This week President Biden traveled to California to designate the Chuckwalla and Sáttítla National Monuments. While he had planned to announce the monuments at a ceremony in Palm Springs, this dog and pony show was canceled due to forecasted severe weather. This severe weather has now resulted in several catastrophic wildfires that have been fueled by dry conditions and high winds, have burned thousands of homes, have caused evacuations of 100,000s of Californians, and the fires continue to burn.
One of the most destructive of these fires is the Eaton Fire which has devastated communities in Altadena. It has also burned a significant portion of the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument that was expanded by President Biden just a few months ago on May 2, 2024.
Notice the Biden Monument Expansion in Yellow Compared Against the Burn Area


We are not surprised that President Biden suddenly didn’t want to draw attention to his abuse of the Antiquities Act. We are also not surprised that Biden’s earlier monument is burning up in flames and destroying the lives of thousands of Californians. If you read the proclamation of the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument Expansion, if you read the Angeles Forest Monument Management Plan to adapt forest management from the 2006 Forest Plan to comply with the original 2014 proclamation of President Obama, or if you read the NEPA analysis to expand Inventoried Roadless Areas that was required through a settlement with environmentalist litigants, you can comfortably conclude that the lock up of these lands and lack of active management that results from a National Monument designation is certainly contributing to the severity of these fires.
None of these designation documents acknowledge the risk of wildfire in this area and the need to manage the land to mitigate this risk. Monuments force managers to prioritize other things. The topic that received the most attention in the Monument Management Plan was changing the transportation system to meet the objective of the monument. In other words – closing roads. While we appreciate that recreation access received some attention in this analysis, Californians living next door should be livid that access for fighting fires, managing roads as firebreaks, and building and maintaining roads to allow for continued vegetation treatment and monitoring were issues that were completely neglected.
While the monument management plan dramatically shifted management priorities, the management plan for this forest was completed almost 20 years ago in 2006, and it has the most information about the Angeles National Forest’s plans for reducing wildfire risk.
While this earlier plan took wildfire risk seriously and did prescribe management activities to mitigate wildfire risk, we also checked the Angeles National Forest Schedule of Proposed Actions (SOPA) to see how many fire reduction projects have actually been completed in recent years. The SOPA is the centralized database of all projects this forest has been reviewing for environmental impact since 2023. It appears that our assumption that monument priorities replaced pre-existing commitments to wildfire risk reduction is correct.
There was one fuels reduction project that was completed in 2023 along the Angeles Highway Corridor that reduced fuels on 1800 acres. It took 2 years of analysis to approve the decision and complete it, and it required the simplest form of environmental review and only affected a very small amount of acreage.
The most notable project that would have helped mitigate wildfire risk in the current burned area of the Eaton Fire is the Forest Wide Fuelbreak Maintenance Strategy, which was initiated in August of 2020!

If you review the listing for this project above, it isn’t clear if it was ever actually approved or implemented. There is also no indication that the project was completed. It says the environmental impact statement was noticed in the Federal Register in May of 2024. But it also says the decision on the project was made in November of 2023. Usually the Federal Register Notice of Availability is published prior to the decision. It also says the project would have been implemented in October 2024. However, when you go to the project page on the USFS website, they only provide the scoping letter from 2020 announcing the beginning of the analysis. There should be links to the decision, the public comments, the documentation of the decision, etc. There is nothing. For what it’s worth, this is exactly the kind of project that gets shelved when monuments become the priority.
It would probably be helpful for the public to know if these firebreaks were ever approved and created, since it appears that several of them were directly north of Altadena where over 7,000 homes have been burned so far. Google Maps doesn’t reveal any obviously noticeable firebreaks being created, and a well-constructed firebreak should be easily discernible by satellites. The black lines the map below are the proposed firebreaks.

So from what we can tell from the record, during the first term of the Trump Administration, the USFS started the years-long process to approve a decision to create firebreaks specifically to protect Altadena from a catastrophic wildfire. Instead of firebreaks, they got a National Monument expansion in 2024 that protected a long list of allegedly special objects of scientific or historic importance but failed to protect a single Californian home. It’s pretty likely the fire burned the objects of scientific and historic importance in addition to half of Altadena.
This is what the communities living in northern California in the shadow of the newly created Sáttítla Highlands National Monument have to look forward to.
For reference, in November, BlueRibbon Coalition made public comment on the Trinity County Community Risk Reduction Project, which is located in the same national forest that will include the Sáttítla Highlands Monument.
Here is a map of the proposed project:

The purpose of the project is to reduce fuel loads in the tiny areas in dark purple, which total about 12,500 acres in size. The pink is private forest land, and the dark green is designated wilderness. The Forest Service can’t even start up a chain saw, build a logging road, build a fuel break, or do anything consequential to reduce wildfire risk in that dark green area, which is the second largest wilderness area in the state encompassing over 500,000 acres. It certainly can’t remove any of the timber California is going to need from areas like this to rebuild the thousands of homes that have been destroyed.
Of course, rebuilding any of these homes is going to be a challenge, since there are many reports that homes in these areas were conveniently declared uninsurable prior to these fires. While we read thousands of pages of agency planning materials every year, one thing we never see is a federal agency analyze the economic impact of increased insurance premiums or the cost of loss of insurability of homes and businesses that are built downwind from our mismanaged forests. I didn’t see any documents produced by the Angeles National Forest analyzing what the economic impact would be of burning Altadena to the ground.
In the very best of circumstances, we get USFS projects that take 2-5 years to complete the most streamlined environmental review process for a proposed action on federal land. These projects are always limited in size and scope, because to do anything more substantial would interfere with management prescriptions for landscape level protective designations like monuments, wilderness, roadless areas, wilderness study areas, areas of critical environmental concern, national conservation areas, national parks, national scenic trails, wild and scenic rivers, lands with wilderness characteristics, etc. etc. etc.
While we have mostly focused on the Eaton Fire in this article, it is also worth noting that now Senator Schiff has been a long time proponent for locking up more land north of the area that has been burned in the Palisades Fire as the Rim of the Valley Corridor. The area of the fire is already a patchwork of protected state and federal government lands consolidated into the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. The Rim of the Valley Corridor proposal would lock even more land up under a single designation to be managed by the National Park Service. Coincidentally, the growth of this protected area has required a slow process of acquiring private property and placing the property under conservation easements.

If the only thing the Department of Government Efficiency does is make it so the USFS can do things like build firebreaks around vulnerable communities in a time period shorter than five years, it can easily save Americans trillions of dollars. Current estimates of the cost of this week’s wildfires are between $130-150 billion, and that number will only go up.
If DOGE wants an early success right out of the gate, they should recommend that President Trump use the power of the Antiquities Act to rescind President Biden’s National Monuments. They should recommend rescission the US Forest Service Roadless Rule. They should release any undesignated Wilderness Study Areas. They should get rid of the labyrinthine environmental regulations that force agencies like the Forest Service to spend 5 years deciding whether they should construct firebreaks. They should have someone review the SOPA database for every national forest and simply approve any risk reduction project that has been gathering dust on the shelf for longer than six months. In short, they should find every way possible to restore active, responsible management to our public lands and relieve western communities from their environmentalist death sentence. If DOGE wants to create a beneficial impact for Americans that is measured by the number trillion, it should start here:
