Oversight Hearing titled

[Gavel sounds.] The Subcommittee on Federal Lands will come to order. Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare a recess of the subcommittee at any time. The subcommittee is meeting today to hear testimony on Fix Our Forests: The Need for Urgent Action One Year After the L.A. Wildfires. I ask unanimous consent that the following members be allowed to participate in today's hearing from the dais: the gentleman from Colorado, Mr. Neguse, and the gentlelady from California, Ms. Lee. Without objection, so ordered. Under committee rule 4(f), any oral opening statements at hearings are limited to the chairman and the ranking minority member. I therefore ask unanimous consent that all other members' opening statements be made part of the hearing record if they are submitted in accordance with the committee rule 3(o). Without objection, so ordered. I'm pinch-hitting for subcommittee chairman Tiffany this morning, and now I will recognize myself for an opening statement. As we sadly see each passing year, wildfires are growing larger, more destructive, and more fatal. Catastrophic wildfires are causing widespread economic hardship and driving up costs for American families. The need to drastically change our approach to this crisis is more urgent than ever. Perhaps nothing highlights that urgency more than the fact that it has now been one year since the devastating Los Angeles fires. These fires tragically claimed 31 lives and became the costliest wildfire event in not just U.S. history, but world history. It's hard to comprehend the level of devastation caused by these fires, which were so deadly and destructive that one local law enforcement official compared the aftermath as looking like an atomic bomb dropped on these communities. As you can see from the poster behind me, which shows a satellite image taken the day after the fires ignited, that description really is not far off. Homes, schools, churches, businesses, playgrounds, and restaurants were all gone in the blink of an eye. Photographs, memories, cherished belongings, everything that makes a house a home, all reduced to rubble and ash. One survivor of the Palisades fire remarked, "You wake up one morning and everything is normal, and you go to bed that night and you have nothing." While the news cycle may have moved on to the latest headlines, I can assure you that the people and families directly affected by these fires have not. Every day, survivors of these catastrophic wildfires must live with the fact that their communities will never be the same again. Take schools for example. 700,000 children were displaced from their schools after the L.A. fires, and many will never return. The same was true of Paradise, California. Before the Camp Fire, their school districts had 3,500 enrolled students. Today, the school district has less than half of that number. And that's to say nothing of how these wildfires have affected home affordability. More than 70 percent of displaced residents have not returned to their homes, and many never will as the cost of rebuilding is too high. Prior to the L.A. fires, insurers dropped nearly 70 percent of policyholders in the Pacific Palisades, deeming them too much of a risk to insure. Those who weren't automatically dropped from their policies had to choose between foregoing home insurance or seeing their premiums rise to as much as 300 percent in some instances. And if somebody was lucky enough to overcome all of these obstacles and still get insurance, these policies still barely scratch the surface of the true cost it takes to rebuild. When you consider all of this, it's not surprising to hear that one L.A. survivor said, "The American dream is not that affordable anymore." This shouldn't be the case, and we must do better. As the only licensed forester in Congress, I have often talked about how active forest management not only protects communities, but provides clean air and drinking water, abundant wildlife habitat, and it supports rural communities. The picture behind me illustrates the consequences when we don't manage our federal forests. On one side, you can see the Freeman Creek Grove of giant sequoias located in Sequoia National Forest. Decades of fire suppression and a lack of active management made the grove overstocked, with these trees becoming unhealthier as they competed for sunlight, water, and basic nutrients. This created the perfect storm when in 2020, the Castle Fire decimated this grove, turning it into the moonscape that you see on the other side of the poster. What's alarming is that we're now exporting this model into our communities. Behind me is a side-by-side comparison of the devastation of one neighborhood in Altadena faced after the Eaton Fire. This portion of Altadena, which directly abuts the Angeles National Forest, was once a vibrant community and now has become its own moonscape. The reality is, no firefighter can stop a wildfire in the face of a 100-mile-an-hour wind. But we can and should be doing more to give communities a better fighting chance by creating more defensible space around communities and actively managing our fire-prone landscapes. And that's where FOFA comes in. If the Fix Our Forests Act had been in place years ago when the Angeles National Forest tried to complete an 8,600-acre fuels reduction project, they wouldn't have faced years of delay. Under FOFA's emergency authorities, work could have been immediately taken on, and instead of using three separate categorical exclusions for the project, they would have needed only one. And maybe that would have made all the difference when the Eaton Fire ignited on Forest Service land. Maybe it would have allowed the Forest Service to start the work when it mattered, when there was still a chance to protect the thousands of homes in Altadena that ultimately went up in flames. We foresters like to say that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today. The best time to have these authorities in place was years before the L.A. fires ever occurred. But the second best time is to enact these reforms now so that communities in the future don't have to suffer the same consequences. I appreciate the bipartisan support this bill has received in both the House and the Senate. It's time for us to get this legislation over the finish line and send the bill to President Trump's desk. I stand willing to work with any of my colleagues across the aisle and across the Capitol to make sure no community has to experience what L.A. had to undergo last year. Before I yield back, I want to thank the witnesses for being here today. I look forward to hearing your testimony and discussing ways that we can prevent wildfires and fix our forests. With that, I yield back and recognize ranking member Huffman for an opening statement.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, folks. Mr. Chairman, I have lost track now of the number of hearings we've had on FOFA. Certainly, fire resiliency is important. And even though we passed this legislation over a year ago, we continue to have hearings about it. Here's the disconnect. There were some good things in FOFA, as I tried to make clear in the hearing that we were allowed to have on it. We have a witness here today, and I'm grateful that Mr. Mills from my district is here. He's developed an amazing information tool called Watch Duty that will help first responders and communities navigate the chaos of real-time disaster management. What are fires doing? What are first responders doing? How can people keep themselves and their families safe? This is great stuff. And some of the authorities in FOFA will help communities use tools like this and build partnerships that will help a lot with resilience. Those authorities are also in the Padilla bill. I have a separate bipartisan bill that would actually put some money on the table so that communities could do these things that we all agree are important to make us safer. I hope the Senate will fix some of the disconnects in FOFA. There is too much environmental scapegoating, too much damage to environmental laws that is not necessary to make us safer, to make forests healthier, to make communities more resilient. And there are not nearly enough real funding solutions to help some of the things we say we support actually happen on the ground. But I hope the Senate will fix those things and that I'll be able to support the bill that comes through the process. The biggest disconnect though, Mr. Chairman, is the ongoing challenge we have getting our friends across the aisle to pay any attention to what the Trump administration is actually doing. I mean, we can put lots of good ideas on the table in legislation, we can have hearings, but if we're ignoring the huge damage that is taking place to the agencies that we count on to manage public lands, to be first responders, to the budgets—I mean, there is a reorganization happening right now within federal agencies to consolidate them in order to carry out firefighting. This could have profound impacts on our ability to be safer and resilient in the face of fire risk. And you haven't had a single hearing on it. You haven't done a bit of oversight. How is it going? How much is it going to cost? Is it going to save money? Is it going to make us safer? Nothing. Crickets. So 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. As the Forest Service and other agencies have been gutted, massive funding has been redirected to this new unaccountable army of secret police that is terrorizing our cities right now, this reign of terror, including a budget for ICE that is bigger than the defense budget of most European countries. That's funding that could be spent on resilience, on forest management, on these other things that we say that we care about while we're going backward in real budgetary terms on walking the walk about these things. So I just want to say something about immigrants, which of course are being targeted by these secret police thugs with no accountability. Immigrants are the people who do the work that help us when wildfires strike. They risk their lives to fight wildfires. They are the cleanup crews doing the dirty work most folks don't want to do. They are the construction workers building our homes. And you are letting the Trump administration terrorize, kidnap, and in the case of people who peacefully protest in support of these communities, murder people without any accountability. So we all want to stop catastrophic wildfires. We also should be talking about this bigger picture and these tremendous disconnects. We have redirected funding that could be used to keep us safer, to do many of these things we say we care about in order to support this massive, unaccountable reign of terror by ICE, and that must stop. Another reality check is the climate crisis. Now, I know that tremendous effort has been taken to sort of airbrush climate change out of federal websites and pretend that it's not a reality. Anyone in the real world that fights fires or that is impacted by fires knows the reality of the climate crisis. It was part of what happened in Los Angeles last year. It was a perfect storm: a climate-driven drought, record-shattering Santa Ana winds, and old abandoned infrastructure, and then throw in some arson, and you have what happened in Los Angeles. So, Mr. Chairman, I look forward to the conversation. I hope we can bring it back to real solutions and take some of the politics out of it. And with that, I yield back.

Ranking member's time has expired. I'll now share my opening statement. Just over one year ago, devastating wildfires erupted in Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the United States. The world watched in horror as the fires tore through dry, overgrown vegetation towards the communities of Palisades, Altadena, and Pasadena. In just a few days, these fires driven by hurricane-force winds destroyed more than 16,000 structures, including homes, businesses, schools, grocery stores, and even places of worship. The L.A. fires caused an estimated $131 billion in property and casualty losses. For context, in a single month, the L.A. fires generated costs exceeding those of the entire 2020 wildfire year, which was one of the most devastating wildfire years on record. The scope of this disaster is difficult to comprehend, and the financial costs of the fires is just one part of the story. For thousands of people, the emotional cost of these fires is as fresh today as it was last January. While these communities will never truly be the same, a combination of rising prices, lack of insurance, and burdensome red tape have made any kind of rebuilding efforts virtually impossible. As Chairman Westerman noted, of the more than 200,000 people that were forced to evacuate, roughly 70 percent have not been able to return to their homes. In fact, of the thousands upon thousands of homes that were destroyed, only 10, 10 have been rebuilt. Unlike hurricanes or tornadoes, we can stop these wildfires from happening in the first place and prevent communities across the country from suffering the same fate as Los Angeles. And we know that if we do not act now, it is a question of when, not if, we will see more towns and neighborhoods across the West reduced to ash. Paradise, California in 2018, Boulder, Colorado in 2021, Lahaina, Hawaii in 2023. These devastating fires should have been wake-up calls. We need more proactive forest management and community protection efforts put in place. I've seen this devastation firsthand. Days after the Maui fires in 2023, I was on the ground with a bipartisan delegation, and the level of destruction we saw was shocking. In mere hours, this once vibrant community had been reduced into a moonscape of rubble. Block after block of homes were completely destroyed. The heat from this fire was so intense, we walked past cars that had melted into the ground. And yet year after year, we fail to heed these warning calls and see more fires bringing similar devastation, destroying homes, claiming lives, obliterating entire communities. We cannot allow ourselves to do the same with the L.A. fires. We cannot let another moment pass where we accept these devastating wildfires as our new normal. We cannot sit idly by while thousands of Western communities turn into tinderboxes. Across the federal government, we have traded in proactive management for reactive responses. Land managers will start clearing hazardous fuels and cutting fire lines, but only when a fire is on their doorstep and the sky has turned orange, not when it's blue and nothing is on fire. And for too long in Congress, we've sat idly by while ominous new benchmarks are hit and then surpassed: the most destructive wildfire, the largest wildfire, the costliest wildfire, the deadliest wildfire in a century. By the way, each of these record-breaking fires have occurred within the past five years. Enough is enough. That's why one year ago, the House did our job. We passed the bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act with the support of roughly two-thirds of the House, an overwhelming majority. It's time for the Senate to finish the job. We must send this vital legislation to the president's desk and do so before the next wildfire season starts. Before I yield back, I'd like to thank the witnesses for being here with us today. I appreciate your willingness to share your experience, expertise, and insights on ways we can better protect our communities and fix our forests. With that, Yeah. With that, we are going to go to our panel. I'd like to remind our witnesses that are here today that under committee rules, you must limit your oral statement to five minutes, but your entire statement will appear in the hearing record. To begin your testimony, please press the on button. We use timing lights. When you begin, the light will turn green. At the end of five minutes, the light will turn red, and I will ask you to please wrap up your statement. First, I would like to introduce the Honorable Steven Crowder, Mayor of the town of Paradise, California. Mayor Crowder, you are recognized for five minutes.

Chair Westerman, Ranking Member Neguse, and members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to share Paradise's experience before, during, and after the 2018 Camp Fire, and to speak about what we have learned in rebuilding a more resilient community. Paradise is a town of about 26,500 people before the fire, located in Northern California on a forested ridge between two steep canyons. Residents chose Paradise for its natural beauty and small-town charm, but that's the geography that placed us at high fire risk. I was elected to town council on November 6, 2018, just two days before the Camp Fire. When I learned a fire had started in Pulga on the morning of November 8, I rushed to town hall to help. It quickly became clear that this was not a normal wildfire. As evacuation routes became congested and conditions deteriorated, I went into the community and began directing traffic to help residents escape. For hours, I remained in town as flames advanced, assisting evacuees alongside first responders. Like thousands of Paradise residents, I lost everything that day. My home was destroyed, my business was destroyed. I survived. 85 of our neighbors did not. The Camp Fire became the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history at the time. It burned over 158,000 acres, destroyed more than 19,000 structures, forced the evacuation of nearly 52,000 people, and forever changed our community. The trauma of that day remains with us today. The conditions that led to the Camp Fire were years in the making. Northern California had gone more than 200 days without significant rainfall. Vegetation was extremely dry and overgrown. National forests surrounding Paradise contained heavy fuel loads. On November 8, strong winds combined with those conditions, and when a Pacific Gas and Electric transmission line failed eight miles away, the fire reached Paradise in less than two hours. Once the fire was out, we made a deliberate decision not just to rebuild, but to rebuild safer and more resilient. We improved evacuation planning and traffic flow. We invested in a modern town-wide early warning siren system and voice capability along with in-home alerting devices for residents of those who may be hard of hearing. We transformed our approach to defensible space. What was once encouraged is now strictly forbidden. Every property in Paradise is inspected annually, and compliance now exceeds 90 percent, significantly reducing ignition around homes. As we rebuild, Paradise has adopted some of the most stringent local building standards in California, aligning with the Institute of Business and Home Safety wildfire prepared home standards. We have experienced participation in Firewise communities, empowering the neighborhoods to work together on fuel reduction and preparedness, and we are creating strategic fuel reduction buffers along the perimeter of town. Independent studies have found that the combined resilience measures Paradise has implemented can reduce wildfire risk by up to 70 percent. The Camp Fire did not start in Paradise. It started on federal land. Local government can act aggressively within our boundaries, but we cannot protect our communities without effective forest management. For that reason, I strongly support the Fix Our Forests legislation. Paradise's experience demonstrates that proactive forest management—thinning, prescribed fire, and faster project delivery—is essential to public safety. Delays and insufficient scale put communities like mine in danger. Forest health must be treated as a life safety issue and not just an environmental one. Paradise lost nearly everything on November 8, but we did not lose our resolve with those to rebuild stronger, safer, and more resilient, and to share what we have learned so other communities did not have to endure the same tragedy. Thank you for the opportunity to tell our story. I look forward to your questions and to working with you to make our forest healthier and our community safer.

Thank you, Mayor Crowder. I'll now recognize Mr. John Clark Mills, CEO and co-founder of Watch Duty. Mr. Mills, you are recognized for five minutes.

Chairman Tiffany, Ranking Member Neguse, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify today. My name is John Mills, and I live in fire country deep in the wildland forests of Northern California. I am also the CEO and co-founder of Watch Duty, a nonprofit organization that provides real-time wildfire alerts and intelligence to millions of Americans and first responders. While I'm proud of what we've built, to be frank, I shouldn't have had to build this at all. Last January during the L.A. fires, Watch Duty became the most downloaded app in the country, surpassing ChatGPT and TikTok. In just one week, 2.5 million people, one-quarter of all of L.A. County, downloaded Watch Duty to find safety during the worst wildfires in history. Make no mistake, this is not a tech success story. This is a story of failure. As one of America's largest cities burned, both residents and first responders were unable to get the information they needed to survive. As a result, everyone turned to us for information, including the emergency managers and the first responders themselves. Our government is failing to alert people of their risk during an emergency, and the consequences are deadly. Simply put, the status quo is not working. Today, emergency alerts are crippled by a fragmented bureaucracy and crumbling infrastructure. Emergency managers are pushed to their limits and cannot keep up with the speed of today's wind-driven fires. As a result, official warnings usually only go out after a community is on fire, houses are burning, aircraft are buzzing overhead, and people are already running for their lives. By that point, panic has set in, as we just saw in the Palisades fire when hundreds of people abandoned their cars on the road, blocking egress for residents and ingress for fire personnel. The same thing happened in Paradise, Lahaina, and Santa Rosa. Every time this happens, we are told these events are unprecedented, meaning without precedent. But these events are anything but unprecedented anymore. From California to Wisconsin, Idaho to Minnesota, New Jersey to New Mexico, the frequency and intensity is increasing, and it's not contained to the American West anymore. Years of research, user interviews, and lived experience tell us the opposite of what our systems assume. People need early and actionable information to save lives and support first responders. The reality is, bureaucratic delays cost confusion and give room for misinformation to spread. Our alerts are delivered rapidly and contain a storyline of events so that you have the context as the situation unfolds. We use verified on-the-ground reports from first responders and emergency managers. We tell people how fast a fire is moving, which direction it's heading, and when it crosses containment lines. That early context, sometimes hours before officials, gives communities time to prepare, like my 81-year-old arthritic neighbor Martha or the rancher with 50 head of cattle. That head start saves lives and livelihoods. But timing isn't the only issue. Quality matters. Many official alerts are hard to read, poorly formatted, and lack maps that give context. Many government officials say, "Evacuate now," but don't tell you where to go, what roads are safe, or give any context about the broader incident to give residents situational awareness. In the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California, confusion caused residents to flee from fairly safe areas directly into the path of the fire. And finally, the delivery mechanisms are failing us. Increasingly, agencies post updates on social media where misinformation and distortion immediately drown out life-saving instructions. Emergency alerts do not belong buried in the comments section. But some agencies warn the public not to rely on Watch Duty and similar platforms. They'd prefer people to visit their websites. Well, guess what? So would we. But websites don't wake you up at night. Alerts do. We want public agencies to modernize alerting by sharing information directly with residents as well as with Watch Duty. Trust Americans with more information and communicate early and often. The entire system needs an overhaul. This is one reason why the Fix Our Forests Act is so urgent. I want to express my appreciation for the speed at which the House has passed this bill, and I encourage the Senate to do the same. I would also like to add my own perspective on what can make the Wildfire Intelligence Center more successful. I implore you to recognize the work that Watch Duty has already accomplished without the financial support of taxpayers and to integrate our work into the intelligence center. I fear that if the government stands this up on its own or with the help of contractors, it will yield the same results: siloed intelligence that helps the few, not the many. We've seen this play out before with single-source providers who prioritize profit, not people like me who live in underserved communities deep in the wildland forest under the constant threat of fire. Rather than trying to duplicate or smother solutions like ours, embrace a multi-source approach that gives Americans what they need, addressing the root causes to make evacuations less chaotic and warnings more effective. No one should have needed Watch Duty. But we're here, we're proven essential for fire-impacted communities, and we're not going anywhere. Please join us in bringing Watch Duty's service to every American family and first responder. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Mills. I now recognize Dr. David Calkin, Principal at Calkin Wildfire Consulting. Dr. Calkin, you are recognized for five minutes.

Thank you very much. Members of the subcommittee, I am honored to have the opportunity to share my thoughts on the critical issues and legislative efforts to address the continued destruction of our communities, the degradation of our wildlands, and the well-being of our responders. I'm Dr. David Calkin, Principal of Calkin Wildfire Consulting and courtesy faculty at Oregon State University. Last April, I concluded a 23-year career as a senior scientist with Forest Service Research, studying how risk science could improve wildfire management. Approximately four years ago, I participated in a retreat with some of the most prominent wildfire scientists to discuss the challenges facing wildfire management. We reached consensus that the single biggest challenge is that we have fundamentally misdefined the wildfire problem. To be successful, we will need to address both the problem of community destruction from fire and address issues within the wildfire management system, and the strategies to achieve these objectives are not the same. Our attempts to remove wildfire have both increased the risk to communities and made our landscapes less healthy. Slowing the rate of community destruction must start with a focus on the individual homes, and then community infrastructure, and finally adjacent wildlands. My research has consistently shown that the slightest perception of homes being at risk formed the basis of decisions to suppress fires. Short-term problem solving wired into human nature perpetuates a suppression-first mindset and helped to create the wildfire paradox. That is, removing wildfire eliminates the mechanism that keeps fuels in check, making future fires more difficult to suppress and more damaging. Further, this reactive cycle distorts agency budgets. Suppression funding consistently dwarfs investments in mitigation and recovery. As a result of our misplaced but well-intentioned desires to reduce short-term risk, firefighter health has been sacrificed. This long-standing effort to eliminate wildfire supported a massive increase in the value of residential development in fire-prone areas. Landscapes loaded with highly combustible fuels, including ignition-susceptible homes, represent a debt that has come due. ...Our focus on removing wildfires distracted us from work to make our communities more prepared for the eventuality of fire. In the last 10 years, our nation has experienced the most devastating wildfires of the last century throughout the Western US. Approximately one year ago, the Eaton and Palisades fires in Southern California. These fires all share several important characteristics that are critical to understand if we are to reduce future destruction. One, they were human caused. Two, ignitions occurred under extreme fire weather conditions in close proximity to a community that was destroyed. Three, despite rapid detection, suppression was almost immediately overwhelmed. And four, for the most part, forest management was largely irrelevant. Last February, I went to Altadena and Pacific Palisades with colleagues from Oregon State University. I was humbled by the scale of loss. Entire suburban neighborhoods miles away from wildlands were destroyed. This experience confirmed that once ignition has occurred under extreme conditions, the only way to prevent catastrophe is to prevent the disaster sequence from starting. Burning structures become the primary source of urban fire spread. Actions to harden homes to prevent initiation of the disaster sequence is the key. Many of our public lands are also at extreme risk to wildfire. If exposed to wildfire under increasingly frequent extreme conditions, landscapes will be fundamentally degraded and may never recover. However, the solution is not the exclusion of fire, nor is it active fire management alone. More of the right fire at the right place and time can fundamentally alter the risk to the landscapes and communities. We can develop risk-based strategies that balance short-term and long-term risk. We should be deploying our resources only when and where they can effectively and safely prevent loss. I've seen these strategies used to both aggressively fight a wildfire, saving a community from imminent destruction, and in another instance, to reintroduce 50,000 acres of ecologically and culturally appropriate fire in a high-risk landscape. If we're to reduce community destruction, then we must invest. As the recent nonpartisan Wildfire Commission recommended, Congress can create interagency partnerships to address risk in the built environment. I'm supportive of many of the provisions within recent legislation, particularly those that focus on preparing communities for the eventuality of fire, protecting the most vulnerable in these communities, and investing in hardening our infrastructure and our homes. I'm also supportive of legislation that results in getting more good fire on the ground. Lastly, I'd like to share some brief thoughts on consolidation. The fire management system in the US is strained to the point of breaking and lacks the ability to keep pace with the increasing complex threats. However, for any new agency to succeed, it will need a well-defined long-range mission, achievable objectives, accountability to local decision makers, and insulation from the political whims of the day. Making fire go away is not achievable. The objectives established under the cohesive strategy are solid, but implementation lags due to our short-sighted nature. Fire-adapted communities start at the individual home. Resilient landscapes require fire, and the only way to be safer and more effective in responding to fire is to do less of it. Thank you for your time and I look forward to questions.

Thank you, Dr. Calkin. Finally, I now recognize Mr. Robert Gordon, Senior Vice President of Policy, Research and International at the American Property Casualty Insurance Association. Mr. Gordon, you are recognized for five minutes.

Thank you, Chairman Tiffany and Ranking Member Huffman. Appreciate today's hearing on the Fix Our Forests Act. I am Robert Gordon, Senior Vice President for the American Property Casualty Insurance Association. We represent about two-thirds of the home, auto, business insurance sector. And we strongly support the Fix Our Forests Act. We think this is legislation that will save lives and reduce losses from wildfires. Insurers for over 50 years have been investing in building safety standards, funding the Institute for Business and Home Safety, IBHS. They're the entity that researches and develops scientific evidence-based safety standards and loss mitigation standards. And over the last several years, they've been publishing new fire safety standards referenced by Mayor Crowder called Wildfire Prepared Home. And those safety standards are now being increasingly adopted by builders, county, state governments, neighborhoods like Paradise. In improving wildfire safety standards, it's becoming a sustainability imperative. Wildfire risk in the United States, it's dramatically escalating. The losses from wildfire over the last decade have been five times higher than any previous decade. Eight of the 10 costliest insured wildfires ever occurred in California just in the last decade, including the record $40 billion plus insured loss event last January. Thousands of Americans die every year from fire, and yet we still see a majority of new homes being built in areas that have significant fire risk without the protection of the current best practices fire safety standards. And we think Fix Our Forests Act is an essential solution. Most importantly, the bill improves the federal coordination of wildfire preparedness, mitigation, and response. And this is important because a lot of weather hazards like wind, individual property owners can implement their own risk mitigation. You can install stormproof windows, you can seal your roof from rain, you can protect yourself. But wildfire risk requires a much broader coordinated community response. You need to have local and federal landowners working together with the private sector. A study last December by the IBHS and the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection found that even homes that had the top four fire-resistant improvements had a less than 50 percent chance of escaping damage if they're within 10 feet of other buildings, especially those that don't have those fire protection characteristics and standards. The study further found that even the best practices fire standards fail without community-level actions to reduce structural density and connective fuels. And we think the Southern California record wildfires last year really demonstrate the danger of the unmitigated risk that involved adjacent federal, state, local, and private lands. Solutions that only addressed one of those groups isn't going to be enough to protect against conflagrations in densely built environments. APCIA particularly supports FOFA Section 102, creates a Fire Shed Center to coordinate what's currently a very fragmented federal agency fire efforts and encourage cooperative agreements with state government and private entities. We strongly support Section 106 to improve land management, creating fuel and firebreaks and vegetation management, facility inspections, and Section 201, which encourages public-private partnerships to reduce hazardous fuel and create a streamlined application process for federal wildfire grants and providing technical assistance to community. And as Congressman Huffman said, hopefully we can get some funding for some of these programs as well. Federal agencies currently have disaster prediction and mitigation services, but with limited interoperability and priority setting. And you really need wildfire efforts aligned across all levers of government. Federal coordination can help disseminate some of the rapidly evolving fire mitigation practices, including some of those talked about by Mr. Mills. Insurers are now rapidly evolving our fire mitigation practices. We're doing things like encouraging smart building technology, real-time aerial image monitoring to detect early fire ignitions and deploy fire retardants and extinguishers. We're deploying trucks with fire retardant foam to protect properties in imminent danger and encouraging property owners to install fire detectors, automated alert systems that trigger fire defense systems. Communities would really benefit if we can get each of the wildfire stakeholders to learn from each other and to coordinate what we're doing, adopt the evolving best practices into coordinate our preparedness, response, and recovery. The Fix Our Forests Act recognizes that each of these layers plays essential roles that need to be connected and coordinated. So we urge enactment of the legislation and appreciate your leadership. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Gordon. I will now recognize members for five minutes for their questions. We will start with the Chairman, Mr. Westerman.

Thank you, Chairman Tiffany, and thank you again to the witnesses for being here. I think it was 2018 after the Paradise fire, I had a meeting with a lot of insurance company executives who were very concerned about being able to write policies in these fire-prone areas. And their concern was not only that they wouldn't be able to offer insurance, but that people wouldn't be able to buy insurance. And it seems like their concerns have become more and more true as time goes on. Mr. Gordon, from an insurance perspective, can you please talk about how active forest management can lower home insurance costs for consumers and make housing more affordable? You know, there's a lot of talk about affordability and rising prices. How can forest management play a role on decreasing these costs from an insurance perspective?

Great question. So insurance is priced based on an actuarial analysis of risk. If our forests are properly managed and maintained, wildfire risks are reduced. If forests are not properly managed and have excessive fuel load, that increases the safety risk for the neighboring communities and it undermines the availability and affordability of insurance. We think that FOFA would have provided enormous benefits, just as you said, if it had been in place before the Southern California fires. We would have had better coordination, better address the fuel loads, more acres managed and treated would have reduced ignition likelihood, slowed the fire spread, fire spread. We think it would have significant benefit. It's not going to fix inflation, it's not going to fix climate shifts or demographic changes, but it can significantly help our wildfire preparedness and mitigate those losses and save lives.

Thank you. I know there was also discussion about how we can make structures more fire-resistant, the Firewise program where you can create defensible space around homes. You can do, we can do the same thing from an engineering standpoint and a structural standpoint when it comes to mitigating against hurricanes. You can build buildings that will withstand stronger winds. But we can't do anything really to stop the hurricanes. But by doing active management, we can actually prevent these major fires from getting into residential neighborhoods. So it is the one natural disaster that we have some control over based on the human interactions that we have. A lot of these other ones, there's not much we can do.

We certainly do have a lot more we can do to improve the infrastructure, mitigate the fuel load, reduce the loss in a way you couldn't with wind. And in addition, as I mentioned, individual homeowners can adopt the best safety standards for wind. But for fire, even if you do it, if your neighbors don't, it's not enough. It has to be a community response. The Fix Our Forests Act is so important because it addresses the fuel load to reduce the likelihood of fire to slow the spread, but it also works to help communities like Paradise Island to get everybody to adopt those fire standards so you don't have to worry about even though you've done everything right, your neighbor hasn't and you're still at risk.

So a few weeks ago, we had a hearing in here and one of the witnesses, it was actually the minority witness from Denver Water, said that, quote, "the number one point she makes to people about lowering prices for consumers is the need for more active forest management." And she was talking about the damage to water utilities. So from an insurance perspective, or Mr. Crowder, I know you must hear a lot as mayor from your constituents about the affordability issue. How do you think active forest management provisions can actually lower costs for consumers, including utility costs?

Well, I think we're long overdue. And seven years since our fire, I'm still not seeing a lot of neighboring communities get cleared. I just, you know, the insurance companies are looking at it, the communities are looking at it. We've got people that want to come back to a fire-safe community. It's imperative that we do everything that we possibly can. We've instituted probably the most stringent weed protection in the state. If it's mandatory, no high weeds year-round, four-inch brush, no taller. And if it's not done, we cite. If it's still not cleared, we go out and clear, then we put a lien on the home. We can actually force a sale of a home. We have not done it yet, but this is what we've done to reach about a 90 percent compliance. And we've had insurance companies come up to Paradise now physically and look around and actually some are starting to write insurance there. And that's our biggest obstacle right now. We're losing sales of homes and people coming back because they can't afford the insurance price.

About out of time, Mr. Chairman.

Gentleman's time has expired and I'll recognize the Ranking Member, Mr. Huffman, for five minutes.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Calkin, I want to begin with you. We're having a conversation here about all these different aspects of making our communities safer and more resilient in the face of wildfire risk. And very little of it, it seems to me, involves actual forest management, although we're talking about a bill that's called Fix Our Forests. And to some degree, I think that challenges us in this conversation because there is this notion that there's this simple thing, if we just fix our forests, we'll all be safer from catastrophic wildfire. Those scenes in Los Angeles right there had very little to do with forests. The things that drove those fires were infrastructure and houses, structures, the kind of vegetation that needed to be managed to make those communities safer was not merchantable timber, it was scrub. And that's the case in many places along the wildland-urban interface that are vulnerable to wildfire. So it would be great to have a more nuanced conversation about this issue, one that is less sort of politicized by this notion that if we go out and do a bunch of backcountry logging because we clear away a bunch of environmental loopholes for backcountry logging, that that's making us safer from wildfire. But that's a little bit of a false narrative, is it not? You're the expert.

Yeah, I'd agree. I mean, what I tried to get across in my testimony is community destruction and the condition of our landscapes, our wildlands, are related but separate problems and they require separate solutions. Protecting communities starts at the individual home, as we've talked about. The condition of the landscapes matter. They are absolutely degraded. The West exists with water, and 70 percent of all water comes off of national forest lands. There is no substitute for fire in our wildlands. We need fire in those landscapes. Fuels management in the backcountry that supports more fuel on the landscape is really important because it allows us to safely get more fire while we protect communities. And water is what drives the West. But we need to separate these problems. The other absolutely important point is that landscape management is inherently local. What happens in Southern California is very different than what happens in the Rocky Mountains and Northern Rockies and Southern Rockies are very different. There is a desperate need for more fuels management in Southern California. That's maintaining the fuelbreaks and that's working in those interface areas, working where ignitions occur. In other places, we really need to worry about the health of our watersheds, and those are different problems. A lot of my work is also focused on how we bring fire management into this problem so that we recognize where firefighters are going to need to make a stand as fire comes from the wildlands into the communities, but also where firefighters can use fire effectively and safely to get more fire on the land. And fuels management, active fuels management has an absolute role to play in both of those things.

Let's talk about that because that's the part of this that Mr. Westerman and I and I think almost all of us agree on. There are places where we need to do much more proactive fuels management as well as the reintroduction of beneficial fire, and there are things within the Fix Our Forests Act that are good on that. We disagree about new environmental loopholes to do massive backcountry logging, but we agree that the small-diameter stuff, especially in the right places, needs to happen. The challenge with that is economics. It is expensive to do this stuff. And one of the things that we did with some legislation in the Democratic Congress was put some money on the table to support like Department of Energy grants for things like biomass energy that could be located near these projects to take the wood chips and other things from these projects and find some economic value rather than just having uneconomic solutions that never actually happen. I've visited some of these facilities that have received under the Biden administration DOE grants that were making it economic and possible to scale up these kind of solutions that would provide both energy and forest resilience. But the goalposts have moved. A lot of that has been pulled back because I guess it was too woke or climatey or something else that triggered a political filter with the new administration. Is that helpful as we try to actually do some of these things that we all say we support if we're sort of pulling funding from anything that might use a word like resiliency?

Yeah, I'd like to start out saying I support logging on our national forest lands where and when appropriate. But most of the material that is problematic from a wildfire standpoint is non-merchantable. And we need to treat that as a waste material. And the only way to get rid of a waste material is to pay for it to be removed from the forest. You know, throughout my career, biomass utilization was supposed to be this silver bullet to solve the problem. It isn't a silver bullet. It requires investment and it requires subsidies, and that material will not pay itself out of the woods.

Yeah. Thank you. Yield back.

Gentleman's time has expired and I'll recognize Mr. McClintock for five minutes.

Well, thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is not a theoretical exercise. We know what works. Active land management works. We did it for decades years ago. The environmental laws that we began imposing 50 years ago simply don't work. Those laws have now caused us to lose a quarter of our national forest to catastrophic fire over the past decade because they've made active management of the public lands impossible. All of that excess growth comes out in one of two ways: either we will carry it out or nature will burn it out. There is no other way. We used to auction off excess timber to logging companies, and they paid us to remove the excess. We leased public lands to cattle and sheep ranchers to suppress brush growth through grazing. To the Ranking Member, I grew up in that region of the Palisades, and I can tell you that we used to allow widespread grazing throughout the Santa Monica Mountains to keep brush under control. In Thousand Oaks, we used to have to stop along the roads to allow these vast flocks of sheep to cross as they passed from one field to another. We did controlled burns to remove undergrowth. We cut firebreaks to contain fires. We used herbicides to keep brush from residential areas. We put out fires before they could explode out of control. 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. These fires are not a new normal. They're the old normal coming back because we abandoned our public lands and catastrophic fire has returned to remove the excess growth. A few examples: firebreaks. When I toured the King fire years ago, I saw a makeshift firebreak that was cut during the frenzy of the fire. The firefighters said, "We've known for years that a fire would come through here, and for years we tried to get a permit so that we could cut a firebreak properly and do it right right here." Instead, they had to do it on the fly in the middle of the fire, and it didn't hold. You look at Altadena. In Trump's first term, he started the process to create firebreaks in the San Gabriel Mountains to protect that town. Biden reversed course and two years ago actually expanded national monument status for those lands that made firebreaks impossible to produce. Ironically, these foolish policies condemn the very lands we're trying to protect from catastrophic fire. I've already mentioned grazing. Controlled burns. Controlled burns were once done all the time to remove brush from building up. Granting a permit now under NEPA takes more than five years of study before you can do it. That is a lot of brush, and it shouldn't surprise us that nature steps in through uncontrolled burns. Price controls on insurance. Insurance prices put a dollar value on risk, and those prices guide consumers in making rational choices. Price controls only distort those signals. They ultimately create a shortage of whatever it is they're trying to control. California insurers are forbidden from charging enough to cover their risk, so they withdraw from the market, leaving Californians without coverage at all. Mayor Crowder, there are members on this committee who have devoted their entire career supporting legislation that have made management of our wildlands endlessly time-consuming and ultimately cost-prohibitive. They continue to be the biggest impediment that we have to reforming and streamlining these laws. What would you like to say to them today?

Well, we need to change our practice because obviously they're not working. Cal Fire tells me, you know, they're doing a great job of trying to get rid of some of this brush and a lot of stuff they just give up on because they said they file to burn some properties, some overgrowth, and they get hit with a lawsuit. So they give it up. So there's where a good part of the problem that we have is.

We've now lived with these laws like ESA and NEPA for 50 years. They were adopted with the promise that they'd improve our forest environment. I think after 50 years of those policies, we've got the right to ask, how's the forest environment doing? What's your answer?

Well, I just think we've got to, I'm a huge supporter of defensible space now after going through the Camp fire. It's worked. It is working. We've had some smaller fires since. You're never going to stop...

I've got one more question I want to fit in, Mr. Gordon, just very quickly. I assume insurers don't make money not selling insurance. So why have so many insurance companies stopped selling insurance in California?

Because according to the NAIC, the state insurance regulators, over the last decade, insurers have had a negative return on net worth compared to a roughly 15 percent return on net worth for the broader Fortune 500. So what we're seeing is as the state just layers on mandate after coverage mandate after coverage mandate, the costs escalate, the infrastructure has failed, they're not doing the prescribed burns, they're not reducing the fuel load. The single most effective fire prevention measure is creating a five-foot defensible perimeter around your house, just moving dry brush five feet away. They enacted it in 2020. They still haven't implemented it six years later.

So Reagan got it right. Government's not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem. Thank you.

Gentleman's time has expired and I'll recognize Mr. Stauber for five minutes.

Thank you very much, Chairman Tiffany. Mr. Gordon, thank you for joining us this morning. When we talk about devastating fires like the ones we saw last year in Southern California, we often talk about the cost of these wildfires in the context of the cost the Americans face when rebuilding their homes, the cost we face when rebuilding lost infrastructure, and cost to local, state, and federal governments when they respond to these fires. I'm going to follow up on what the Chairman Westerman spoke about. The costs are devastating and in some cases insurmountable. That said, I think we should also be focusing our attention on the cost Americans face before a fire even breaks out. How are failed forest management policies impacting the wallets of everyday Americans, and would you agree that Americans are forced to pay for these failed policies when it comes to increased insurance premiums for their homes?

Yes, it's having a significant cost. We're seeing the wildfire costs, particularly in California but in a number of states like Minnesota, those risks are escalating. And they're escalating in part because the governments aren't addressing the infrastructure, they aren't addressing the fuel load, they aren't implementing the fire safety standards. We need to work together. We have the solutions, but we need to actually get it done and execute.

As wildfire risk spreads to different areas of the country that traditionally have not been susceptible to wildfires, more and more Americans are now facing this economic burden. Would you agree with that?

Yes, we're seeing much more wildfire risk. Particularly we're now seeing a significant number, maybe even close to half of new homes being built in area with fire risk. So it's a growing problem.

And would you agree that our failed forest management policies ultimately are an affordability issue for Americans?

We could definitely make homes more affordable if we improve our forest management policies and our fire safety standards, which FOFA would help do.

So Mr. McClintock, I want to follow up on what he says. So let me give you a hypothetical. Say the Forest Service is looking to conduct prescribed burns or conduct mechanical thinning of an area near a group of homes. In many cases like this, the Forest Service needs to spend months, if not years, conducting a NEPA analysis. And once that analysis is conducted, it often ends up being litigated for years on end. So you've got years for the analysis, years for the litigation. All the while, the Forest Service is not able to conduct the important management of the forest and fire risk increases. So Mr. Gordon, in this example, would you agree that this lack of proper management because of years of litigation over a NEPA analysis would increase the risk to the homeowners in this area?

So I'm not a NEPA expert, but I will say California in particular has known about their fire risk for years and years. The governor, the fire service has warned about it, and yet they're still failing to take action and addressing the forest and addressing some of the utility cost fires and getting implementation of all the fire safety standards. So it's clear that we can and need to do more in this area and without delays.

Is it probable that these homeowners' insurance premiums might increase?

Well, if we don't do anything, then we're seeing those disasters spike. Again, the wildfire losses in the last decade were more than five times any previous decade, and that doesn't include the record $40 billion wildfire last year. So those losses and risk to safety are greatly increasing and will continue to do so if we don't take action.

...action.

Thank you. You know, it's clear that the failure to act and support reforms that lead to proper forest management is hurting everyday Americans and their wallets. This is ultimately an affordability issue. I would encourage my colleagues who are serious in addressing affordability join us and get serious about reforming and strengthening our forest management policies. Mr. Mills, in just the time I have, I simply want to say thank you for the work that you have done in developing the Watch Duty app. I have it on my phone and many do. I wasn't aware of it until our fires in Northern Minnesota last year. It's an incredible tool that many of my constituents used during the fire season and it's saved lives and property from destruction during the wildfires across Northern Minnesota last year. So on behalf of my constituents and myself, I want to say thank you and I yield back.

Gentleman yields and I now recognize the gentleman from Oregon for his questioning.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank all of the witnesses for being here. Dr. Calkin, I'm not sure which one of you to ask this question of, but I'm going to start with you. And the assertion was made earlier by the ranking member that if we just would focus on climate change and its causes, this problem would go away. He might be right, but it's going to take quite a while. How long?

Well, I mean climate change is certainly a significant component of what is happening and why these fires are so much more severe, but also is 100 years of suppression. We've made fire go away from our landscapes that were designed with fire. Native Americans burned these landscapes regularly and consistently and we've excluded fire and so there is a deficit that's come due. I think, you know, we are going to have a tough next 20 years, 30 years. When I look at these largest, most complex wildland fires, the only thing that seems to stop them, well there's two things that stop them: major changes in weather and past large fires. So basically our success in these large wildland fires comes from our past failures. Those are the only things that stop these most problematic fires.

I think in listening to forestry experts from Oregon State, I'm from Oregon, the assertion was that our future of hotter, drier is, quote, their words, baked in for the next 30 to 40 years, even if we stopped creating CO2 tomorrow. And so this assertion that we have misdirected our attention in the FOFA bill, I believe is incorrect because we have to adapt to a situation that we know is going to continue for perhaps another half century and I would guess longer. But you are pointing out what should be done and I think the FOFA bill addresses that, am I correct?

There are absolutely positive reforms that are needed. NEPA is problematic, it's time-consuming. But if we want to protect our communities, we start at the community. We start at the home and we start at the adjacent lands. We also have that fire deficit on our public lands that we need to address and those are different strategies. My research is really focused on how we use our fuels management to make firefighting more successful. And firefighting is stopping those problematic fires as they come out of the wildlands into communities and it's also getting safely getting more fire into our wildlands. I think one of the most important things is more fire comes from private land onto federal land than federal land to private land. The devastation comes when it gets into the communities, but for the most part, ignitions happen on, problematic ignitions do not happen on federal land that often.

They happen. Let me move to Mr. Gordon just briefly. I want to shift over to affordability because that certainly is an issue that people are talking about and I want to talk about how unaffordable insurance has become in areas that can't get their act together and start driving it down as you've repeatedly suggested they should and I think of course the FOFA bill would help us do that. But I'm just looking at these numbers here. It appears that in California in fire-prone areas, rates have gone up 300 to 500 percent, up to $6,000 a year in some cases. Are these numbers correct?

Well, I think those numbers may be anecdotal, they're certainly not averages. And in fact, California has some of the lower overall insurance rates. What we are seeing is the primary driver for insurance costs is simply building inflation. It's the inflation in building labor and materials that skyrocketed after the pandemic and then people are building more expensive buildings in the wildland-urban interface. So the primary, there is a climate element, but the primary cost driver is the inflation and the rapid development in places like California, places like Oregon. If we're going to build there, you need to address the forest management.

We do. I'm not disputing that one bit. What I'm trying to say is in order to get something done when it comes to preventing these fires, we need to get people together and the FOFA bill would help encourage that. That's what I've heard. Do I have that correct?

Absolutely, that is correct.

And if an individual wants to go in and drive down their own rate, just taking care of themselves by themselves will not work. You've already said that. I agree with that completely. So the FOFA bill is one of the few ways that I've seen around here where we could immediately address affordability if we could get it passed, if the Senate would get busy and pass it, then we could do something positive to bring these people together. Is that correct?

That is correct and it would be a significant help.

And again, going back to affordability, $500 a month is what a $6,000 policy would cost and I understand the increased cost of housing, but I would blame our lack of adaptation. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. I yield back.

Gentleman yields. We are now going to take a short break. We have votes on the floor and we hope you will join us after we recess here and we will be back here as quickly as possible. We're hoping for 11:45 or so that we'll come back because members will have questions for you. So the subcommittee now stands in recess subject to the call of the chair.

[Gavel sounds.] Subcommittee on Federal Lands will come to order. Thank you to our witnesses for your patience here as we had to cast a couple votes and we are going to start with questions. Ms. Maloy, would you like me to go first or do you want to start in? I might need a minute to get my... Yeah, okay. I'm going to start in here. I want to start by asking a question for the entire panel and we're going to start with you, Mayor Crowder. As we look to the future to ensure no communities face the same fate as a community like yours that were affected by last year's fires, what do you think is the single most important action Congress should take and why? What is that one thing that really comes to mind for you? And you may start, Mayor Crowder.

Well, in a short answer, it would be let's get this Fix Our Forests bill passed and initiated and going. I think that's one of the most important things that we can do that will keep everybody safe. We'll never stop a wildfire, but we can mitigate the damage it does.

Is there anything, not to put you on the spot here, yes, I'm actually putting you on the spot, but is there a single item in the Fix Our Forests Act, I don't know how familiar you are with all the details in there, is there a single thing in there that caught your eye?

Well, it's just basically, you know, let's get rid of the obvious fuel. Our fire was fueled by fuel that had been around for 80 years and you couple it with the dry conditions and stuff, it's gone and that's what we need to prevent.

So in other words, the fuel reduction part of it is something that's imperative if we're going to prevent these wildfires in the future, is that correct?

Absolutely.

Yeah. Mr. Mills, your turn.

Well, I'll have to second that. Obviously passing Fix Our Forests is imperative and I think on top of that, empowering Brian Fennessey, the new chief of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, is imperative.

Empowering, I didn't catch that. Repeat that.

The new chief of the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, Brian Fennessey.

Is giving him the authority to be able to take the actions that are necessary, is that what you're saying, Mr. Mills?

That's correct.

Very good. Mr. Calkin.

Yeah, I think there is no silver bullet. We are faced with these risks for the foreseeable future. I think the most important thing is to invest in community preparation for these kinds of events. And that's technical assistance, it's grant funding to support evacuation planning and support of our most vulnerable peoples, and it's subsidizing home hardening and infrastructure hardening.

Mr. Gordon.

So Mr. Chairman, certainly we strongly support FOFA, think it would have significant benefits, but I will say probably the most important thing that we could change is legal system abuse. So in 2023, Florida had the highest homeowner insurance rates in the nation because of legal system abuse. Only 9 percent of the homeowner's insurance claims were in Florida, but 70 percent of the insurance lawsuits occurred there. They enacted very significant legal system abuse reform, including eliminating one-way attorney fees, terminating assignment of benefits, a number of other significant improvements. By 2024, they had the lowest insurance rate increases in the nation. Their state residual market reduced its exposure by nearly half and we saw just as a huge success for Florida consumers. So it'd be great if Congress could fix inflation, it would be great if we could address climate, and particularly great if we could address legal system abuse, but FOFA's a great start to helping homeowners affordability.

Yeah, is that legal abuse, legal system abuse, is that also happening in states like California?

Absolutely. California is becoming one of the most expensive states. We're seeing nuclear verdicts skyrocket, damages everywhere. We're seeing a smoke chaser industry emerging, ignoring science-based smoke standards. Legal system abuse has become, in California's become one of the top what they call tort hellholes. So it's a great state, I grew up there, but legal system abuse is an enormous problem in California.

A tort hellhole. Mr. Calkin, you worked for the Forest Service for more than two decades and you're very familiar with the layers of analysis that the agency must complete when it does vegetation management. Earlier in the hearing you stated that NEPA is problematic and time-consuming. Could you just expand on that a little bit as far as how it became problematic and time-consuming?

You know, NEPA work has not been my specialty. So I do see the time it takes from initiation of a project to completion of a project. It's too long and there's ways of reforming that, that's not my expertise. But getting more work done on the ground is critically important. One of the things we need to have when we do that work on the ground are those resources to do the physical work too. So it's not just NEPA, it's also taking care of the people who conduct the work.

Well, I think your statement is accurate and I would just point out one of my favorite charts here when you take a look at timber harvested versus the number of wildfires that we've had in the United States. I always believe the watershed year is 1988. This chart starts at 1984, but when we stopped harvesting wood in part because of lawsuits, when we started to reduce the amount of wood harvested here on our public lands, wildfire went up. I mean, there is a direct correlation between timber harvested and the amount of timber burned on our federal forests and we should change that and it will no longer be expensive to manage our national forests if we would just bring back timber management. It was really interesting when we were out in Yosemite a couple years ago, one of our members who was along, I think it was Representative McClintock, said that there are 200 mills across the Sierra that have closed since the 1990s. Think about that, 200 mills. And we wonder why wood is not being consumed. When you do not have the ability to accept that wood, you got to figure out a way to be able to deal with it. Well, Mother Nature knows how to deal with it if we don't deal with it and it is to burn. And 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? So with that, I yield and turn to the gentlelady from Utah for her questioning.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I will just echo that. I represent Utah's 2nd Congressional District and we also have mills that have been closed down because of lawsuits and the fear of lawsuits and now we have fuels that are building up when there's a really obvious economic answer to this, which is let people go make a living harvesting timber instead of letting it burn and then people can't make a living. Mayor Crowder, your story is really compelling. Listening to you talk about what happened in your community is really helpful when we are making policy decisions. And I'm just, I'm thankful that all of you are here talking about Fix Our Forests. It is time to change the way we think about all of these things. But you said that you're trying to build back more resilient and that now you have 90 percent compliance with some of these fire resiliency codes. Is there anything you would like to add about that? I just thought that was really helpful talking about a local government coming up with solutions that are helping the people who live there.

So we've expanded, you know, the traditional homes to cement homes, Quonset hut homes, more fire resilient home foam blocks, just anything that would meet the resilience. We were already WUI, we were the first I believe place that initiated the IBHS standards into our code, which is the five-foot clearance. Weeds in our community was a huge issue because obviously we had so many vacant lots and they were overgrown and a lot of people had left the state, didn't care about maintaining them. Neighbors were concerned and we were having a hard time with compliance. So we put in a really strict ordinance that year-round you had to maintain that lot whether you lived there or not. And just doing everything to be as fire safe as we can. We have had some insurance companies come up and visit us, boots on the ground, look around and say, yeah, we'll write some insurance there. So everything that we're doing is helping to harden our new homes and also to hopefully help with insurance down the road.

Thank you. It just seems logical to me that when your local government is asking you to do things that you can see the benefit and you buy into it, it's a much better process than if the federal government's coming in and saying this is what you have to do and you don't like it. Mr. Gordon, I've also been interested in what you're saying about insurance and why it's getting so expensive and why it's hard to insure homes when you know that there's going to be a high fire risk. The Fix Our Forests Act includes grazing provisions and talks about how grazing can be used to manage fuels. Is that something insurance companies are willing to buy into and incentivize?

So we're not experts in the best way to clear fuel load, whether it's burns or mechanical thinning or grazing, whatever policymakers think is most important. But I will say what we're seeing in a lot of these states, Utah for example, highest per capita home building in the high wildfire risk zones, about five times higher than the next state. We're seeing that in California as well, majority of new homes being built in the wildfire risk areas. If we're going to build more expensive buildings in higher fire risk areas, it just becomes that much more essential that we do the forest clearing, whether it's grazing or some other means. We have to do that to protect lives and to keep insurance available and affordable.

Thank you. I appreciate that. There's sort been an anti-grazing bent for a few years where there's an ethic out there that if animals are on the landscape they're doing damage and I think it's time to turn that around and let animals do some of the work to help us be firewise. You also talked in your testimony about the Fire Shed Center and would you just expand a little, I'm almost out of time, sorry Mr. Mills, I'll have to ask you the questions in writing later, but about how that would work, how the Fire Shed Centers would work.

So we've talked, several of us have talked about it, how insurers have developed a lot of wildfire safety standards. We also are using new wildfire modeling, AI analysis of aerial imagery for fire detection. The federal agencies have developed various tools like real-time monitoring and prediction services. The Fire Shed Center would connect the private sector and various state and federal workstreams so that they become more interoperable, they consolidate data, they help prioritize resource. We shouldn't all be working on the same kinds of whether it's alerts or detection or other things without talking to each other and working together. So the Fire Shed Center will play a critical role in coordinating all of these different community efforts.

Yeah, I agree. I think it'll also be helpful with what I talked to Mayor Crowder about where you have local buy-in and some of the things I was going to ask Mr. Mills about where you're getting information to people efficiently. So thank you for that and I am out of time so I will yield back.

The gentlelady's time has expired and I'll recognize Ms. Dexter for her questioning.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank you for all of our witnesses coming to be with us today. I'll just say the timing of this hearing is deeply troubling given the demonstrated failures of this administration and the profound mismanagement of the Department of Homeland Security under Kristi Noem, whose leadership directly oversees FEMA. Mayor Crowder, you have said in your testimony the 2018 Camp Fire was one of the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in California's history. According to FEMA records, the state of California was provided $2.6 billion in funding to support rebuilding and recovery. From your perspective, how critical was that funding and what did it mean for Paradise's ability to recover after such devastating loss?

It was very critical for us. We were not, we're one of the poorest counties in California. We had a lot of people that were underinsured, most people were underinsured, we had a lot of no insured. So in the ability to come back, we would not be where we are right now without the help that we got. We didn't have the finance, we had a building department that used to build five homes, 10 homes a year and we went from that to trying to build 500. So there was a lot of grant money that went for us to get more people in our building department, so it was critical.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And that funding being critical for Paradise and the Camp Fire recovery underscores the role that FEMA must play in disaster recovery. We are here today to discuss the tragedy of the Los Angeles fires last year, which killed 31 people, destroyed thousands, thousands of homes, and has left tens of thousands of families displaced. This was yet another one of the deadliest and most destructive wildfires in recent history and it demanded a full, urgent, and sustained federal response. Instead, one year later, recovery assistance for the L.A. fires amounts to approximately 1 percent of the total estimated losses. That shortfall is staggering. Time and again, this administration has taken steps that undermines FEMA's capacity to respond effectively, particularly when the disaster affects states it views as politically misaligned. Last year alone, over the course of just six months, the Government Accountability Office reported that FEMA lost approximately 2,500 staff due to this administration's reckless decisions. Those losses meant slower response times, fewer caseworkers, and less support for disaster survivors. And just days ago, several unions sued to block the loss of an additional 10,000 FEMA jobs. The consequences are ongoing and severe, despite this fact that seven in 10 residents impacted by the L.A. fires remain displaced. FEMA's latest round of recovery funding was just announced last week and California was nowhere to be found on that list. Notably, the majority of that funding went to red states. The pattern is clear. Under Secretary Noem's leadership, FEMA is weaker, slower, less responsive, and families across this country are paying the price. 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. I would urge my colleagues to join me in holding this administration accountable for the sake of their recovering communities. And because I was able to finish that quicker than expected, I do want to get Mr. Calkin to you, Dr. Calkin, I'm sorry. From your perspective, what is needed at the federal level to support community-level risk reduction, both to reduce wildfire impacts and to better protect people from wildfire smoke?

Thank you very much. So again, I think there's a two-pronged problem here. What we do to protect communities is distinct from what we do to deal with our landscapes. And the landscapes is largely where the smoke issue comes from. For the landscapes, the federal government lacks the authority and responsibility for the built environment, but that does not mean there's not a role. There's a role to invest in community preparedness, evacuation planning particularly for the most vulnerable amongst us, and for incentivizing home hardening. In the L.A. fires, there's an emerging thing that's really interesting, the community brigades that had started in Malibu. You know, can we get the volunteer firefighting workforce to actually show up in the built environment to do the preparation and the for home hardening, to do vegetation management, and when fire occurs, then they become a mobile strike force that enhances our capability. I talked to one of the leading fire managers of the Palisades and what he said is what I had was 80 type one engines, big municipal engines, what I needed was 300 type six engines, basically four people in an F-350 or something like that. For smoke management, we're going to have to deal with smoke and again what we have to do is have strategies to protect our most vulnerable. And that's identification, early warning, and then safe spaces for them. Prescribed fire is absolutely going to be critical to any solution that we come up with and prescribed fire creates smoke. There is no smoke-free solution, so preparation and protection of the most vulnerable is going to be key in that environment.

Thank you so much, Dr. Calkin, and I recognize I'm over time so I yield back. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

The gentlelady's time has expired and now recognize the ranking member, Mr. Neguse, for his questioning.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to the witnesses. Thank you all for being here and certainly grateful for the opportunity to participate in a hearing on a topic that is very important close to home, the state that I proudly represent, Colorado, in my district, the 2nd Congressional District, which has been at the epicenter of multiple historic wildfires over the course of the last six years. I will say, however, you know, I had planned remarks and I had intended to rely on those planned remarks to talk a bit about our experience in Colorado and the terrible Marshall Fire just by way of example back in 2021, five years nearly five years ago now, that devastated my community, over a thousand homes that were ultimately burned in the span of 18 hours and the necessity for the work that needs to be done at the federal level to prevent wildfires like the Marshall Fire from metastasizing into the future. But I have to just say, I want to echo the remarks of my colleague from Oregon because this experience, this hearing is a bit confounding to me, to be candid. Right now, the Trump administration is refusing to approve disaster declarations for multiple wildfires that have happened over the course of the last year and a half. And the only basis for the Trump administration's decision is that these disaster declarations were submitted by Democratic governors. That's it. That's the new normal we find ourselves in. Now, when I was chair of this subcommittee, we held many hearings like this one where we had honest, good faith conversations about wildfire mitigation and resilience and home hardening and all of the challenges we face and the work that needs to be done at the federal level. But it is very difficult to fathom having those conversations right now when we're facing this existential challenge that the Trump administration is posing by virtue of deciding that they're going to politically retaliate against states that didn't vote for Donald Trump in the last election. That's what this has become. And and I have to just so that it's clear to everyone that this isn't hyperbole, let me give you an example. A year ago, Colorado experienced the fourth largest wildfire in the history of our state, the Pine Gulch Fire in Rio Blanco County. This is a county on the western slope of Colorado that voted for Donald Trump with 80 percent of the vote. 80 percent of the people who live in this county voted for Donald Trump. The disaster declaration for that fire, 137,000 acres burned, a land size bigger than the city of Chicago, the disaster declaration, $30 million, sitting on Donald Trump's desk. He refuses to sign it. Why? Because our governor is a Democrat. It's outlandish. And so I look forward, I can promise you this, there will be many hearings in the future where we'll have an opportunity to engage in good faith on the various items you all have proposed that I am very passionate about and I share your passion on. But right now, we are facing a very clear crisis, at least as far as the communities that I represent are concerned. And that crisis is being caused by the Trump administration. You know, I don't how can we have a conversation about investments in wildfire resiliency when the Trump administration is gutting the Interior Department, gutting the Forest Service, gutting the National Park Service? How do we have a conversation about disaster response when they are dismantling FEMA? And we're just supposed to pretend like this isn't happening in real time, that we're just going to have a normal hearing where we engage in, you know, colloquies about conventional solutions and all the rest. Madness. So I thank the witnesses and I apologize, I guess I would say, on behalf of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle because they have not this is not a hearing that was scheduled in good faith in my view. And with that, I yield back the balance of my time.

The gentleman's time has expired. Now recognize the gentleman from Utah for his questioning.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for convening us and thanks to the witnesses for your patience and listening to us and working through these important issues. One year after the devastating wildfires in Los Angeles, Congress acted with urgency and bipartisan resolve to pass the Fix Our Forests Act. That legislation represented a significant step forward in modernizing forest management. In the past year, we have already seen meaningful progress in the form of faster project approvals as well as expanded thinning and prescribed burn programs and improved cross-jurisdictional collaboration. These accomplishments do matter and they are saving taxpayer dollars, protecting watersheds, and most importantly helping to safeguard homes, businesses, and lives. But even as we remember the families still rebuilding in Los Angeles, wildfires continue to devastate communities across the West. Just this past year, Utah faced a wildfire numbering over 70,000 acres in Monroe Canyon, threatening homes, livelihoods, and critical infrastructure. These events underscore a hard truth: wildfires are no longer a regional or seasonal problem. Fire seasons are longer, fires are more intense, and their behavior is increasingly unpredictable. Drought, overgrown forests, and extreme weather are creating the conditions for catastrophic fires to ignite and spread at unprecedented speed. The Fix Our Forests Act was a critical first step, but it was never intended to be the finish line. If we are serious about protecting lives, property, and our public lands, we must continue to build on this legislation, remove remaining barriers, and adapt our policies to... ...to me the escalating reality on the ground. Mayor Crowder, I wanted to talk to you first. Thank you for being here and the devastation that your community has faced is something most of us can only imagine and I'm sorry you and your community have had to go through that. But thanks for being with us and can you itemize some of the ways that since the Fix Our Forests Act has passed, how things have gotten some better in the aftermath of what you've had to deal with and how federal coordination and state and local entities are working better together?

Well, I think we kind of wrote the book on aftermath of a fire of this magnitude. I've seen we've gotten a lot of federal and state help since the fire. I think there's a lot more attention being paid at least in our area to forest management, building hardening. We've gotten some federal grants to give to homes that survived to help harden them as far as new roofs, new windows, new siding. So I think there's been progress made. I think we still got a ways to go, but we've definitely made that type of progress since the fire.

Sorry you've had to learn that way, but thanks for itemizing some of those ways that you've responded since then. Dr. Calkin, I had a question for you and you've talked about the critical need for more prescribed fires and mitigating the wildfire danger that's out. Can you tell me how those kind of techniques can benefit Western states such as California and Utah?

Yeah, it's very clear the only solution to wildfire is more fire. We need more fire on the ground. There is no substitute for fire. Mechanical treatments may be necessary so that we can safely burn, but we must burn. I think the prescribed fire program, we are always going to have challenges getting at the pace and scale necessary. Air quality standards are difficult to maintain, the workforce necessary to do this is not on the ground and not available. One of the things that I continue to emphasize is how we respond to fire matters and we can respond to fire in ways that responsibly get more fire on the landscape that make us safer into the future. I've worked with incident management teams and seen it done. Six Rivers Lightning Complex, 50,000 acres of good fire was put on the landscape during a suppression event. These are full suppression fires, but we can and must get good fire on the ground. Prescribed fire is a critical component to it, but it needs to set the stage for other good fire management.

Do you feel like our technology is such that we can use those prescribed fires in a way that does not present danger to the communities that are nearby?

That's one of the fundamental challenges. There is danger out there. The burns that create the most risk reduction are inherently risky, but we know the consequences of not doing this. You know, interestingly we did a study of the Las Conchas and Cerro Grande fires. The Cerro Grande in 2000 was considered one of the worst prescribed fire disasters and it burned a large portion of Los Alamos. 10 years later the Las Conchas fire would have taken out way more than Los Alamos. So again, the worst fire prescribed fire disaster saved Los Alamos. And so there is no no-risk solution. We have gotten a lot better at understanding that risk and working towards better strategies that are lower risk, but we cannot eliminate risk.

Thank you. Mr. Mills, you've talked about the what does and doesn't work in regard to wildfires and you identified the bureaucratic delays as a big problem associated with them. How would streamlining information and the coordination between entities offer better protection to our citizens in these high-risk areas?

I think the best way to really look at this is look at examples that work rather than what I've done because what I've created is modeled after how the weather service treats tornadoes. When a tornado touches down, an alert is sent immediately. No one passes go, no one calls the diplomat, the bureaucrat, the judge. They press a button because it's happening. What happens in fires and also similarly in floods is there's a chain of events that cascades and the system collapses and people are now finding out about fires when it's on their doorstep or the tankers are overhead. There are ways to do this, we've done this in America before and I'm just mirroring what the weather service has done in the past.

Thank you for that response. Mr. Chair, my time has expired. I yield back.

Gentleman's time has expired and I see no other members here. I'd like to thank the witnesses for your testimony here today and thank you. Whenever we talk about wildfire, the witnesses travel a long ways to get here because you are the in the Western states are the epicenter of fire. Members of the subcommittee may have some additional questions for you today and we will ask that the witnesses respond in writing. Under committee rule three, members of the subcommittee must submit questions to the subcommittee clerk by 5:00 PM on Friday, February 6, 2026. The hearing record will be held open for 10 business days for your responses. If there is no further business, without objection, the subcommittee on federal lands stands adjourned. [Gavel sounds.]