As California braces for another wildfire season, forestry experts warn that decades of regulatory mismanagement — not climate change or Trump-era budget cuts — have left forests dangerously overloaded with fuel.

Democrats have blamed climate change and agency rollbacks for creating tinderbox conditions, but forestry experts see a self-inflicted wound that began festering as far back as the Clinton administration. Three decades of environmental litigation, they say, has warped forest management into a Byzantine maze of legal delays and procedural dead ends — leaving millions of acres to accumulate fuel faster than anyone can clear it.

The blame game intensified Friday as Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom took to X to point fingers at President Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump isn’t just threatening CA’s disaster aid, he’s also pushing for dangerous cuts ahead of wildfire season,” the governor said Friday. “A 63% REDUCTION in the U.S. Forest Service’s budget. A 30% REDUCTION in workforce — 10,000 employees … He is literally playing politics with people’s lives.”

Newsom then accused Trump of “sabotage” in a follow-up post Saturday, citing a San Francisco Chronicle article that reported less than 20% of National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles were actually on the ground fighting the state’s seven ongoing fires — the worst of which is the Monte Fire, which burned over a thousand acres and was 90% contained as of Monday

But Bob Zybach, an author and wildfire expert who has led the Oregon Websites and Watersheds Project since 1996, sees a different cause for California’s chronic wildfire problem.

“The problem isn’t all these massive numbers of wildfires,” he told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “The problem is the financial end of it. It’s not Trump, it’s the people, the litigants, who keep suing to shut down the timber industry which has allowed the fuels to build up.”

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