Last summer, Plumas County Fire Safe Council was hoping to hit the ground running. The nonprofit’s members knew exactly what they were working to prevent—the devastation of wildfires is evident all over the landscape of this Sierra Nevada county, tucked between Tahoe and Lassen. In 2021, the Dixie Fire—California’s second-largest wildfire on record—tore through Plumas, destroying three communities and stretching across five counties. This kind of destruction couldn’t be allowed to happen again.
A year ago, in March 2023, Liam Galleher was excited to hear that the Fire Safe Council, where he works as a county coordinator, would receive $6.8 million from the U.S. Forest Service’s Community Wildfire Defense Grant Program. He had plans for fuel reduction—thinning forests, removing trees, and safely burning the overgrown understory.
But due to delays at the federal level, the grant agreement went unsigned for months. So the contractors that Galleher’s team had ready to go around the eastern outskirts of Quincy—where wildfire risk level is very high, per CalFire, California’s state fire agency—had to be called off.
“There were projects that we would have really, really liked to apply the funding to. But frankly, we couldn’t,” Galleher says.
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The council came up with “creative solutions”: it pooled money from private sources, and broke down the big Quincy project into three contracts, to help ease the funding gap. Even then, it was five months before any fuels teams got off the ground, and 10 total before federal funding arrived at all.
The Community Wildfire Defense Grants are a brand-new program that was kickstarted by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law last year. Nationwide, the program will provide $1 billion dollars over five years to help communities manage their fire risks. Grants are meant for the communities in greatest need, and applicants are weighed by socioeconomic factors as well as fire risk—work happens on private or tribal trust lands, not federal properties. “Some people might be saying, ‘It’s delayed.’ But on the other hand, it’s a new program that they had to stand up very quickly,” says Evan Burks, spokesperson for the USFS. “And it’s been an absolute game-changer.”
Galleher and his colleagues weren’t the only ones who encountered delays. Elsewhere in Plumas County, the Feather River Resource Conservation District, a nonregulatory local agency that works on post-fire restoration, waited 10 months for its $8.5 million grant. Outside of Plumas, the Forest Service says, three of California’s 33 grantees have yet to receive awards totaling over $10 million—and it’s been a year and counting since that round of awards was announced. These include northern California communities in Mendocino, Trinity, and Kern. On average, grants took about 250 days, or about eight months, to execute.
“High-risk communities have to fret through fire seasons, while they just sort of hope to God that they don’t have a fire come through the neighborhood,” says Hugh Safford, a former regional ecologist who left the Forest Service in 2021. He now works on forest resilience as chief scientist at a tech startup, Vibrant Planet, and holds an ecology research position at UC Davis. “It means that they’re gonna go another fire season without having the work done.”
USFS officials say grants were held up due to small, bureaucratic delays—such as checking signatures were valid, or budget back-and-forths. But Adrienne Freeman, a spokesperson for the grant program, also acknowledges two factors: an agency-wide staffing shortage, and a lack of an external clearinghouse to get the money moving on the beleaguered Forest Service’s behalf. “The Forest Service, [which] has extremely limited capacity, is doing all of these grants. So, fundamentally, it’s gonna be a challenge,” Freeman says. Some states have taken over administering the grants, and CalFire has distributed some federal money originating from the USDA. But for this round of funding, the state of California opted out, putting the onus back on the federal government.
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The USFS’s workforce numbers have been near-stagnant for decades. The permanent staff count for the agency’s Pacific Southwest region, which includes California, has hovered around 5,000 employees since 2004. Wildfire, in the meantime, has been ramping up its intensity and spread. Since 2020, wildfires have annually burned more than five times as much acreage as they did in the 2010s. And of the 20 largest wildfires in California’s history, 18 occurred in or after 2000.
