WASHINGTON — Wildfire legislation aimed at reducing fire risk exposed partisan divisions Tuesday, as Democrats used a House Subcommittee on Federal Lands hearing to criticize the Trump administration.
California’s Palisades and Eaton fires exploded within hours of each other on Jan. 7, 2025, in Los Angeles County. The wildfires charred 59 square miles and claimed 31 lives.
In response to this fast-moving natural disaster, the House introduced the Fix Our Forests Act (FOFA) on Jan. 16, 2025. The legislation aims to improve forest health and mitigate wildfire spread through active forest management. It passed the House with bipartisan support on Jan. 23, 2025, and now awaits a vote in the Senate. Yet, at Tuesday’s hearing, it sparked major partisan debate and broader concerns about wildfire response.
One of the key features of the bill would remove impediments to logging, including provisions that promote prescribed burning and forest thinning in fire-prone areas. Experts say the legislation will give the U.S. Forest Service permission to begin projects with little public oversight.
Ranking Member on the House Natural Resources Committee, Jared Huffman, D-Calif., urged the committee to have a more nuanced conversation. He said that logging alone will not mitigate wildfires.
“There is a notion that there’s this simple thing if we just fix our forests, we’ll all be safer from catastrophic wildfire,” Huffman said. “Those scenes in Los Angeles right there had very little to do with forests.”
Huffman agreed that some aspects of the FOFA could help in proactive fuel management, but rejected the idea that timber harvesting would make communities safer, calling it a false narrative. He pointed instead to infrastructure and shrub vegetation as key factors in the Los Angeles fires.
Yet, several Republican representatives argued that forest management is an effective strategy against wildfires. They instead attacked environmental regulation, including the National Environmental Policy Act, for delaying fire management efforts.
“The environmental laws adopted in the 1970s made active land management all but impossible. So nature has now returned to do the gardening her way by burning it out,” Tom McClintock, R-Calif. said.
Subcommittee Chairman Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., agreed, arguing that unmanaged forests would inevitably burn.
“We have the ability to manage properly, including burning but also including grazing, harvesting, and shouldn’t we be using some of that wood to be able to build homes right here in America rather than importing that wood from other countries?” Tiffany said.
Throughout the hearing, Democrats focused on other issues. In his opening statement, Huffman condemned the administration for damaging the agencies that manage public land.
“I would love to bridge this disconnect where we say we care about these things, but we will never ask any hard questions of the Trump administration, even as it runs roughshod over the budgets and the agencies that we count on to do these things,” Huffman said.
Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore., said the timing of the hearing was troubling, citing the administration’s failures and what she described as “profound mismanagement” of the Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
“It is difficult to take hearings like this seriously or to meaningfully discuss solutions when the administration charged with disaster response continues to hollow out FEMA and fails the communities that depend on it,” Dexter said.
Ranking member of the subcommittee Joe Neguse, D-Colo., did not ask any questions to the witnesses. He did not view this as a hearing scheduled in good faith, as the administration refused to approve disaster declarations for multiple wildfires that had occurred within the last year.
“I just have to be candid with you that I find it very difficult to take my colleagues on the other side seriously right now,” Neguse said. “If they were serious about wildfire resiliency, wildfire mitigation, assisting communities, they could start by joining us in convincing the Trump administration to grant these disaster declarations.”
Republican representatives did not address these concerns in Tuesday’s hearing. If FOFA passes in the Senate, the bill would be sent to the president for approval.
