Fact-check: Did Gavin Newsom cut $100m in fire prevention funding?

As wildfires in California caused at least two dozen deaths and billions of dollars in damages, some social media users accused Governor Gavin Newsom of slashing money to prevent fires.

Many posts including by Fox News stated Newsom cut about $100m in fire prevention from the state’s budget months before the Los Angeles fires.

Some of the posts drew on a January 10 Newsweek article that reported Newsom signed a budget in June which cut funding for wildfire and forest resilience by $101m. California Assembly Republicans made similar statements about fire prevention cuts citing information from the state budget. President-elect Donald Trump posted an article by Breitbart that repeated the $100m claim, citing Newsweek.

Newsom said it was a “ridiculous lie” that he cut $100m, a retort he included on his new website, California Fire Facts. But the website didn’t dissect the $100m; it focused on the big picture of the budget during his tenure, asserting that the budget had grown for California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Cal Fire.

Newsom is right that the budget increased. But it’s not a lie that money (actually more than $100m) was cut.

State fire department budget facts

In 2021 and 2022, California had a budget surplus. The state dedicated an additional $16.3bn to address issues ranging from droughts and sustainable agriculture to 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 $2.8bn towards wildfires and improving forest health. However, following 2023 and 2024 budget deficits, the state shaved that amount by $191m ($47m in 2023, $144m in 2024). The budget deficit was tens of billions of dollars.

Cal Fire, which oversees about 12.5 million hectares (31 million acres), responds to hazards and disasters including fires. The department has a budget of about $4.2bn for 2024-2025. Most of its money comes from state funds but it also includes reimbursements from local departments and the federal government.

Newsweek’s story cited an analysis by the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, a nonpartisan office that works for the state Assembly, that it said showed the $101m cut. That office told PolitiFact that Newsweek had cited a report that summarised the governor’s proposed budget for 2024-2025.

The proposal included $101m in reductions to the wildfire and forest resilience funding. That represented a cut to previous surplus years’ budget agreement that called for one-time wildfire funding to be spread over a four-year period, from 2020-2024, said Rachel Ehlers, who works in the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

The adopted budget’s spending plan reduced that planned multiyear one-time wildfire-related funding by $144m.

“To underscore: These were reductions to one-time augmentations, not reductions to Cal Fire’s ongoing base programmes and funding,” Ehlers said.

Of the $144m in reductions, the largest – $46m – was for a pilot focused on creating hydrogen from biomass through the Department of Conservation. The forest management project’s goal 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 $35m for wildfire resilience projects on state-owned land and $28m for projects undertaken by state conservancies.

Many of the programme cuts were small, percentage-wise. For example, the forest health programme declined from $555m to $552m, about a half-percent decrease. Prescribed fire and hand crews, who use hand tools to suppress fires, dropped from $134m to $129m, almost a 4 percent decrease. Fire prevention grants stayed the same at $475m as did fire prevention projects at $90m.

Jim Stanley, a spokesperson for the state assembly’s Republican Caucus, also pointed to the figures showing the proposed $100m cut and the actual $144m cut. We asked Stanley whether the Republicans had objected to the cuts at the time. He quoted Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher 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 had “misrepresented his accomplishments and even disinvested in wildfire prevention. The investigation found Newsom overstated, by 690 percent (a near-eight-fold increase), the number of acres treated with fuel breaks and prescribed burns in the very forestry projects he said needed to be prioritised to protect the state’s most vulnerable communities.”

Cal Fire’s budget and spending have grown

Cal Fire’s total base wildfire protection budget has nearly tripled over the past 10 years (from $1.1bn in 2014‑2015 to $3bn in 2023‑2024), according to a March analysis by the Legislative Analyst’s Office 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 more than doubling over the past 10 years from $1.7bn in 2014‑2015 to $3.7bn in 2023‑2024. Newsom’s office sent us similar information showing budget increases.

The number of staff members working in fire prevention has similarly grown during that decade, rising from 5,756 to 10,275.

Another way to look at Cal Fire is through expenditures rather than the budgeted amount because it’s not unusual for the state to dip into other pots of money to spend more than budgeted for addressing fires.

The California Legislative Analyst’s office estimated total Cal Fire expenditures have risen during Newsom’s tenure from $2.74bn in 2019-2020 to $4.59bn (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 $10bn climate bond that allocates $1.5bn to forest health and wildfires.

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird and Chief Correspondent Louis Jacobson contributed to this report.

Source