jareA House Natural Resources hearing on forest management and wildfires Tuesday underscored partisan divisions — but the panel’s top Democrat, Jared Huffman of California, said he’s looking to the Senate to bridge the gap.
At the hearing of the Federal Lands Subcommittee, the Republican majority reinforced its view that more intensively thinning forests is the top priority for curbing big wildfires in the West, and that legislation called the “Fix Our Forests Act” would go a long way toward achieving that goal.
Huffman, though, said the proposal goes too far in scaling back environmental reviews of forest projects and doesn’t ensure that the Forest Service — shrunken by the Trump administration’s workforce reductions last year — will have the ability or money to step up forest management.
“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,” Huffman said.
