He Promised to Fast-Track 100,000 Acres of Fire Prevention. Less Than 1 Percent Got Done.

After the January 2025 fires reduced Pacific Palisades and Altadena to ash — 30 dead, more than 16,000 structures gone, and economic losses estimated between $76 billion and $131 billion — Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA)stood before the cameras and made a promise. He would cut the “bureaucratic red tape,” fast-track the brush-clearing and forest-thinning projects that protect vulnerable communities, and, in his words, “get them done.”

A new City Journal investigation, published June 10, 2026, checked the math. Newsom fast-tracked land totaling nearly 100,000 acres. The state-approved organizations charged with treating it have completed projects covering about 781 acres — less than 1 percent. In one Bay Area fire district, 75 percent of the project budget was eaten by the very compliance costs the governor swore he was cutting.

It is not the first time. Five years earlier, a CapRadio and NPR investigation caught Newsom overstating his fire-prevention record by 690 percent — and caught his hand-picked CAL FIRE director quietly ordering the inflated figure pulled off the internet. The pattern is the story: a confident promise, a fraction of the delivery, and a fire season that does not grade on a curve.

• < 1% — of the ~100,000 fast-tracked acres actually treated — about 781 acres completed as of last month · Source: City Journal
• 690% — by which Newsom overstated his 2019 'priority project' fire work — he claimed 90,000 acres; the real number was 11,399 · Source: CapRadio / NPR
• $1.1B → $457M — wildfire and forest funding's slide, from its 2022 peak to Newsom's proposed 2026–27 budget · Source: City Journal, LAO
• 30 dead — in the January 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires — 16,000+ structures destroyed across more than 50,000 acres · Source: PBS NewsHour, Britannica

In March 2025, with Los Angeles still smoldering, Governor Gavin Newsom (D-CA)issued an emergency proclamation. Its purpose, as the administration described it, was to “cut bureaucratic red tape” and “fast-track critical projects” — brush clearance, forest thinning, prescribed burning, and other fuels-reduction work that fire scientists agree is the single most effective defense against catastrophic wildfire. The proclamation exempted projects of no more than 3,000 acres from the California Environmental Quality Act’s review process, the months-long gauntlet of impact reports and public-comment periods that normally stands between a fire district and a chainsaw.

The governor was unequivocal about what he was promising. “These are the forest management projects we need to protect our communities most vulnerable to wildfire,” Newsom said. “We’re going to get them done.” Roughly 100,000 acres were ultimately fast-tracked. The application window stayed open until May 1, 2026 — more than a year of runway. The question City Journal set out to answer was simple: how much of it got done?

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The answer, per the City Journal investigation by Christopher F. Rufo, Shawn Regan, and Kenneth Schrupp, is almost nothing. Of the nearly 100,000 acres approved for fast-tracking, state-approved organizations had completed projects totaling about 781 acres as of last month — less than 1 percent. Only about 13 percent of the approved projects had been completed at all. The fast track, in practice, was a slow crawl.

The completed projects read like a parody of urgency: a 0.24-acre tree-pruning job near Camp Nelson, a 0.36-acre tree-felling project near Thousand Oaks, a six-acre vegetation-management effort in Sonoma County. In the San Ramon Valley, the local fire district managed to finish just 22 of 300 planned acres — and 75 percent of that project’s budget went not to clearing brush but to compliance costs. The emergency proclamation was supposed to gut those costs. Instead, City Journal concluded, “despite the governor’s declaration of war against ‘red tape,’ it seems that the red tape won.”

“These are the forest management projects we need to protect our communities most vulnerable to wildfire. We're going to get them done.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), 2025 · via City Journal

The 2026 broken promise echoes one the press caught five years earlier. In June 2021, a CapRadio investigation by reporter Scott Rodd, produced with NPR’s California Newsroom, found that Newsom had overstated the acreage treated in his signature “priority projects” by an astounding 690 percent. The governor had claimed that 35 priority projects, carried out under his 2019 executive order, completed fire-prevention work on 90,000 acres. The state’s own data showed the real figure was 11,399 acres — barely an eighth of what he advertised.

What happened next is the part that should worry taxpayers most. Internal emails obtained through a public-records request showed that Newsom’s hand-picked CAL FIRE director, Thom Porter, ordered the inflated fact sheet pulled from the agency’s website once reporters started asking questions. A top CAL FIRE official, Matthew Reischman, emailed his superiors with a link to the document and a single question: “Chiefs, shall we take down?” Porter’s reply: “Yes, it’s old and outdated.” The investigation also documented that Newsom had quietly cut CAL FIRE’s wildfire-prevention staffing even as he toured the state touting prevention.

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The promises got louder; the funding went the other way. The 2024–25 budget that Newsom (D-CA)signed in June 2024 eliminated about $101 million from seven “wildfire and forest resilience” programs, according to an analysis by the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office — cuts that landed just months before the Palisades and Eaton fires ignited. Newsom’s communications office called the reporting a “ridiculous lie,” and fact-checkers noted the nuance: CAL FIRE’s overall budget has grown substantially since 2019, and the cuts followed two years of state deficits. But the trajectory City Journal traced is hard to spin away — wildfire and forest funding has fallen from a $1.1 billion peak in 2022 to $620 million in 2026, and Newsom’s proposed 2026–27 budget, a record $349 billion overall, would cut it further to $457 million.

Put differently: California’s total state budget has grown by $106 billion under Newsom, and the line item for keeping the state from burning down has shrunk by more than half. On June 5, 2026, days before the City Journal piece landed, the governor’s office announced it was fast-tracking “400 wildfire prevention projects” and unveiling a draft five-year action plan — the latest in a long series of announcements whose headline numbers, the record suggests, are best read as aspirations rather than accomplishments.

The bill for under-managed land is not abstract. The January 2025 Palisades Fire burned 23,448 acres, destroyed 6,837 structures, and killed 12 people. The Eaton Fire burned 14,021 acres, destroyed 9,414 structures, and killed 18. Together the firestorms claimed 30 lives, leveled more than 16,000 buildings across upwards of 50,000 acres, and inflicted economic losses that early estimates put north of $250 billion and later analyses pegged between $76 billion and $131 billion — among the costliest natural disasters in American history.

Federal investigators traced the Palisades Fire to a “holdover” — a small New Year’s Eve brush fire on state parkland that crews thought they had extinguished, but which smoldered for days in unmanaged root systems before flaring back to life. Fuels reduction is precisely the work that turns a holdover into a non-event. It is the work Newsom promised to fast-track, the work his 2021 fact sheet inflated by 690 percent, and the work his budget keeps cutting. Fire does not read press releases.

Strip away the politics and a single pattern remains, repeated across two governors’ worth of time in one man’s tenure: a vivid promise, a press event, a headline number — and then a delivery that, when someone finally pulls the records, comes in at a fraction of the pledge. In 2021 it was 11,399 acres dressed up as 90,000. In 2026 it is 781 acres standing in for 100,000. The constant is Gavin Newsom (D-CA), the constant is CAL FIRE under his appointees, and the constant is a funding line that shrinks while the rhetoric expands.

None of this makes Newsom responsible for every spark in a state built to burn. But accountability is not about assigning blame for the weather. It is about whether a governor did the unglamorous, fundable, scientifically settled work he repeatedly told Californians he was doing. The receipts — CapRadio’s emails, the LAO’s budget tables, City Journal’s acreage audit — say he did not. We will update this page as CAL FIRE reports new completion figures and as the June 2026 five-year plan is tested against the next fire season.

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Last updated June 11, 2026