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As wildfires raged out of control all across Los Angeles, so too did unfounded rumors and misinformation about who was to blame for the devastating event. One early culprit: budget cuts.
Interestingly, this sinister narrative exploded in both left-wing and right-wing circles.
The Los Angeles Times’ billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, declared on X that “the Mayor cut LA Fire Department’s budget by $23M.” The right-wing social media account Libs of TikTok lambasted a political leadership team that “defunds the fire dept,” and Elon Musk boosted a post that lamented “LAFD underfunding.”
The left-wing outrage was just as venomous. Slow Factory, an environmental and social justice nonprofit, circulated a post on Instagram that asserted that the “LA city council defunded the fire department by $23 million while redirecting $138 million to the LAPD. Our leaders want a hollowed out police state with no social services.” People’s City Council Los Angeles, an influential activist collective, tweeted: “The mayor cut the fire department’s budget so she could give LAPD more money.”
Did Los Angeles—with its Democratic mayor, Karen Bass, and its 15-seat City Council, controlled by 14 Democrats and one independent—actually defund its Fire Department? The short answer is, not really, though the short answer also isn’t wholly accurate and the long answer is more complicated. Reports in both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times clarified that although the initial budget agreement did indeed reduce the funding allocated to the Fire Department by $23 million, the mayor was simultaneously in negotiations over a pay boost for the city’s 3,300 firefighters, which was approved in November to the tune of $53 million in additional salary. Another $58 million for equipment was approved after that.
As the L.A. Times reported: “Once those two line items were added, the fire department’s operating budget actually grew by more than 7% compared to the prior fiscal year.”
It didn’t matter that Bass hadn’t actually cut the budget; simply being open to something that looked like a budget cut was crime enough. She received a torrent of criticism for her budget-cutting predilection, in the form of combative interviews from press that she was seemingly powerless to repel. “LA Mayor Grilled on Controversial Decision to Cut LAFD Funding,” proclaims this video from Forbes Breaking News. As Politico noted, the PR kerfuffle has threatened to wipe out Bass’ surprisingly positive favorability among Angelenos.
It’s a thankless situation. With tax revenues dropping and operating costs on the rise, Los Angeles has faced a dire budgeting environment. Bass proposed an annual budget for the 2024–25 fiscal year that featured a 2 percent cut over the year prior to try to address this. The proposed cut to the LAFD was 2.7 percent. Even if that were where the story ended, it’s pretty clear at this point that the city was not $23 million away from beating back the series of blazes that have now consumed more than 40,000 acres in numerous firestorms.
Of course, Republicans famously love to campaign on budget cuts. And this is where Musk comes back in. While the billionaire partisan Republican was fanning the flames of misinformation over a Democrat’s defunding a municipal firefighting service, he was simultaneously running public relations cover for his own personal budget-cutting phantasmagoria, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
This side project has been grabbing headlines since Donald Trump’s November victory, as Musk has proclaimed that he personally, in his unelected capacity, would oversee the cutting of $2 trillion in federal spending.
But last Wednesday, as the fires raged and Musk tweeted, he took time out for a podcast appearance with former Bill Clinton adviser Mark Penn to begin walking back that pledge.
“I think we’ll try for $2 trillion. I think that’s, like, the best-case outcome,” he equivocated. “If you try for $2 trillion, you have a good shot at getting $1 trillion.”
Whether or not Musk was aware of it, his own involvement in the LAFD fiasco is proof of one very simple fact: Cutting budgets is brutally unpopular. It makes for a gigantic political liability for the electeds who engage in it. That might not matter much to Musk, who wasn’t elected to anything anyway, but it matters a lot to Trump, who will be the actual president and cares greatly what people think of him.
Proving just how imperiled his own supercut ambitions are, Musk, when asked what specifically he was hoping to cut, came up with this as an answer: “It’s a very target-rich environment. … It’s like being in a room full of targets. You can close your eyes, and you can’t miss.”
For comparison’s sake: Bass’ proposed 2 percent cut to the Fire Department, which wasn’t even actually effectuated, was such a profound political liability that it has threatened to dash her entire mandate as mayor. Musk is proposing a $2 trillion cut to an annual budget estimated in the $6 trillion to $7 trillion range, as high as 30 percent of the budget. Even at $1 trillion, we’re talking about a 15 percent cut.
Gutting spending might sound nice in theory, but what it truly means is getting rid of extremely beloved social services like Medicare, Medicare, Social Security, health care, and veterans’ benefits, which are the top expenditures beyond “defense” (functionally uncuttable) and “interest payments” (uncuttable).
The problem for Republicans gets worse from there. They also have to try to cut spending even further to offset the massive tax cuts that Trump wants, an extension of the now-expiring 2017 deal and more tax slashing that he has called for since the election. The spread of proposals to make that math work is so ugly that many in the party don’t even want to look at it with both eyes open.
And while it may be easy to call for cuts to profligate spending in the abstract, the second a disaster hits, like the fires in L.A., an outraged public, no longer served by their government, will know exactly where to place the blame. It’s the reason attacks on L.A.’s city government spread like, well, wildfire. The disasters, of course, will keep coming.
Trump understands this. It’s why he made no real effort to offset his tax cuts in his first term with equivalent spending cuts. He just ran the deficit sky-high and called it a day. Without that, he might not have been able to mount a second run at the presidency.
It’s as sure a sign as any that Musk’s DOGE will end in failure. And it brings into question what on earth some congressional Democrats are thinking, as they, like Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz, volunteer themselves for DOGE membership, legitimating a program that could only result in a massive political liability come election season. It might not make it long enough to get there. It’s very unlikely that Trump’s going to let an unelected and formally unappointed megadonor drive his political project—and, more important, his political favorability—off a cliff.
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