on federal lands, Talhelm said.

On a July morning, Fitch trekked to the ridgeline to see, for the first time, the fuel break that his work on state and federal land agreements enabled. The sun beat back the remaining tendrils of fog tangling with coyote brush and scrub to either side of the fuel break.

Fitch called it a testament to strong partnerships.

“Land is fragmented,” he said, the fuel break stretching along the ridge behind him. “For Cal Fire to be successful, we can’t do it alone.”

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Larry Valenzuela contributed reporting.

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This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.