Fact Check: Did Gavin Newsom cut $100 million in fire prevention funding? | Politics news

It also caused wildfires, at least in California Twenty deaths and billions of dollars in damageSome social media users accused Gov. Gavin Newsom of cutting funds for fire prevention.

Several publications including Fox News reported that Newsom cut about $100 million for fire prevention from the state budget months before the Los Angeles fires.

Some of the posts were based on a January 10 Newsweek article reporting that Newsom signed a budget in June that cut funding for wildfires and forest resilience by $101 million. Republicans in the California Assembly made similar statements about fire prevention cuts, citing information from the state budget. President-elect Donald Trump Published an article by Breitbart reiterating the $100 million demand, citing Newsweek.

Newsom said the $100 million reduction was a “ridiculous lie,” a response he included on his new website, California Fire Facts. But the site did not explain the amount of $100 million; She focused on the big picture budget during his tenure, emphasizing that the budget increased for California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Cal Fire.

Newsom is right to increase the budget. But it’s no lie that the money (actually more than $100 million) was cut.

State Fire Department budget facts

In 2021 and 2022, California achieved a budget surplus. The state has allocated an additional $16.3 billion to address issues ranging from drought, sustainable agriculture, wildfires and extreme heat, said Gokce Sencan, a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank.

As part of that, the state allocated $2.8 billion for wildfire prevention and improving forest health. However, after budget shortfalls in 2023 and 2024, the state reduced this amount by $191 million ($47 million in 2023, $144 million in 2024). The budget deficit reached tens of billions of dollars.

Cal Firewhich oversees about 12.5 million hectares (31 million acres), responds to hazards and disasters including fires. The ministry’s budget is about $4.2 billion for the period 2024-2025. Most of its money comes from state funds but also includes refunds from local departments and the federal government.

The Newsweek report cited an analysis by the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, a nonpartisan office that works for the state Assembly, which it said showed the $101 million reduction. This office told PolitiFact that Newsweek cited a report summarizing the governor’s proposed budget for 2024-2025.

The proposal included $101 million in cuts to wildfire funding and enhancing forest resilience. That represents a reduction in the previous surplus years budget agreement that called for one-time wildfire funding to be spread out over four years, from 2020 to 2024, said Rachel Ehlers, who works in the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

The approved budget spending plan reduced one-time multi-year wildfire-related planned funding by $144 million.

“To reiterate: these were reductions to one-time increases, not reductions to core programs and ongoing funding for Cal Fire,” Ehlers said.

Of the $144 million in cuts, the largest reduction — $46 million — was for a pilot project focused on producing hydrogen from biomass through the Department of Environmental Conservation. The goal of the forest management project was to address forest health and wildfire risk in the Sierra Nevada.

That pilot never got off the ground, Ehlers said. The budget also reduced $35 million for forest fire prevention projects on state-owned lands and $28 million for projects implemented by government reserves.

Many of the program cuts were small in percentage terms. For example, the Forest Health Program decreased from $555 million to $552 million, a decrease of nearly half a percent. Costs for fire crews and hand tools, which use hand tools to put out fires, fell from $134 million to $129 million, a decline of about 4 percent. Fire prevention grants remained the same at $475 million, as did fire prevention projects at $90 million.

Jim Stanley, spokesman for the State House Republican Caucus, also pointed to numbers showing the proposed $100 million cut and the actual cut of $144 million. We asked Stanley whether Republicans objected to the cuts at the time. Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher was quoted as saying in June 2024 that the budget failed to adequately fund public safety.

In 2021, Cap Radio (a former PolitiFact partner) reported that Newsom “misrepresented his accomplishments, and even divested, of his investments in wildfire prevention.” The investigation found that Newsom overestimated the number of acres treated with fuel outages and prescribed burns by 690 percent (a nearly eight-fold increase) on the very forest projects he said needed to be prioritized to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities.

Cal Fire’s budget and spending grew

Cal Fire’s overall wildfire protection base budget That budget has nearly tripled over the past 10 years (from $1.1 billion in 2014-2015 to $3 billion in 2023-2024), according to an analysis by the Legislative Analyst’s Office in March before the 2024-2025 budget was approved.

Cal Fire’s overall budget has also increased, with its combined budget for fire protection, emergency fire suppression, resource management and fire prevention doubling over the past 10 years from $1.7 billion in 2014-2015 to $3.7 billion in 2023-2024. Newsom’s office sent us similar information showing budget increases.

number Employees working in the field of fire prevention It similarly grew during that decade, rising from 5,756 to 10,275.

Another way to look at Cal Fire is by expenditures rather than the budgeted amount because it is not unusual for the state to turn to other funds to spend more than it budgeted to address fires.

The California Legislative Analyst’s Office estimated that total Cal Fire expenditures rose during Newsom’s term from $2.74 billion in 2019-2020 to $4.59 billion (not adjusted for inflation or including additional costs incurred for the current Los Angeles wildfires) in 2024-2025.

In November, California voters approved Proposition 4, a $10 billion climate bond that allocates $1.5 billion to forest health and wildfires.

PolitiFact researcher Karen Byrd and chief correspondent Lois Jacobson contributed to this report.