Standing amid the charred ruins of Paradise, California, after the deadliest wildfire in the state’s modern history, President Donald Trump had a clear diagnosis of the problem.
“You gotta take care of the floors,” he told reporters in November 2018. “You know, the floors of the forest.” Trump cited a conversation with Finland’s president: “They spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things, and they don’t have any problem.” In the years that followed, Trump repeated the line. “You gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests,” he declared at a 2020 rally in the Golden State. “There are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up.”
Even when first uttered, the “raking” comment became an instant punchline. Twitter lit up with #RakeAmericaGreatAgain. Late-night hosts piled on. Governor Gavin Newsom—who had toured the Paradise ruins alongside Trump as governor-elect—later dismissed him outright: “You don’t believe in climate change,” he tweeted. “You are excused from this conversation.”
Yet as fires continued to devastate the Golden State—including the catastrophic years of 2020 and 2021—the mockery has given way to grudging acknowledgment. By 2024, the Sacramento Bee reported that California’s leaders had become “surprisingly aligned” with Trump on forest management, noting that research shows “he wasn’t entirely off base.” California’s landscapes had become dangerously overgrown, and state officials were now embracing the very tactics Trump had clumsily but persistently advocated: clearing brush, thinning forests, and using prescribed fire to reduce dangerous fuel loads.
After the state’s worst wildfire year on record, California launched a plan in 2021 to ramp up fuel treatments using prescribed burns, mechanical thinning, and other vegetation-clearing methods. And following the deadly Los Angeles fires last year, Newsom doubled down, signing an executive order to cut red tape and fast-track such projects. The question now is not whether California has recognized the problem—but whether it is actually solving it.
The centerpiece of California’s 2021 plan is a commitment to conduct fuel treatments on 1 million acres annually by 2025, split evenly between federal lands (primarily managed by the U.S. Forest Service) and non-federal lands, including state, private, and tribal ownerships.
California also established targets for expanding prescribed fire—the controlled burning of vegetation to reduce dangerous fuel loads—to 400,000 acres per year statewide by 2025. Within that goal, CAL Fire committed to treating 50,000 acres annually with prescribed fire, while California State Parks set a target of 25,000 acres annually on high-risk state lands.
These goals reflect a growing scientific consensus as to the importance of proactive fuel treatments in fire-prone landscapes. Such practices can quite literally save entire communities. When the Caldor Fire roared into the Lake Tahoe Basin in 2021, for example, the communities of Christmas Valley and Meyers were largely spared. Decades of prior fuel treatments are widely credited for the outcome.
Now, five years in, how much progress has California actually made toward its targets? According to California’s Interagency Treatment Dashboard, treatment activity has increased since 2021. In 2023, roughly 767,000 “footprint acres” were treated statewide—the highest on record. (Footprint acres count each geographic acre once, regardless of whether it received multiple treatments.)1 In 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, treatment fell to about 731,000 acres—a decline from the previous year’s peak, and still below the 1 million-acre target.
Prescribed fire followed a similar pattern. Treated acreage rose from about 118,000 acres in 2021 to a record 219,000 in 2023, before falling to 189,000 acres in 2024. CAL Fire exceeded its 50,000-acre prescribed fire target for the first time in 2023, but burned just 41,000 acres in 2024.
These figures, however, overstate California’s contribution to reducing wildfire risk. First, the U.S. Forest Service manages roughly 20 million acres in California—more than half of the forestland in the state. In 2024, federal land agencies treated about 309,000 acres on these lands, accounting for more than 40 percent of statewide treatments. The Forest Service also conducted the majority of prescribed burns, treating roughly 111,000 acres compared with CAL Fire’s 41,000.
Second, California’s accounting inflates its progress by including activities that do little to reduce near-term fire risk. Treatment totals count tree planting—a worthwhile reforestation activity, but not a fuel-reduction strategy—which accounted for more than 127,000 acres in 2024. The state also counts timber harvesting by large-scale, industrial operators on private land, which has little to do with the state’s wildfire resilience efforts but comprised nearly 200,000 footprint acres in 2024. Excluding these activities, the state’s core fuel treatment work is even further from the target.
Overall, while California has made real gains, its own data show that it is falling short of its fuel reduction targets. The state and its federal partners have achieved 73 percent of the 1 million-acre goal. Prescribed fire, at 189,000 acres, was less than half of the 400,000-acre target. Data for 2025 are not yet available.
Meeting these targets would be real progress, but the unfortunate reality is that even a million acres per year would barely dent California’s wildfire problem. State officials estimate that 10 to 30 million acres in California would benefit from fuel reduction treatments. And the state set new targets in 2024 calling for treatment on 33.5 million acres of fire-prone lands by 2045. At today’s treatment rates, it would take decades to close the gap.
Fuel treatments are notoriously slow and difficult to scale in California. Some of the reasons are geographic—California’s rugged topography, hot and dry conditions, and flammable brush creates narrower weather windows for prescribed burning than other states. But many of the reasons are regulatory.
Air-quality rules, especially those enforced by the California Air Resources Board, tightly restrict the timing and scale of prescribed burns, while stretching approval timelines by months or longer. California’s stringent environmental-review requirements subject even routine fuel treatment projects to extensive analysis, permitting, and litigation risk.
In practice, these rules can slow projects or even prevent urgently needed fuel reduction work from happening at all. Consider a recent example in the San Ramon Valley east of San Francisco. The San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District sought to conduct fuel-reduction work on California State Parks land—in areas the state has designated as “Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zones.” The district developed a mitigation plan, secured local funding, and was ready to do the work.
But State Parks imposed what the district called “significant and prolonged barriers” that stymied the project. These included prohibitions on vegetation treatment involving protected Manzanita species, mandatory cultural and habitat monitoring requirements, extensive permitting and oversight fees, among other restrictions. Of a planned 300 acres of mitigation work, the district completed only 22 acres. Nearly 80 percent of the $120,000 project budget went to state-mandated compliance costs rather than actual fuel treatment.
The San Ramon case is not an isolated incident. California State Parks, which set a goal to increase prescribed fire on its high-risk areas, treated just 3,000 acres in 2024—a mere 12 percent of its 25,000-acre target for state lands.
California’s progress on wildfire resilience is real but insufficient. The state is falling short of its own targets, and even further behind what the scale of the problem requires. Meeting the wildfire challenge will take more than money. It will require regulatory reforms that allow fuel-reduction projects to move faster and at lower cost—and a recognition that the environmental risks of inaction now exceed the risks of proactive management.
Trump’s calls to “rake” California’s forests were easy to ridicule. Today, state leaders largely agree on the need for more aggressive forest management. The question now is whether the state can translate that consensus into action at the pace and scale that’s needed. So far, the answer is: not yet.
California also reports “activity acres,” which count each treatment separately even when multiple treatments occur on the same land. If an acre receives prescribed fire, mechanical thinning, and grazing, it counts as three activity acres but only one footprint acre. Activity types that can be double-counted include prescribed fire, mechanical and hand fuel reduction, timber harvesting, targeted grazing, and tree planting. The footprint measure provides a more accurate picture of how much land was actually treated.