Where did the tax dollars go?
More misdirection, I think. The criticism isn't false; I'm just not sure it has anything to do with the current fire situation. Maybe, but nobody's showing how.
"'[California Gov.] Gavin Newsom back in 2020 came up to a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Forest Service, and they agreed that they were going to clear … 500,000 acres of forest land per year,` Fors explained. "And that means doing controlled burns, because part of the issue with living in a place like California is we're surrounded by wild lands. These wild lands accumulate brush, and that brush is incredibly dangerous. … So they came to this memorandum of understanding they were going to clear 500,000 acres, but they've only cleared about 100,000 per year.'"
But is Forest Service land implicated in these fires? The Angeles National Forest is on LA's north side, so potentially it is. But there are two questions. 1) Did fires begin in the National Forest and spread to populated areas? 2) If so, did they begin in areas that would likely have had prescribed burns if the NSF had kept its side of the agreement? A yes answer to both questions is plausible, but I haven't seen evidence yet that in this case "yes" is correct.
For Pacific Palisades, the criticism is entirely irrelevant. PP is not close to the Angeles National Forest. It's beside the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, which is not National Forest Service land but National Park Service property. So no amount of clearing by the NSF would have touched it.
Did the PP fire come from NPS land? Again, a yes answer is generally plausible, but I don't know if it is so in this case. I would not be remotely surprised if the NPS was negligent or dilatory (or regulatorily constrained) in reducing fuel loads in the Recreation Area.
But did that actually matter in this case? I've not seen anybody show evidence of that to date. Instead, everyone is operating at the ultra-high level "all these policy actions are bad" level, and - while not being wrong about the policy actions - completely failing to actually connect them logically to these particular fires.
Government failure? Sure probably in some ways. Government critics failure? Absolutely and embarrassingly.