Representative Peter DeFazio made an impassioned appeal in the House of Representatives to “wake up and smell the smoke”, urging his fellow members to hold hearings and pass the legislation to provide funding for wildfires so that the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Forest Service will not have to rob money from unrelated accounts in order to pay firefighting bills. The Forest Service will run out of money to fight fire by the end of this month.
He is probably talking about H.R. 3992, the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act of 2014, introduced February 5, 2014, rather than President Obama’s recent legislative proposal to appropriate $615 million to fund wildfire along with another $3 billion to manage the influx of child migrants crossing the Southwest border from Central America.
The video was uploaded to YouTube on July 10, 2014 with no description.
I thought the “Flame Act” that was proposed by the Agencies (passed by Congress, Signed into law by President Obama) was supposed to fix this funding mess???
Maybe the Agency heads should be held accountable for proposing piss poor, half truth legislation that rarely addresses the root cause problem…. land management agencies (USFS, BLM, BIA, NPS, FWS) trying to fund and manage a fire management program.
A few years back, some Congressperson commented that “a million here, a million there, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.” Now the comment is essentially the same, except we’re talking “billions.” Wish my salary and retirement had inflated that way too!