On the latest episode of Breaking Battlegrounds with hosts Chuck Warren and Sam Stone, Congressman Tom McClintock discussed his newly introduced FIRE Act, which would require the U.S. Forest Service to extinguish wildfires immediately rather than simply monitoring them under the controversial “let burn” policy.

McClintock criticized the current practice—rooted in what he calls “environmental left-wing lunacy”—that allows certain fires to smolder until they grow out of control. He cited the recent Big Red Fire near the Grand Canyon and the Tamarack Fire in the Sierra Nevada as examples where early intervention could have prevented massive destruction. In the Tamarack case, Forest Service helicopters reportedly took daily photos of the blaze for social media but never dropped water to contain it until it had already burned 70,000 acres.

Historically, the Forest Service operated under the “10 a.m. rule,” which called for putting out every fire by 10 a.m. the day after detection. McClintock argues that this approach—ended in the 1970s after new environmental regulations—was highly effective, reducing annual forest loss in California from millions of acres to just 250,000. However, in recent years, fire damage has climbed back to historic highs, with 2022 seeing four million acres lost in California alone.

Comparing unmanaged forests to neglected gardens, McClintock warned that without proactive management, forests become overgrown, disease-ridden, and prone to catastrophic fires that can take centuries to recover from. His FIRE Act seeks to restore the proven policies of the past, aiming to prevent up to 90% of large-scale wildfires.

Transcript

**Chuck Warren: **So Congressman, you have put out a bill, put out the FIRE Act, which tells the Forest Service, I'm still laughing about this, it tells the Forest Service to immediately put out fires and just not monitor them. Now our audience is gonna listen to this and think I have been taking some illicit drugs this morning because is there, how often do they just monitor fires instead of putting them out immediately?

**Congressman Tom McClintock: **Quite often called their let burn policy stems from this environmental left wing lunacy that fire is our friend of so of of and we just had the of the big red fire on the Grand Canyon that was a let burn. They knew about the fire they sat there and they watched it smolder for days and then finally exploded out of control and took out telling us fifteen thousand acres or so. I introduced this bill after the tamarack fire. When the forest service knew about a fire smoldering in rugged territory in Sierra Nevada they actually sent helicopters over every day to take pictures for their facebook page but they never bothered to drop a single bucket of water to put the thing out. On the twelfth day exploded out of control and took out seventy thousand acres of forest land. Now that's not the way the forest service used to work. They used to have what they call the informal ten a.m. rule which basically said we're gonna put out every fire we see the moment we see it when it's little and we can put it out with a single bucket drop from a helicopter we're not going to wait until it explodes out of control and requires an entire temporary city of firefighters to try to put the thing out as it destroys of thousands of homes. So that this simply gets us back to the common sense and proven policies that we used to employ before the looney left took control of these policies.

**Chuck Warren: **You know, our audience listening to this is just going to think this is like a bad Veep episode or something. I just, I can't believe that ever got through to people and think that's a good idea. When did that change? How long ago was it?

**Congressman Tom McClintock: **Well it changed in nineteen seventy uh nineteen seventies is when it changed that's what all the other environmental laws going into effect that that that utterly destroyed the environment of our forest. of all that happened in the nineteen seventies.

It actually was responsible for the massive Yellowstone fire in nineteen eighty six when Reagan was president. When Reagan found out about this lead burn policy that that had caused this massive fire in Yellowstone National Park he put an end to it immediately and went back to the ten a.m. rule.

Unfortunately two years later Ronald Reagan left office and the policy of let burn returned and it's been plaguing us ever since and that's just on top of all of the other environmental impediments to properly managing our forced environment and and the results been catastrophic we've we've lost now in last ten years a quarter fully one-fourth of our national force to catastrophic fire because of these policies.

Chuck Warren: How much do you think we could have prevented that if we did the 10 a.m. policy?

**Congressman Tom McClintock: **Oh we could’ve prevented I would say probably ninety percent of those fires. I can actually give you an actual thing. The paleontologist tell us that before we began forest management California would lose between four and twelve million acres a year to catastrophic fire. So let's let's use of the the minimum four million acres are lost every single year. Once we form the forest service and started managing our forest properly that figure dropped to a very steady two hundred and fifty thousand acres.

So before from a minimum of four million lost every year two hundred and fifty thousand lost every year to catastrophic fire but since these laws have impeded our ability to manage our forests well in twenty twenty two we saw an increase back up to four million acres of of a loss to the state of California to catastrophic fire now that is not a new normal that is the old normal returning.

That's how nature gardens and she's a lousy gardener. If you doubt that, you just leave your own garden alone for a few years and tell me what it looks like. untended forest is no different than an untended garden.

It's going to grow and grow until it chokes itself to death. And then it'll be consumed by disease, pestilence, drought, and ultimately catastrophic fire. That's how nature gardens. Nature doesn't care that it takes hundreds of years for a forest to regrow after a fire.

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