In the aftermath of the 2025 Los Angeles County wildfires, which had destroyed more than 12,000 structures as of this writing, critics of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and multiple media outlets claimed he had cut the state's fire prevention budget by $100 million the previous year, implying that Newsom was at least partially at fault for the devastation.
Newsweek was the first to report this, on Jan. 10, 2025. Other news outlets, including Fox News, the Daily Mail and the New York Post, followed suit, and social media users across multiple platforms also spread the claim.
The claim was oversimplified and misleading. Newsom did ask for a $101 million reduction, but it was a reduction to a $2.8 billion supplemental appropriation he proposed in 2020, not a reduction to ongoing regular funding of fire prevention in 2023 and 2024. Overall, California's fire prevention funding increased leading up to the January 2025 fires.
What Specific Reductions Did California Make?
The Newsweek article cited data from the California Legislative Analyst's Office — an office overseen by the bipartisan Joint Legislative Budget Committee — but it left out key context.
"These were reductions to one-time augmentations, not reductions to CalFire's [California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection] ongoing base programs and funding," Rachel Ehlers, analyst for the office, wrote Snopes via email.
Newsom's proposed $2.8 billion package, called the Wildfire and Forest Resilience Package and to be spread across four years, was meant to augment firefighting efforts. However, because of California's $55 billion budget deficit in 2024-25 (under the state constitution, the budget must be balanced by increasing revenues or reducing spending), Newsom and the California legislature reduced this lump sum by $47 million in the 2023-24 budget, by an additional $101 million (the origin of the claim in question) at the beginning of the 2024-25 session, and $43 million more after that.
This amounted to a total reduction of $191 million in the $2.8 billion supplemental package, leaving $2.6 billion of supplemental fire prevention funding intact.
What Were the Supplemental Funds Earmarked for, and Which Programs Were Most Affected?
"Most of these reductions were to planned augmentations to departments other than CalFire, such as for forest and fire resilience activities on state-owned land at state conservancies and parks," said Ehlers of the California Legislative Analyst's Office.
In 2024, the program most affected by the reductions was a biomass to hydrogen/biofuels pilot, which went from a $50 million augmentation to $5 million. Other programs for which supplemental funding was reduced to balance the budget (see table below) included CalFire's Forest Health Program and Forest Legacy Program, the prescribed fire and hand crews program, the home hardening program, the stewardship of state-owned land program and IBank's Climate Catalyst Fund Program.
(California Legislative Analyst's Office)
Overall Fire Prevention Funding Increased During Newsom's Tenure
Funding allocated to preventing fires in California almost tripled from $1.1 billion to $3 billion between 2014 and 2024; the most significant increase occurred after Newsom took office in 2019.
(California Legislative Analyst's Office)
In the regular 2024-25 budget, Newsom did not take any action to reduce CalFire's base funding. On the contrary, Newsom's 2024-25 budget allocated $199 million and 338 new positions to support a 66-hour workweek for CalFire, and more in coming years.
(California Legislative Analyst's Office)