October, 01 2020, 12:00am EDT
Report: As Wildfire Season Rages On, Trump Has Repeatedly Slashed Fire Management Budgets and Made the Problem Worse
WASHINGTON
As wildfires have raged across Western states in recent weeks amidst another record-breaking wildfire season that is destroying lives and communities, new research released by Western Values Project finds President Trump has repeatedly cut federal funding dedicated to preventing and mitigating the spread of wildfires. He has often rebuked experts within his administration and withheld funding for political reasons. And Trump blamed state officials to try to shirk responsibility - even though most of the fires are occurring on federal lands - all while padding the pockets of logging companies.
"Trump has done everything except physically light a match to spark worsening wildfires across Western state lands that his government is responsible for managing. Time and again he's cut budgets, resulting in fewer firefighters, less mitigation and land management, and decreased research to help prevent future deadly fires," said Jayson O'Neill, Western Values Project director. "These actions are dangerous enough on their own, but it's even worse knowing that Trump has withheld funding because the states most affected by wildfires didn't vote for him in the 2016 election. Americans facing wildfires can't afford political games and need a serious approach to wildfire management from the federal government."
The Western Values Project research finds the following:
- Trump Cut Budgets of Federal Fire Management Programs and Services While Knowing of Heightened Risks. Trump has pushed long-term forest fire management budget cuts, leading to fewer staff, including fewer firefighters, and less money for reducing wildfire risk. Trump's FY 2020 budget proposed cutting $948 million - nearly $1 billion - from the National Forest Service (NFS), including slashing state wildfire action plans and conversation funding. Between 2019 and 2021, Trump cut funding for the critical wildfire suppression program by nearly $600 million, even though his administration acknowledged that 63 million acres of federal forest lands and 70,000 communities were at risk of uncharacteristically severe wildfires. Instead of increasing budgets to try to prevent fires, the federal government has been relegated to fighting them once they're blazing.
- Trump Cut Fire Research Budgets, Going Against His Own Administration's Experts. Programmatic cuts have plagued fire science research, and Trump tried to completely eliminate funding for a program that develops fire prevention and management best practices. While the program survived, its budget has been cut by more than half. Further, even though the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) budget proposal summary emphasizes the importance of funding research, Trump's FY 2020 budget called for cutting $45 million in forest and rangeland research money and eliminating forest service research positions. The proposed USDA budget included funding for roughly half the number of full-time employees (160, down from 329 in 2019) at USDA's Economic Research Service.
- Federal Forests Have Faced Particularly Severe Wildfires in Recent Years, But Trump Has Failed to Increase Funding. Wildfires have become more severe and impactful. California broke a record from 2018 for the number of acres burned - 3.2 million in 2020, up from 1.9 million two years ago. About 330,000 acres have burned in Washington, the most in over a decade. While Trump blames state officials for the wildfires, they are happening mostly on federal lands. Of the 33 million acres of forest in California, federal agencies own and manage 57 percent of them. Even though wildfires got worse, Trump didn't propose increasing the budget to deal with the problem. Instead, NFS's wildland fire management activities budget remained at $2.4 billion. His FY 2021 USDA budget proposed the same amount -- $2.4 billion -- for forest service wildland fire management activities.
- Trump Withheld Funding for Political Purposes. The former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and awards disaster relief funding, said "[Trump] told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down from a wildfire because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn't support him and that politically it wasn't a base for him." Further, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and NFS withheld $9 million worth of routine reimbursements owed to California fire agencies for their time fighting fires on federal lands.
- Trump Pushed Timber Industry's False Narrative Blaming Fires on Forest Management, Not Climate Change. As wildfires raging across California in August, Trump said "you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests -- there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they're like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up." This narrative seeks to advance support for more logging in the state, which benefits the timber industry. However, experts say logging wouldn't necessarily help prevent or lessen wildfires, but might negate the forests abilities to absorb carbon dioxide.
Western Values Project brings accountability to the national conversation about Western public lands and national parks conservation - a space too often dominated by industry lobbyists and their allies in government.
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Amazon Won't Display Tariff Costs After Trump Whines to Bezos
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said all companies should be "displaying how much tariffs contribute to the total price of products."
Apr 29, 2025
Amazon said Tuesday that it would not display tariff costs next to products on its website after U.S. President Donald Trump called the e-commerce giant's billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, to complain about the reported plan.
Citing an unnamed person familiar with Amazon's supposed plan, Punchbowl Newsreported that "the shopping site will display how much of an item's cost is derived from tariffs—right next to the product's total listed price."
Many Amazon products come from China. While U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed Sunday that "there is a path" to a tariff deal with the Chinese government, Trump has recently caused global economic alarm by hitting the country with a 145% tax and imposing a 10% minimum for other nations.
According toCNN, which spoke with two senior White House officials on Tuesday, Trump's call to Bezos "came shortly after one of the senior officials phoned the president to inform him of the story" from Punchbowl.
"Of course he was pissed," one officials said of Trump. "Why should a multibillion-dollar company pass off costs to consumers?"
Asked about how the call with Bezos went, Trump told reporters: "Great. Jeff Bezos was very nice. He was terrific. He solved the problem very quickly, and he did the right thing, and he's a good guy."
Earlier Tuesday, during a briefing, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called Amazon's reported plan "a hostile and political act," and said that "this is another reason why Americans should buy American."
Leavitt also asked why Amazon didn't have such displays during the Biden administration and held up a printed version of a 2021 Reutersreport about the company's "compliance with the Chinese government edict" to stop allowing customer ratings and reviews in China, allegedly prompted by negative feedback left on a collection President Xi Jinping's speeches and writings.
Asked whether Bezos is "still a Trump supporter," Leavitt said that she "will not speak to" the president's relationship with him.
As CNBCdetailed Tuesday:
Less than two hours after the press briefing, an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC that the company was only ever considering listing tariff charges on some products for Amazon Haul, its budget-focused shopping section.
"The team that runs our ultra low cost Amazon Haul store has considered listing import charges on certain products," the spokesperson said. "This was never a consideration for the main Amazon site and nothing has been implemented on any Amazon properties."
But in a follow-up statement an hour after that one, the spokesperson clarified that the plan to show tariff surcharges was "never approved" and is "not going to happen."
In response to Bloomberg also reporting on Amazon's claim that tariff displays were never under consideration for the company's main site, U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote on social media Tuesday, "Good move."
Before Amazon publicly killed any plans for showing consumers the costs from Trump's import taxes, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the chamber's floor Tuesday that companies should be "displaying how much tariffs contribute to the total price of products."
"I urge more companies, particularly national retailers that compete with Amazon, to adopt this practice. If Amazon has the courage to display why prices are going up because of tariffs, so should all of our other national retailers who compete with them. And I am calling on them to do it now," he said.
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) on Tuesday framed the whole incident as an example of how "Trump has created a government by and for the billionaires," declaring: "If anyone ever doubted that Trump, and Musk, and Bezos, and the billionaires are all [on] one team, just look at what happened at Amazon today. Bezos immediately caved and walked back a plan to tell Americans how much Trump's tariffs are costing them."
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As the owner of
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On Tuesday, Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Democratic Reps. Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Debbie Dingell of Michigan reintroduced the Medicare for All Act, re-upping the legislative quest to enact a single-payer healthcare system even as the bill faces little chance of advancing in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives or Senate.
Hundreds of nurses, healthcare providers, and workers from across the country joined the lawmakers for a press conference focused on the bill's reintroduction in front of the Capitol on Tuesday.
"We have the radical idea of putting healthcare dollars into healthcare, not into profiteering or bureaucracy," said Sanders during the press conference. "A simple healthcare system, which is what we are talking about, substantially reduces administrative costs, but it would also make life a lot easier, not just for patients, but for nurses" and other healthcare providers, he continued.
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Under Medicare for All, the government would pay for all healthcare services, including dental, vision, prescription drugs, and other care.
"It is a travesty when 85 million people are uninsured or underinsured and millions more are drowning in medical debt in the richest nation on Earth," said Jayapal in a statement on Tuesday.
In 2020, a study in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet found that a single-payer program like Medicare for All would save Americans more than $450 billion and would likely prevent 68,000 deaths every year. That same year, the Congressional Budget Office found that a single-payer system that resembles Medicare for All would yield some $650 billion in savings in 2030.
Members of National Nurses United (NNU), the nation's largest union of registered nurses, were also at the press conference on Tuesday.
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At a markup session held by a U.S. House committee on the Republican Party's recently unveiled higher education reform bill Tuesday, one Democratic lawmaker had a succinct description for the legislation.
"This bill is a dream-killer," said Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) of the so-called Student Success and Taxpayer Savings Plan, which was introduced by Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) as part of an effort to find $330 billion in education programs to offset President Donald Trump's tax plan.
Tasked with helping to make $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans possible, Walberg on Monday proposed changes to the Pell Grant program, which has provided financial aid to more than 80 million low-income students since it began in 1972. The bill would allocate more funding to the program but would also reduce the number of students who are eligible for the grants, changing the definition of a "full-time" student to one enrolled in at least 30 semester hours each academic year—up from 12 hours. Students would be cut off from the financial assistance entirely if they are enrolled less than six hours per semester.
David Baime, senior vice president for government relations for the American Association of Community Colleges, suggested the legislation doesn't account for the realities faced by many students who benefit from Pell Grants.
"These students are almost always working a substantial number of hours each week and often have family responsibilities. Pell Grants help them meet the cost of tuition and required fees," Baime toldInside Higher Ed. "We commend the committee for identifying substantial additional resources to help finance Pell, but it should not come at the cost of undermining the ability of low-income working students to enroll at a community college."
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The proposal would also reduce the number of student loan repayment options from those offered by the Biden administration to just two, with borrowers given the option for a fixed monthly amount paid over a certain period of time or an income-based plan.
At the markup session on Tuesday, Bonamici pointed to her own experience of paying for college and law school "through a combination of grants and loans and work study and food stamps," and noted that her Republican colleagues on the committee also "graduated from college."
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“In a time when higher ed is being attacked, this bill is another assault,” @RepBonamici calls out committee leaders for wanting to gut financial aid.
“With this bill, they will be taking that opportunity [of higher ed] away from others. This bill is a dream killer.” pic.twitter.com/UjTYvnOEKv
— Student Borrower Protection Center (@theSBPC) April 29, 2025
Democrats on the committee also spoke out against provisions that would cap loans a student can take out for graduate programs at $100,000; the Grad PLUS program has allowed students to borrow up to the cost of attendance.
The Parent PLUS program, which has been found to provide crucial help to Black families accessing higher education, would also be restricted.
"Black students, brown students, first-generation college students, first-generation Americans, will not have access to college," said Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.).
“We cannot take away access to loans, and not replace it with anything else, not make the system better. We know the outcome here—Black, brown, and poor students will not figure it out. Instead, only elite students from the 1% will continue to access education.”@RepSummerLee🙇 pic.twitter.com/oGbRH154Ed
— Student Borrower Protection Center (@theSBPC) April 29, 2025
As the Student Borrower Protection Center (SBPC) warned last week, eliminating the Grad PLUS program without also lowering the cost of graduate programs would "subject millions of future borrowers to an unregulated and predatory private student loan market, while doing little to reduce overall student debt and the need to borrow."
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