EDITORIAL: Money goes up in smoke
The wildfires that have burned across hundreds of thousands of acres in
The
Specifically, the lawmakers want the government to treat big blazes as it does other natural disasters such as hurricanes -- by putting money into a separate account for that specific purpose.
The current budgeting system for firefighting is, to borrow Wyden's apt adjective, "awful."
Federal agencies, principally the
In a perversely ironic twist, this means the agencies often have less money to do work, such as thinning overcrowded forests, that can help reduce the size and severity of wildfires.
This creates a recurring cycle in which the government deals with the symptoms of the problem -- the fires -- but not one of its key sources -- unhealthy forests. It's roughly analogous to the government dealing with a river that frequently floods by buying a bunch of pumps rather than building a better system of levies.
We endorse the proposal to end what Wyden calls "fire borrowing."
The Trump administration has been striving to reduce government spending, but when it comes to managing the nation's hundreds of millions of acres of public land, one of America's greatest resources, spending more to protect those vast expanses seems to us a worthwhile investment.
Moreover, it's conceivable that over years and decades, a more concerted effort to reduce the fire danger will actually result in fewer blazes on public land, and a net savings to the government treasury.
Restoring forest health is not cheap, to be sure, in part because some of the necessary work, such as cutting small trees and lighting prescribed fires, doesn't produce commercial products.
But the current situation hardly qualifies as a bargain, either.
The federal government has regularly spent more than
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