The Biden-Harris administration celebrated its first anniversary on Friday. This week, the administration has been taking a victory lap… or, at least, it’s been trying to.
Specifically, Vice President Kamala Harris flew to her native California on Friday to introduce some new plans to fight wildfires.
Still, if Harris is trying to define her role in the Biden administration, then she may want to distance herself from California’s wildfire policies.
To the rest of the country, California’s wildfire management can look — to put it mildly — dysfunctional
As a daughter of California, I know the devastation that wildfires bring. Yesterday, in San Bernardino I joined @SecVilsack to survey San Bernardino National Forest. pic.twitter.com/DFPXsXfdnh
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) January 22, 2022
The state has botched conservation efforts and allowed wood fuel to accumulate in forests.
Plus, Californians have been living closer to fire hazards due to suburban sprawl. According to one analysis, 2.7 million Californians live in “very high fire hazard severity zones,” and 350,000 live in cities located entirely in the hazard zones.
State-employed firefighters sometimes need to work as many as 40 days in a row, amid anemic growth in the labor supply. Some firefighters have reported shocking tales of burnout and mental illness.
One firefighter, Riva Duncan, retired from the service last year after a PTSD diagnosis. “There’s a sense of hopelessness,” she told Reuters in November.
Now, the state is seeing increasingly destructive wildfires. Last year, two massive fires crossed the rocky bastion of the Sierra Nevada for the first time, with one of them threatening tourist destinations along Lake Tahoe.
Of the 10 largest wildfires in the state’s recorded history, eight were within the last five years.
California has been effectively controlled by the Democrats for the last decade, despite containing more Trump voters than any other state.
Yet, the Democrats, after sitting on the taxpayers’ budget surplus, are just now starting to act.
Last year, Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom banned single-family zoning last year in an effort to prevent further sprawl. The Biden administration, in solidarity with Newsom, promised this week to expand efforts to fight wildfires by thinning forests around “hot spots” where nature collides with neighborhoods.
That’s where Harris comes in.
Harris joined Newsom and California Sen. Alex Padilla — both Harris’ friends and fellow Democrats — on a day when they inspected wildfire damage from the sky, visited a federal fire station where they heard about the increasing risk of destructive blazes and outlined new spending aimed at reducing the risk of wildfires and dealing with their aftermath.
Then, Harris announced $600 million in disaster relief funding for the U.S. Forest Service in California. She also hailed the work of firefighters and credited collaboration between governments “unencumbered by politics,” an apparent reference to past friction between heavily Democratic California and the Trump administration. Then, she concluded that the government is “putting the resources where they are needed” in the battle against fires.
More specifically, officials in the Biden-Harris administration said they have crafted a $50 billion plan to more than double the use of controlled fires and logging to reduce trees and other vegetation that serves as tinder in the most at-risk areas.
Here’s the catch. Only some of the work has funding so far.
Yet, the administration still insists that the rest of Biden’s Build Back Better Act won’t add to the deficit.
Harris antagonized Republicans in her speech, with the remark about being “unencumbered by politics.”
However, she relied on the Republicans help to collect this infrastructure funding.
The 2017 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was bipartisan. It passed the Senate with 69 votes, 19 of which came from Republicans.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of a dozen California lawmakers said they will push to add more than 1,100 new professional wildland firefighters amid the recent epic wildfire seasons, with a dwindling pool of inmates to help fight the blazes.
Sure enough, Harris was met with protests in California. The Associated Press reported, “A sprinkle of protesters joined onlooking along the motorcade’s route to the fire station, where at the entrance a lone protester waved a U.S. flag and shouted a derogatory slogan about Biden.”
Harris has been visiting California during a bleak time for the Democrats. President Joe Biden is receiving mixed ratings in the polls, Democrats are at risk of losing control of the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections, and Harris herself continues to struggle to define her role in the administration.
The vice president spent her first year on the pandemic, a fruitless battle over voting rights legislation, and an immigration crisis at the border. Each time, she has bungled the tasks given to her by Biden.
Perhaps she has finally found a career-defining issue… but maybe she should keep looking.
The Horn editorial team and The Associated Press contributed to this article.