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When the Government Makes Wildfires Worse


Watkins

As long as humans have had fire, they have tried to bend it to their will. Native Americans set small fires for centuries to clear underbrush from forests or open up pasturelands. Later, European settlers purposely burned perimeters around their settlements to protect them from unexpected wildfires. In the late 19th century, private timberland owners organized the first groups to fight wildfires, often structured as cooperatives. In the American West, members paid dues based on acreage owned, the proceeds of which were used to protect timber stands from flames. By the turn of the 20th century, more than a dozen states had programs devoted to fighting wildfires.

But the federal government soon became entrenched as both forest owner and wildfire fighter. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt led the charge to establish the U.S. Forest Service, a quintessential Progressive Era agency that oozed with faith in centralized management. During his two terms, Roosevelt used presidential power previously granted by Congress to drastically increase the size of federal forests, setting aside tens of millions of acres. A large and lethal fire season in 1910 brought political salience to the destructive potential of wildfires, and the government stepped in. An agency publication summed up its stance at the time: “Protecting the Nation’s wildlands from fire was one of the new agency’s greatest responsibilities since, in the words of the new Forest Service, only the Federal Government can ‘give the help so urgently needed.'”

More than a century later, wildfires remain an urgent problem, and the feds’ help simply isn’t doing the job. Wildfires are getting bigger and more devastating, and muddled incentives are making a bad situation worse. The root of the problem is the idea that the federal government will show up virtually anywhere, anytime, to try to put out wildfires, regardless of the cost or effort required. Federal spending on wildfires has doubled in real terms over the past decade and grown fivefold since the late 1990s. Wildfire-related costs have consumed the majority of the Forest Service’s budget for years, prompting the common quip that the agency should be renamed the “Fire Service.” The implied federal guarantee of firefighting-no-matter-what signals to residents that it’s perfectly fine to build and live in fire-prone areas. Yet nudging more people to live in high-risk places has increased the potential for catastrophe.

Fires Are Getting Worse

For most of the 20th century, the prevailing stance of the federal government was that fires should be extinguished as aggressively and quickly as possible. It pursued this goal with lookout towers and networks of fire detectors that even included rural mail carriers. In the 1930s, the approach was embodied by the “10 a.m. rule”—the idea that all wildfires should be under control by that time the day following detection. By 1939, the Forest Service had developed units of parachuting smokejumpers to rapidly respond when fires did ignite, and by 1944, it had rolled out Smokey Bear to educate everyday Americans about fire prevention. The idea that all wildfire should be snuffed out held sway through much of the second half of the 20th century and remains a popular notion today.

But decades of demonizing fire hasn’t always helped. For various types of forests and landscapes, fire is a positive force, rejuvenating grasses and soils and keeping vegetation in check. Ponderosa pine trees need regular fire to thrive, for example. But while frequent, low-intensity fire brings ecological benefits—something well understood by countless timber owners in the Southeast who carry out controlled burns annually—a landscape that hasn’t seen fire regularly is much more likely to suffer a large and intense one once it finally comes. Decades of suppression have left many Western forests choked with dense stands of small-diameter trees, underbrush, and other growth. This has contributed to high fire risk in many places today and partially accounts for why wildfires in the West are getting worse over time.

Before 2000, wildfires generally destroyed a few hundred structures in the United States each year. From 2000 to 2010, that rose to roughly 3,000 or 4,000—a big jump. Then, in 2018, nearly 25,000 structures burned. According to insurer Munich Re, economic damage from Western wildfires has surged for several years, now totaling $10–$20 billion annually. In California, seven of the 10 most destructive fires in state history have occurred in the past five years. In 2020, fires in the West killed 47 people, destroyed 18,000 structures, cost $3.6 billion in suppression efforts, and caused $16 billion in damage. The season was notable for how much damage extended beyond California to Oregon, Colorado, and Washington.

Unfortunately, many predict the bad trends will get worse. Climate change has contributed to making many forests and other Western landscapes drier for longer. (About 40 percent of the acreage burned by wildfires since 1984 has been in forests, while the majority has been shrublands or grasslands.) Western fire seasons have lengthened by an average of 60–80 days over the last three decades. In some places, the fire “season” is no longer a season at all but a year-round concern. Insect and disease infestations have also left dead trees on millions of acres of forests, compounding the risk created by a century of striving to zealously put out every fire.

But the most fundamental reason wildfires are becoming a bigger problem is that there are now more homes and people in harm’s way. In recent decades, the area where houses meet forests and other wild vegetation has grown by one-third—and it’s not because the forests are encroaching. The footprint of such areas, which researchers call the “wildland-urban interface,” represents the fastest-growing type of land use in the contiguous United States. It now contains more than 43 million homes covering a total area larger than Texas.

The rapid growth in residential development not only puts more property and lives in fire-prone areas; it also increases the chances that new wildfires will ignite. People cause approximately eight in 10 wildfires, and human ignitions—whether from escaped campfires, burning debris, power lines, railroads, arson, or something else—threaten 30 times more homes in the wildland-urban interface than do fires caused by lightning. People are also responsible for helping to extend the wildfire season, which would be limited mainly to summer months if not for human ignitions.

Economists Dean Lueck of Indiana University and Jonathan Yoder of Washington State University have studied the evolution of wildland firefighting in the United States and note that the federal government has essentially had a “blank check” to suppress wildfires since the 1908 Forest Fires Emergency Act. They describe wildfire fighting today as a “highly structured, hierarchical, military-style” effort. The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, spearheads responses from the federal level and coordinates with state and local agencies, moving specialized firefighting crews and equipment from one active fire to the next.

“This network comprises a bewildering array of laws, policies, and contracts that create a complicated mix of incentives and outcomes,” Lueck and Yoder write. “Scholars and other commentators suggest that inefficiencies abound in the system, leading to over-investment in suppression and under-investment in pre-fire risk mitigation.”

The most egregious thing about this blank check to suppress wildfires seems to be the fruitlessness of most suppression efforts. “There is well documented evidence,” the economists write, “that fire suppression on large fires, especially when they are active, is often exceedingly ineffective.” Consider that tanker drops of fire retardant that seem to be made for cable news often have little effect on large fires. Likewise, “backfires” set purposely by firefighters to try to contain a wildfire often fail to accomplish that objective but end up destroying valuable timber or other property. Still, these tactics continue to be funded year after year. “Even when suppression of large fires may be effective,” Lueck and Yoder continue, “there are many cases in which the suppression costs far exceed the value of the protected resources.”

The biggest wildfire-related legislative action of recent years was when Congress formalized in 2018 the blank check by providing federal agencies with disaster-account funding for fires, a model akin to the one used to fund flood and hurricane responses. The reform separated disaster funding for fires from main budgets, ultimately making it simpler and easier for agencies to devote money to firefighting. Dubbed the wildfire “fix,” it did nothing to address the muddled incentives at the heart of the problem: Homeowners don’t pay for the government’s all-out efforts to put out fires and protect their lives and property; tens of millions of taxpayers do. The blank-check approach dulls people’s incentive to prepare for fires—including when it comes to choosing where to build and live.

Government Creates Noise

Prices contain information. A sky-high insurance premium to live on the edge of a Western forest, for instance, might inform you that the wooded lot is extremely risky and you should build your house elsewhere. But interference often drowns out the price message.

When the federal government spends seemingly limitless amounts to put out wildfires, it signals that it’s OK to move to riskier areas. As economists Patrick Baylis of the University of British Columbia and Judson Boomhower of the University of California San Diego point out, “the guarantee of federal government protection” from wildfires creates what’s known as a moral hazard. “Homeowners do not internalize the expected costs of future fire protection when choosing where to live or how to design and maintain their homes,” they write. “Perhaps just as importantly, local governments do not internalize these costs in zoning, land use, and building code decisions.” The economists conclude that government spending to suppress fires has created implicit subsidies, borne by the rest of us, for people who live in high-risk places.

The hazard comes from the expectation that the feds will swoop in to help out once flames are raging. Baylis and Boomhower estimate that these implicit subsidies to property owners can be more than 20 percent of a home’s value. In Montana and Idaho, they find that the subsidies exceed the total value of federal transfers to those states for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

The expectation of federal assistance also likely undermines incentives for property owners to take preventative actions. “The promise of aggressive firefighting at no cost may reduce private incentives to choose fire proof building materials and clear brush around homes, actions that can decrease the threat to homes during a wildfire,” they write. “Similarly, federally financed firefighting limits incentives for cities and states to create and enforce wildland building codes and defensible space regulations.”

Essentially, all-out federal firefighting transfers wealth from taxpayers to homeowners in risky areas. It also blunts the incentives to organize and prepare at lower levels of government—or on an individual level.

The distortions created by federal wildfire policy are similar to those created by federal flood insurance. The National Flood Insurance Program offers plans to homeowners in floodplains, hurricane alleys, and other areas prone to inundations. But legislation requires that it aim for “affordability” for premium holders rather than set premiums based on underlying risk. “Any insurance pricing structure that is not based on the risks associated with a home in a given location creates distorted incentives,” says Arizona State University economist Kerry Smith.

An implicit bailout when disaster hits makes it much easier to justify staying in a risky place. It’s how one Mississippi home in the flood program, valued at $69,000, ended up flooding 34 times in 32 years, resulting in $663,000 worth of claims. It’s little surprise that a program that makes rebuilding affordable, or even possible, in such a risky place would end up $20 billion in debt—after Congress recently wiped away $16 billion from the program’s balance sheet. To top it all off, Smith’s research suggests that in some areas it may not actually be low-income households who are benefiting from federally discounted insurance. Along the Gulf Coast, he and a coathor’s research findings “imply that in many locations we are subsidizing higher income households and not the ones envisioned by equity concerns.”

The blank check for wildfire fighting from the federal government clearly distorts incentives for homeowners. In California, policies regarding insurance markets have compounded the issues. After bad fire seasons resulting in record insurance payouts in recent years, insurers began to raise rates or even get out of the market altogether. In response, the state has sought to freeze policies and rates in what was already the most stringently regulated insurance market in the country. It is essentially encouraging people to remain or rebuild in places almost certain to burn again.

“People are used to paying, say, $1,600 a year of property cost for insurance,” Michael Young, a vice president at Risk Management Solutions told Bloomberg Businessweek last year. “But if that goes up to $4,000 or $5,000 per year, that might not be something that they’re interested in or capable of doing.” Nobody roots for their insurance premium to triple, but nobody wants their house to burn down either. And a trebling of insurance rates in fire-prone areas may be just the price signal needed to keep new residents away.

California clearly doesn’t see the situation that way. Its legislature passed a bill in 2018 that allows the state to prohibit insurance companies from canceling or refusing to renew policies for up to a year after a wildfire emergency. Regulators invoked the measure in 2019, when it covered 800,000 homes, and then renewed it in 2020, when it applied to 2.1 million homes—fully 18 percent of California’s residential insurance market. The upshot is that the premiums for homes in risky areas will be subsidized by policyholders in other areas, at least until the insurers now shouldering huge losses can withdraw from the market. Choosing to risk having your home destroyed by a wildfire is one thing. But other policyholders or even taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize you to take that risk.

By contrast, Colorado has taken a more prudent tack: allowing premiums to be adjusted to reflect different levels of fire risk. If a homeowner loses his policy because an insurer decides not to cover his area anymore, he can take risk-mitigating actions such as modifying the home or managing the trees around it and get a certification for having done so. In turn, various insurers agree to cover certified homes. Letting risk dictate the price of insurance gives property owners clear incentives to do the preventative work that reduces fire risk in the first place.

In California, rather than allowing the insurance market to continue to innovate, develop new wildfire models that are more precise, and price risk more accurately, regulators seem hellbent on making sure insurance prices will be based on anything except for underlying risk. But whether the disaster threat is flood or fire, the last thing policy makers should be doing is allowing people to disregard risk on other people’s dime.

A Better Response

Even if California’s insurance markets were allowed to function based on risk, the federal approach to suppressing wildfires—and implicitly subsidizing risky homebuilding—would remain.

Lueck and Yoder have pointed to two reforms that could help. One is to let more fires burn more widely, especially where few structures are at risk, and concentrate resources on protecting life and property. Until the 20th century, the approach to fighting wildfires was usually not to fight at all—a “let it burn” stance. Even today, fires covering many millions of acres are generally allowed to burn out in parts of Alaska every year.

A much more targeted approach to suppression makes economic sense. Not every acre is equally valuable, and not every acre burned is equally damaging. Here, the private sector is already helping. Wildfire Defense Systems is an example of a business that’s concerned not so much with acreage burned—as federal efforts to fight fires often are—as with structures protected. Working for insurers, it preemptively evaluates policyholders’ fire risk and advises actions to mitigate it. It also responds to active fires with equipment like water tankers or fire retardant to protect homes of covered policyholders. For nearly a decade, the company, which now serves 20 states, has been honing its system to judge a property’s fire risk based on vegetation, topography, climate, history, and various other factors. Of course, these sorts of efforts depend on insurers being able to charge rates that at least keep them in business.

The second reform would be to set federal wildfire funding at a base level, and then let agencies “bank” unspent funds from one year to the next. If that were the case, total public spending devoted to fires might actually go down, and the demand for services from private pioneers like Wildfire Defense Systems might go up—meaning homeowners and insurers rather than far-flung taxpayers would foot more of the bill for wildfire risk. That would, in turn, give property owners more incentive to use fire-resistant designs and materials and to prepare their homes and environs for fires by doing things like spacing trees appropriately, enclosing eaves, and screening vents.

Beyond the home, various actions could be taken in forests to try to reverse the current state of overinvestment in suppression and underinvestment in prevention. The idea would be to reduce ignition risk and limit the intensity of wildfires when they do break out. Prescribed burns and selective harvesting are two ways to reduce property damage and suppression costs from wildfire. Both aim to reduce the amount of fuel available to a potential fire—either by preemptively burning it or removing it mechanically. But there’s often a great deal of political and environmental opposition to such efforts, and when they do get off the ground, bureaucratic and legal obstacles often limit their scope.

Still, wildfires have become so salient that Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.) and Steve Daines (R–Mont.) have been willing to reach across the aisle to argue that much more needs to be done to proactively manage forests. The two legislators have co-sponsored a bill to speed up efforts to decrease fire risk with measures like prescribed burns and mechanical thinning. Such projects are often delayed or derailed by environmental reviews, which take an average of nearly three years to prepare for large-scale forest projects—meanwhile, wildfires do not wait for paperwork to get done. The senators’ legislation aims to streamline such requirements for certain projects, as well as cut through some of the additional red tape that the Endangered Species Act can impose.

If bureaucratic obstacles can be flattened, then communities will be better positioned to invest in forest management themselves. One path to do that is through forest resilience bonds, a financial tool piloted by the Blue Forest Conservation nonprofit in 2018. The effort raised $4 million in private capital from insurance groups, private foundations, and other investors to restore 15,000 acres in Tahoe National Forest through activities like thinning trees, carrying out prescribed burns, and clearing brush. A local water utility and the state of California, both of which will ultimately benefit from reduced fire risk in the project area, will repay the bond. The Forest Service had projected the work to take a decade or more, but the upfront financing and novel partnership has accelerated the timeline to just four years. This model could even conceivably be applied to residential communities and insurers who seek to decrease fire risk.

Today, government wildfire policy often seems to promise the wrong kind of help, given how much of the spending aimed at putting out large fires is ineffective. Even if there’s been little appetite to reform the blank check approach to fighting wildfires, various private actors are taking matters into their own hands, from companies providing insurers with sophisticated risk models, to financial innovators decreasing the likelihood of catastrophic fires breaking out in forests, to individual residents deciding to make their homes more firewise. Still, nudging people to dismiss risk by making it cheaper and easier for them to live in fire-prone areas helps no one—least of all those in harm’s way.

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When the Government Makes Wildfires Worse


Watkins

As long as humans have had fire, they have tried to bend it to their will. Native Americans set small fires for centuries to clear underbrush from forests or open up pasturelands. Later, European settlers purposely burned perimeters around their settlements to protect them from unexpected wildfires. In the late 19th century, private timberland owners organized the first groups to fight wildfires, often structured as cooperatives. In the American West, members paid dues based on acreage owned, the proceeds of which were used to protect timber stands from flames. By the turn of the 20th century, more than a dozen states had programs devoted to fighting wildfires.

But the federal government soon became entrenched as both forest owner and wildfire fighter. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt led the charge to establish the U.S. Forest Service, a quintessential Progressive Era agency that oozed with faith in centralized management. During his two terms, Roosevelt used presidential power previously granted by Congress to drastically increase the size of federal forests, setting aside tens of millions of acres. A large and lethal fire season in 1910 brought political salience to the destructive potential of wildfires, and the government stepped in. An agency publication summed up its stance at the time: “Protecting the Nation’s wildlands from fire was one of the new agency’s greatest responsibilities since, in the words of the new Forest Service, only the Federal Government can ‘give the help so urgently needed.'”

More than a century later, wildfires remain an urgent problem, and the feds’ help simply isn’t doing the job. Wildfires are getting bigger and more devastating, and muddled incentives are making a bad situation worse. The root of the problem is the idea that the federal government will show up virtually anywhere, anytime, to try to put out wildfires, regardless of the cost or effort required. Federal spending on wildfires has doubled in real terms over the past decade and grown fivefold since the late 1990s. Wildfire-related costs have consumed the majority of the Forest Service’s budget for years, prompting the common quip that the agency should be renamed the “Fire Service.” The implied federal guarantee of firefighting-no-matter-what signals to residents that it’s perfectly fine to build and live in fire-prone areas. Yet nudging more people to live in high-risk places has increased the potential for catastrophe.

Fires Are Getting Worse

For most of the 20th century, the prevailing stance of the federal government was that fires should be extinguished as aggressively and quickly as possible. It pursued this goal with lookout towers and networks of fire detectors that even included rural mail carriers. In the 1930s, the approach was embodied by the “10 a.m. rule”—the idea that all wildfires should be under control by that time the day following detection. By 1939, the Forest Service had developed units of parachuting smokejumpers to rapidly respond when fires did ignite, and by 1944, it had rolled out Smokey Bear to educate everyday Americans about fire prevention. The idea that all wildfire should be snuffed out held sway through much of the second half of the 20th century and remains a popular notion today.

But decades of demonizing fire hasn’t always helped. For various types of forests and landscapes, fire is a positive force, rejuvenating grasses and soils and keeping vegetation in check. Ponderosa pine trees need regular fire to thrive, for example. But while frequent, low-intensity fire brings ecological benefits—something well understood by countless timber owners in the Southeast who carry out controlled burns annually—a landscape that hasn’t seen fire regularly is much more likely to suffer a large and intense one once it finally comes. Decades of suppression have left many Western forests choked with dense stands of small-diameter trees, underbrush, and other growth. This has contributed to high fire risk in many places today and partially accounts for why wildfires in the West are getting worse over time.

Before 2000, wildfires generally destroyed a few hundred structures in the United States each year. From 2000 to 2010, that rose to roughly 3,000 or 4,000—a big jump. Then, in 2018, nearly 25,000 structures burned. According to insurer Munich Re, economic damage from Western wildfires has surged for several years, now totaling $10–$20 billion annually. In California, seven of the 10 most destructive fires in state history have occurred in the past five years. In 2020, fires in the West killed 47 people, destroyed 18,000 structures, cost $3.6 billion in suppression efforts, and caused $16 billion in damage. The season was notable for how much damage extended beyond California to Oregon, Colorado, and Washington.

Unfortunately, many predict the bad trends will get worse. Climate change has contributed to making many forests and other Western landscapes drier for longer. (About 40 percent of the acreage burned by wildfires since 1984 has been in forests, while the majority has been shrublands or grasslands.) Western fire seasons have lengthened by an average of 60–80 days over the last three decades. In some places, the fire “season” is no longer a season at all but a year-round concern. Insect and disease infestations have also left dead trees on millions of acres of forests, compounding the risk created by a century of striving to zealously put out every fire.

But the most fundamental reason wildfires are becoming a bigger problem is that there are now more homes and people in harm’s way. In recent decades, the area where houses meet forests and other wild vegetation has grown by one-third—and it’s not because the forests are encroaching. The footprint of such areas, which researchers call the “wildland-urban interface,” represents the fastest-growing type of land use in the contiguous United States. It now contains more than 43 million homes covering a total area larger than Texas.

The rapid growth in residential development not only puts more property and lives in fire-prone areas; it also increases the chances that new wildfires will ignite. People cause approximately eight in 10 wildfires, and human ignitions—whether from escaped campfires, burning debris, power lines, railroads, arson, or something else—threaten 30 times more homes in the wildland-urban interface than do fires caused by lightning. People are also responsible for helping to extend the wildfire season, which would be limited mainly to summer months if not for human ignitions.

Economists Dean Lueck of Indiana University and Jonathan Yoder of Washington State University have studied the evolution of wildland firefighting in the United States and note that the federal government has essentially had a “blank check” to suppress wildfires since the 1908 Forest Fires Emergency Act. They describe wildfire fighting today as a “highly structured, hierarchical, military-style” effort. The National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho, spearheads responses from the federal level and coordinates with state and local agencies, moving specialized firefighting crews and equipment from one active fire to the next.

“This network comprises a bewildering array of laws, policies, and contracts that create a complicated mix of incentives and outcomes,” Lueck and Yoder write. “Scholars and other commentators suggest that inefficiencies abound in the system, leading to over-investment in suppression and under-investment in pre-fire risk mitigation.”

The most egregious thing about this blank check to suppress wildfires seems to be the fruitlessness of most suppression efforts. “There is well documented evidence,” the economists write, “that fire suppression on large fires, especially when they are active, is often exceedingly ineffective.” Consider that tanker drops of fire retardant that seem to be made for cable news often have little effect on large fires. Likewise, “backfires” set purposely by firefighters to try to contain a wildfire often fail to accomplish that objective but end up destroying valuable timber or other property. Still, these tactics continue to be funded year after year. “Even when suppression of large fires may be effective,” Lueck and Yoder continue, “there are many cases in which the suppression costs far exceed the value of the protected resources.”

The biggest wildfire-related legislative action of recent years was when Congress formalized in 2018 the blank check by providing federal agencies with disaster-account funding for fires, a model akin to the one used to fund flood and hurricane responses. The reform separated disaster funding for fires from main budgets, ultimately making it simpler and easier for agencies to devote money to firefighting. Dubbed the wildfire “fix,” it did nothing to address the muddled incentives at the heart of the problem: Homeowners don’t pay for the government’s all-out efforts to put out fires and protect their lives and property; tens of millions of taxpayers do. The blank-check approach dulls people’s incentive to prepare for fires—including when it comes to choosing where to build and live.

Government Creates Noise

Prices contain information. A sky-high insurance premium to live on the edge of a Western forest, for instance, might inform you that the wooded lot is extremely risky and you should build your house elsewhere. But interference often drowns out the price message.

When the federal government spends seemingly limitless amounts to put out wildfires, it signals that it’s OK to move to riskier areas. As economists Patrick Baylis of the University of British Columbia and Judson Boomhower of the University of California San Diego point out, “the guarantee of federal government protection” from wildfires creates what’s known as a moral hazard. “Homeowners do not internalize the expected costs of future fire protection when choosing where to live or how to design and maintain their homes,” they write. “Perhaps just as importantly, local governments do not internalize these costs in zoning, land use, and building code decisions.” The economists conclude that government spending to suppress fires has created implicit subsidies, borne by the rest of us, for people who live in high-risk places.

The hazard comes from the expectation that the feds will swoop in to help out once flames are raging. Baylis and Boomhower estimate that these implicit subsidies to property owners can be more than 20 percent of a home’s value. In Montana and Idaho, they find that the subsidies exceed the total value of federal transfers to those states for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

The expectation of federal assistance also likely undermines incentives for property owners to take preventative actions. “The promise of aggressive firefighting at no cost may reduce private incentives to choose fire proof building materials and clear brush around homes, actions that can decrease the threat to homes during a wildfire,” they write. “Similarly, federally financed firefighting limits incentives for cities and states to create and enforce wildland building codes and defensible space regulations.”

Essentially, all-out federal firefighting transfers wealth from taxpayers to homeowners in risky areas. It also blunts the incentives to organize and prepare at lower levels of government—or on an individual level.

The distortions created by federal wildfire policy are similar to those created by federal flood insurance. The National Flood Insurance Program offers plans to homeowners in floodplains, hurricane alleys, and other areas prone to inundations. But legislation requires that it aim for “affordability” for premium holders rather than set premiums based on underlying risk. “Any insurance pricing structure that is not based on the risks associated with a home in a given location creates distorted incentives,” says Arizona State University economist Kerry Smith.

An implicit bailout when disaster hits makes it much easier to justify staying in a risky place. It’s how one Mississippi home in the flood program, valued at $69,000, ended up flooding 34 times in 32 years, resulting in $663,000 worth of claims. It’s little surprise that a program that makes rebuilding affordable, or even possible, in such a risky place would end up $20 billion in debt—after Congress recently wiped away $16 billion from the program’s balance sheet. To top it all off, Smith’s research suggests that in some areas it may not actually be low-income households who are benefiting from federally discounted insurance. Along the Gulf Coast, he and a coathor’s research findings “imply that in many locations we are subsidizing higher income households and not the ones envisioned by equity concerns.”

The blank check for wildfire fighting from the federal government clearly distorts incentives for homeowners. In California, policies regarding insurance markets have compounded the issues. After bad fire seasons resulting in record insurance payouts in recent years, insurers began to raise rates or even get out of the market altogether. In response, the state has sought to freeze policies and rates in what was already the most stringently regulated insurance market in the country. It is essentially encouraging people to remain or rebuild in places almost certain to burn again.

“People are used to paying, say, $1,600 a year of property cost for insurance,” Michael Young, a vice president at Risk Management Solutions told Bloomberg Businessweek last year. “But if that goes up to $4,000 or $5,000 per year, that might not be something that they’re interested in or capable of doing.” Nobody roots for their insurance premium to triple, but nobody wants their house to burn down either. And a trebling of insurance rates in fire-prone areas may be just the price signal needed to keep new residents away.

California clearly doesn’t see the situation that way. Its legislature passed a bill in 2018 that allows the state to prohibit insurance companies from canceling or refusing to renew policies for up to a year after a wildfire emergency. Regulators invoked the measure in 2019, when it covered 800,000 homes, and then renewed it in 2020, when it applied to 2.1 million homes—fully 18 percent of California’s residential insurance market. The upshot is that the premiums for homes in risky areas will be subsidized by policyholders in other areas, at least until the insurers now shouldering huge losses can withdraw from the market. Choosing to risk having your home destroyed by a wildfire is one thing. But other policyholders or even taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to subsidize you to take that risk.

By contrast, Colorado has taken a more prudent tack: allowing premiums to be adjusted to reflect different levels of fire risk. If a homeowner loses his policy because an insurer decides not to cover his area anymore, he can take risk-mitigating actions such as modifying the home or managing the trees around it and get a certification for having done so. In turn, various insurers agree to cover certified homes. Letting risk dictate the price of insurance gives property owners clear incentives to do the preventative work that reduces fire risk in the first place.

In California, rather than allowing the insurance market to continue to innovate, develop new wildfire models that are more precise, and price risk more accurately, regulators seem hellbent on making sure insurance prices will be based on anything except for underlying risk. But whether the disaster threat is flood or fire, the last thing policy makers should be doing is allowing people to disregard risk on other people’s dime.

A Better Response

Even if California’s insurance markets were allowed to function based on risk, the federal approach to suppressing wildfires—and implicitly subsidizing risky homebuilding—would remain.

Lueck and Yoder have pointed to two reforms that could help. One is to let more fires burn more widely, especially where few structures are at risk, and concentrate resources on protecting life and property. Until the 20th century, the approach to fighting wildfires was usually not to fight at all—a “let it burn” stance. Even today, fires covering many millions of acres are generally allowed to burn out in parts of Alaska every year.

A much more targeted approach to suppression makes economic sense. Not every acre is equally valuable, and not every acre burned is equally damaging. Here, the private sector is already helping. Wildfire Defense Systems is an example of a business that’s concerned not so much with acreage burned—as federal efforts to fight fires often are—as with structures protected. Working for insurers, it preemptively evaluates policyholders’ fire risk and advises actions to mitigate it. It also responds to active fires with equipment like water tankers or fire retardant to protect homes of covered policyholders. For nearly a decade, the company, which now serves 20 states, has been honing its system to judge a property’s fire risk based on vegetation, topography, climate, history, and various other factors. Of course, these sorts of efforts depend on insurers being able to charge rates that at least keep them in business.

The second reform would be to set federal wildfire funding at a base level, and then let agencies “bank” unspent funds from one year to the next. If that were the case, total public spending devoted to fires might actually go down, and the demand for services from private pioneers like Wildfire Defense Systems might go up—meaning homeowners and insurers rather than far-flung taxpayers would foot more of the bill for wildfire risk. That would, in turn, give property owners more incentive to use fire-resistant designs and materials and to prepare their homes and environs for fires by doing things like spacing trees appropriately, enclosing eaves, and screening vents.

Beyond the home, various actions could be taken in forests to try to reverse the current state of overinvestment in suppression and underinvestment in prevention. The idea would be to reduce ignition risk and limit the intensity of wildfires when they do break out. Prescribed burns and selective harvesting are two ways to reduce property damage and suppression costs from wildfire. Both aim to reduce the amount of fuel available to a potential fire—either by preemptively burning it or removing it mechanically. But there’s often a great deal of political and environmental opposition to such efforts, and when they do get off the ground, bureaucratic and legal obstacles often limit their scope.

Still, wildfires have become so salient that Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.) and Steve Daines (R–Mont.) have been willing to reach across the aisle to argue that much more needs to be done to proactively manage forests. The two legislators have co-sponsored a bill to speed up efforts to decrease fire risk with measures like prescribed burns and mechanical thinning. Such projects are often delayed or derailed by environmental reviews, which take an average of nearly three years to prepare for large-scale forest projects—meanwhile, wildfires do not wait for paperwork to get done. The senators’ legislation aims to streamline such requirements for certain projects, as well as cut through some of the additional red tape that the Endangered Species Act can impose.

If bureaucratic obstacles can be flattened, then communities will be better positioned to invest in forest management themselves. One path to do that is through forest resilience bonds, a financial tool piloted by the Blue Forest Conservation nonprofit in 2018. The effort raised $4 million in private capital from insurance groups, private foundations, and other investors to restore 15,000 acres in Tahoe National Forest through activities like thinning trees, carrying out prescribed burns, and clearing brush. A local water utility and the state of California, both of which will ultimately benefit from reduced fire risk in the project area, will repay the bond. The Forest Service had projected the work to take a decade or more, but the upfront financing and novel partnership has accelerated the timeline to just four years. This model could even conceivably be applied to residential communities and insurers who seek to decrease fire risk.

Today, government wildfire policy often seems to promise the wrong kind of help, given how much of the spending aimed at putting out large fires is ineffective. Even if there’s been little appetite to reform the blank check approach to fighting wildfires, various private actors are taking matters into their own hands, from companies providing insurers with sophisticated risk models, to financial innovators decreasing the likelihood of catastrophic fires breaking out in forests, to individual residents deciding to make their homes more firewise. Still, nudging people to dismiss risk by making it cheaper and easier for them to live in fire-prone areas helps no one—least of all those in harm’s way.

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The CDC’s Ever-Shifting COVID-19 Advice Shows the Agency Is Ill-Suited To Decide Which Risks Are Acceptable


Rochelle-Walensky-5-13-21-Newscom

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which initially said there was no need for most Americans to wear face masks as a safeguard against COVID-19, reversed that position a little more than a year ago. Beginning in April 2020, the CDC said face masks were an essential disease control tool, even for people who have been vaccinated. Yesterday the CDC modified its advice again, saying fully vaccinated Americans generally do not need to wear masks outdoors or indoors, except when required to do so by businesses or the government.

At each turn, the CDC has said its recommendations were informed by the latest scientific evidence. While there is some truth to that claim, it is clear that other, nonscientific factors have played a role in the CDC’s shifting attitude toward face coverings as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The history of that evolution provides ample reason to be skeptical of both the CDC’s specific recommendations and the expectation that all Americans should conform to its notion of safety.

‘You Do Not Need to Wear a Facemask’

As late as April 3, 2020—more than two months after the first confirmed COVID-19 case in the United States, when the country was recording more than 26,000 new infections and nearly 1,000 deaths a day—the CDC was telling Americans to “wear a facemask if you are sick.” But “if you are NOT sick,” it said, “you do not need to wear a facemask unless you are caring for someone who is sick (and they are not able to wear a facemask).” It added that “facemasks may be in short supply and they should be saved for caregivers.”

The CDC changed its advice the next day, saying “everyone should wear a cloth face cover when they have to go out in public,” because “you could spread COVID-19 to others even if you do not feel sick.” It said “the cloth face cover is meant to protect other people in case you are infected.” But it added that people should “NOT use a facemask meant for a healthcare worker,” meaning surgical masks and N95 respirators. The most effective face coverings, in other words, were still reserved for medical professionals.

“Here’s what’s changed,” then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams claimed on Meet the Press. “We now know that about 25 percent, in some studies even more, of COVID-19 is transmitted when you are asymptomatic or presymptomatic.” That estimate actually referred to the percentage of people infected by the COVID-19 virus who never develop symptoms. Then–CDC Director Robert Redfield began citing that number (which was somewhat lower than the CDC’s current “best estimate” of 30 percent) on March 31, 2020. But it had been clear at least since February that people could carry the virus for days before they developed symptoms and that some carriers never felt ill.

A study published in February 2020, based on 88 cases in Wuhan, China, estimated that the mean incubation period for COVID-19 was 6.4 days. Another study published the same month, based on “publicly available event-date data from the ongoing epidemic,” put the incubation period at two to 14 days with a mean of about five days. Based on those findings, the researchers recommended that “the length of quarantine should be at least 14 days.” A March 10 study, based on 181 cases, essentially confirmed those results, estimating a mean incubation period of five days and finding that “97.5% of those who develop symptoms will do so within 11.5 days.”

A January 30 letter to The New England Journal of Medicine, based on several cases in Germany, warned that “asymptomatic persons are potential sources of [COVID-19] infection.” A February 13 letter to the International Journal of Infectious Diseases estimated that 31 percent of people infected by the COVID-19 virus did not have symptoms. A research letter published in The Journal of the American Medical Association on February 21 described an asymptomatic carrier from Wuhan who seemed to have infected four other people. A February 26 Global Biosecurity report noted that “asymptomatic transmission has been documented” and “the viral load in symptomatic and asymptomatic people is not significantly different.”

A report from the World Health Organization published around the same time nevertheless depicted asymptomatic infection as rare. While “asymptomatic infection has been reported,” it said, “the majority of the relatively rare cases who are asymptomatic on the date of identification/report went on to develop disease.”

When it came to wearing face masks in public to protect others from infection, however, it did not really matter whether carriers were asymptomatic or presymptomatic. The point was that people could transmit the virus without realizing they were carriers. Given the incubation period, that phenomenon had to be common.

‘the most important, powerful public health tool we have’

It seems clear that the CDC conflated two issues: 1) whether wearing face masks in public places was a sensible safeguard, and 2) whether there were enough commercially produced masks to supply the general public as well as medical workers.

“Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS!” Adams had tweeted on February 29. “They are NOT effective in preventing [the] general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” In other words, Adams wanted the public to believe the same masks on which health care workers relied somehow stopped working when worn by ordinary Americans.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, likewise questioned the effectiveness of general mask wearing while simultaneously saying that masks should be reserved for health care workers. “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” he said during a March 8, 2020, interview with 60 Minutes. “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet. But it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often, there are unintended consequences. People keep fiddling with the mask, and they keep touching their face…When you think ‘masks,’ you should think of health care providers needing them.”

Fauci, like the CDC, was soon singing a different tune. “There should be universal wearing of masks,” he told ABC News in August. “If you look at the scientific data, the masks clearly work,” he told CNN the following month.

Around the same time, Redfield claimed that face masks provided better protection than vaccination would. “These face masks are the most important, powerful public health tool we have,” he told a Senate subcommittee while holding a cloth mask. “I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine.”

Redfield really should not have gone that far. Although it was not yet clear how remarkably effective COVID-19 vaccines would prove to be, his logic was plainly fallacious even then. He imagined that a vaccine might provoke an immune response in 70 percent of the people who received it. “If I don’t get an immune response, the vaccine is not going to protect me,” he said. “This face mask will.” But face masks, like vaccines, are not 100 percent effective, and there was no reason to think they would provide better protection than vaccination.

‘IT FEELS LIKE A HUGE SHIFT’

Even after clinical trials and follow-up research showed that vaccines not only prevented serious disease and death but also nearly eliminated the risk of asymptomatic infection, the CDC took a suspenders-and-a-belt approach. In early March 2021, the CDC allowed that “fully vaccinated people” could “visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing.” They could even “visit with unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk for severe COVID-19 disease indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing.” But the CDC said they should still “avoid medium- and large-sized in-person gatherings”; “take precautions in public like wearing a well-fitted mask and physical distancing”; “wear masks, maintain physical distance, and practice other prevention measures when visiting with unvaccinated people from multiple households”; and do likewise “when visiting with unvaccinated people who are at increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease or who have an unvaccinated household member who is at increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease.”

The CDC loosened up a bit in late April, saying fully vaccinated people “can gather or conduct activities outdoors without wearing a mask except in certain crowded settings and venues.” But it still was recommending masks for vaccinated people in many situations, including “indoor public settings,” private gatherings “with unvaccinated people (including children) from more than one other household,” and visits with “an unvaccinated person who is at increased risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19 or who lives with a person at increased risk.” It also advised vaccinated people to “avoid large indoor gatherings.”

As of yesterday, however, the CDC is saying “fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance.” What changed in the last two and a half weeks?

“It was not entirely clear what prompted the new guidance on Thursday,” The New York Times notes. “It feels like a huge shift, and I’m not going to follow it,” John Swartzberg, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Times. “Each individual should look at what the CDC is recommending and see if that fits for them.” Swartzberg said “this shows tremendous confidence in how well the vaccines work” but added, “The CDC does have data to support this decision. It’s not like they’re operating on the fly.”

Did the CDC acquire those data since April 27, the last time it updated its advice? During a press briefing yesterday, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky cited data from Israel that were available months ago. She also mentioned a study published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on April 2 and another in the same journal that was originally published on April 28. The CDC surely was aware of the results reported in the latter study earlier than that.

Walensky added that other studies have shown that the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are effective against “variants like B1351.” Those include two studies of the Pfizer vaccine “published just last week”—one in The Lancet, the other in The New England Journal of Medicine. “Previous research suggested that B.1.1.7 is more infectious and more deadly than other variants, but that vaccines still worked well against it,” The New York Times noted. “But vaccines appeared to be less effective against B.1.351, according to earlier studies.”

‘Why do we have to wear masks?’

Maybe those two studies provided the crucial pieces of evidence that made the CDC comfortable with relaxing its recommendations for vaccinated people. But it is likely that other factors also played a role.

The CDC seems to have recognized that expecting people to continue living constrained lives even after they get their shots reduces the incentive to get vaccinated, especially among Americans who are at low risk from COVID-19. More generally, the CDC’s excessive conservatism makes Americans less likely to take any of its advice seriously. As Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine) noted during Walensky’s Senate testimony this week, “It undermines public confidence in your recommendations, in the recommendations that do make sense, in the recommendations that Americans should be following.”

Walensky recently has received a lot of criticism for grossly exaggerating the risk of outdoor COVID-19 transmission and for taking an absurdly cautious approach to the relaxation of COVID-19 control measures, epitomized by the CDC’s ridiculous, unworkable guidelines for summer camps, which epidemiologists and infectious disease experts criticized as “cruel,” “irrational,” and “unfairly draconian.” An exchange during a CNBC interview on Wednesday highlighted the growing impatience with the CDC’s unreasonable conservatism.

“Everybody in my work group is wearing a mask,” Shepard Smith told Walensky. “Everyone. Why do we have to? We’re all vaccinated. Why do we have to wear masks?”

Walensky could have responded by noting that the most recent CDC guidance actually allowed Smith and his colleagues to take off their masks, as long as no unvaccinated people were around. Instead she said this:

We have to look at the science with regard to how the vaccine has worked in the real-world setting….We were looking for signs to ensure that the vaccine works just as well in the real world setting as it did in the trials. We need to ensure that the vaccines are working against all of the circulating variants that we have here in the United States. We’re following that carefully. And then we need to make sure that you’re not an asymptomatic carrier, if in fact you’re vaccinated. So all of that science is emerging, that’s what we’re following and we will use to update our guidance.

Walensky added that “we are looking forward to updating our guidance very soon”—the very next day, in fact. It would be unfair to conclude that emerging science played no role in that decision, at least with respect to the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19 variants. But it likewise would be a mistake to pretend that the CDC’s recommendations are purely a matter of science.

As Swartzberg suggested when he said “each individual should look at what the CDC is recommending and see if that fits for them,” deciding what COVID-19 safeguards make sense requires value judgments. People have to weigh whether the tiny, possibly nonexistent risks that worry the CDC are worth the cost of forgoing enjoyable activities and the burden of masking and physical distancing. Public health bureaucrats do not have the information necessary to make that assessment, which depends on individual circumstances and preferences.

Most Americans are not as cautious as Swartzberg—or the epidemiologists recently surveyed by the Times, 80 percent of whom thought everyone should continue wearing masks in public for another year. The more the CDC insists that everyone should adopt its view of acceptable risk, the more Americans will rightly ignore its advice.

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Republicans and Democrats Endorse Concept, but Gloss Over Details, of Funding Infrastructure With User Fees


reason-highway3

Republicans and Democrats are eager to pass some sort of infrastructure bill. They also might be converging on a means of paying for it.

On Thursday, Axios reported that several prominent Democrats have endorsed the idea of increasing user fees to help pay for any new infrastructure spending. “User fees have to be part of the mix,” Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.) told the publication.

Warner’s comments match those of Sen. Tom Carper (D–Del.), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (which handles most infrastructure issues), who said at a Brookings Institution event in April that “things that are worth having are worth paying for and those that use roads, highways, and bridges have an obligation to help pay for them.”

User fees—like tolls to pay for highways and public transit fares—have been a mainstay of Republicans’ infrastructure proposals. A $536 billion spending plan released by GOP Sens. Pat Toomey (R–Penn.), Roger Wicker (R–Miss.), John Barrasso (R–Wyo.), and Shelley Moore Capito (R–W. Va.) in April calls for collecting user fees on electric vehicles and redirecting already-approved federal spending.

Axios reports that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D–Ariz.) has also endorsed the idea of user fees.

Support for the concept of user fee–funded infrastructure is far from universal, however.

President Joe Biden, in keeping with his pledge to not raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year, has rejected the idea of paying for his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan with user fees, including a federal gas tax hike. He’s instead proposing a corporate tax hike—something Republicans’ infrastructure proposal explicitly rejects.

Progressive Democrats also don’t like the idea, which they say falls too heavily on the poor and middle class.

“Republicans’ insistence that middle-class families and local communities foot the bill for everything from roads to water to broadband, while mega-corporations not pay a penny more in taxes isn’t acceptable,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) in an April response to the GOP’s infrastructure bill.

Even if there were a consensus of making motorists and transit riders pay for the infrastructure they use, there are still the knock-on questions of what types of user fees might be applied and how much infrastructure they’d actually buy.

The simplest policy to implement under the user fee umbrella would be a federal gas tax hike. It’s also the most politically fraught.

Biden has rejected it explicitly, as has Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W. Va.). His fellow West Virginia senator, Capito, has also said no to a gas tax increase. Instead, she’s floated charging drivers a mileage-based fee, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The Biden administration has thrown cold water on that idea, however. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, while agreeing the idea has “a lot of promise,” said in a March CNN interview that it wouldn’t be part of Biden’s plan.

Several states, including Washington, Oregon, and California, are experimenting with mileage fee pilot programs. There are nevertheless a lot of practical problems with trying to implement it at the federal level.

“A mileage-based user fee is not ready for prime time,” says Baruch Feigenbaum, a transportation expert at Reason Foundation (the foundation that publishes Reason). We’re still years away from a federal mileage fee being feasible, he says, meaning that it can’t be used to fund any short-term infrastructure plans

Republicans’ other idea to impose a user fee on electric vehicles “is not going to raise that much money because there’s just not that many electric vehicles,” Feigenbaum says. “Right now, Republicans don’t have enough of a pay-for.”

The Journal reported yesterday that Biden has asked GOP senators to flesh out more ideas for funding an infrastructure proposal, meaning we could see more details on particular pay-fors soon.

Hanging over this entire debate is whether Congress will try to pass a stand-alone additional infrastructure bill like the one Biden has proposed, or instead incorporate some of those ideas into a reauthorization of existing surface transportation programs (including highway and public transportation spending) that are set to expire at the end of September.

The must-pass nature of a surface transportation bill could be a way to round up bipartisan political support for any proposal. The fact that it can’t be passed by reconciliation and would thus need a full 60 votes in the Senate would also mean Biden couldn’t use it as a vehicle to pass his most ambitious proposals.

One possibility would be for Biden to get as much of the traditional infrastructure parts of his American Jobs Plan put in a surface transportation bill, and then pursue stand-alone passage of his other proposals like funding nursing homes and affordable housing.

Expect much more political wrangling to come.

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The CDC’s Ever-Shifting COVID-19 Advice Shows the Agency Is Ill-Suited To Decide Which Risks Are Acceptable


Rochelle-Walensky-5-13-21-Newscom

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which initially said there was no need for most Americans to wear face masks as a safeguard against COVID-19, reversed that position a little more than a year ago. Beginning in April 2020, the CDC said face masks were an essential disease control tool, even for people who have been vaccinated. Yesterday the CDC modified its advice again, saying fully vaccinated Americans generally do not need to wear masks outdoors or indoors, except when required to do so by businesses or the government.

At each turn, the CDC has said its recommendations were informed by the latest scientific evidence. While there is some truth to that claim, it is clear that other, nonscientific factors have played a role in the CDC’s shifting attitude toward face coverings as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The history of that evolution provides ample reason to be skeptical of both the CDC’s specific recommendations and the expectation that all Americans should conform to its notion of safety.

‘You Do Not Need to Wear a Facemask’

As late as April 3, 2020—more than two months after the first confirmed COVID-19 case in the United States, when the country was recording more than 26,000 new infections and nearly 1,000 deaths a day—the CDC was telling Americans to “wear a facemask if you are sick.” But “if you are NOT sick,” it said, “you do not need to wear a facemask unless you are caring for someone who is sick (and they are not able to wear a facemask).” It added that “facemasks may be in short supply and they should be saved for caregivers.”

The CDC changed its advice the next day, saying “everyone should wear a cloth face cover when they have to go out in public,” because “you could spread COVID-19 to others even if you do not feel sick.” It said “the cloth face cover is meant to protect other people in case you are infected.” But it added that people should “NOT use a facemask meant for a healthcare worker,” meaning surgical masks and N95 respirators. The most effective face coverings, in other words, were still reserved for medical professionals.

“Here’s what’s changed,” then-Surgeon General Jerome Adams claimed on Meet the Press. “We now know that about 25 percent, in some studies even more, of COVID-19 is transmitted when you are asymptomatic or presymptomatic.” That estimate actually referred to the percentage of people infected by the COVID-19 virus who never develop symptoms. Then–CDC Director Robert Redfield began citing that number (which was somewhat lower than the CDC’s current “best estimate” of 30 percent) on March 31, 2020. But it had been clear at least since February that people could carry the virus for days before they developed symptoms and that some carriers never felt ill.

A study published in February 2020, based on 88 cases in Wuhan, China, estimated that the mean incubation period for COVID-19 was 6.4 days. Another study published the same month, based on “publicly available event-date data from the ongoing epidemic,” put the incubation period at two to 14 days with a mean of about five days. Based on those findings, the researchers recommended that “the length of quarantine should be at least 14 days.” A March 10 study, based on 181 cases, essentially confirmed those results, estimating a mean incubation period of five days and finding that “97.5% of those who develop symptoms will do so within 11.5 days.”

A January 30 letter to The New England Journal of Medicine, based on several cases in Germany, warned that “asymptomatic persons are potential sources of [COVID-19] infection.” A February 13 letter to the International Journal of Infectious Diseases estimated that 31 percent of people infected by the COVID-19 virus did not have symptoms. A research letter published in The Journal of the American Medical Association on February 21 described an asymptomatic carrier from Wuhan who seemed to have infected four other people. A February 26 Global Biosecurity report noted that “asymptomatic transmission has been documented” and “the viral load in symptomatic and asymptomatic people is not significantly different.”

A report from the World Health Organization published around the same time nevertheless depicted asymptomatic infection as rare. While “asymptomatic infection has been reported,” it said, “the majority of the relatively rare cases who are asymptomatic on the date of identification/report went on to develop disease.”

When it came to wearing face masks in public to protect others from infection, however, it did not really matter whether carriers were asymptomatic or presymptomatic. The point was that people could transmit the virus without realizing they were carriers. Given the incubation period, that phenomenon had to be common.

‘the most important, powerful public health tool we have’

It seems clear that the CDC conflated two issues: 1) whether wearing face masks in public places was a sensible safeguard, and 2) whether there were enough commercially produced masks to supply the general public as well as medical workers.

“Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS!” Adams had tweeted on February 29. “They are NOT effective in preventing [the] general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!” In other words, Adams wanted the public to believe the same masks on which health care workers relied somehow stopped working when worn by ordinary Americans.

Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, likewise questioned the effectiveness of general mask wearing while simultaneously saying that masks should be reserved for health care workers. “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” he said during a March 8, 2020, interview with 60 Minutes. “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet. But it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often, there are unintended consequences. People keep fiddling with the mask, and they keep touching their face…When you think ‘masks,’ you should think of health care providers needing them.”

Fauci, like the CDC, was soon singing a different tune. “There should be universal wearing of masks,” he told ABC News in August. “If you look at the scientific data, the masks clearly work,” he told CNN the following month.

Around the same time, Redfield claimed that face masks provided better protection than vaccination would. “These face masks are the most important, powerful public health tool we have,” he told a Senate subcommittee while holding a cloth mask. “I might even go so far as to say that this face mask is more guaranteed to protect me against COVID than when I take a COVID vaccine.”

Redfield really should not have gone that far. Although it was not yet clear how remarkably effective COVID-19 vaccines would prove to be, his logic was plainly fallacious even then. He imagined that a vaccine might provoke an immune response in 70 percent of the people who received it. “If I don’t get an immune response, the vaccine is not going to protect me,” he said. “This face mask will.” But face masks, like vaccines, are not 100 percent effective, and there was no reason to think they would provide better protection than vaccination.

‘IT FEELS LIKE A HUGE SHIFT’

Even after clinical trials and follow-up research showed that vaccines not only prevented serious disease and death but also nearly eliminated the risk of asymptomatic infection, the CDC took a suspenders-and-a-belt approach. In early March 2021, the CDC allowed that “fully vaccinated people” could “visit with other fully vaccinated people indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing.” They could even “visit with unvaccinated people from a single household who are at low risk for severe COVID-19 disease indoors without wearing masks or physical distancing.” But the CDC said they should still “avoid medium- and large-sized in-person gatherings”; “take precautions in public like wearing a well-fitted mask and physical distancing”; “wear masks, maintain physical distance, and practice other prevention measures when visiting with unvaccinated people from multiple households”; and do likewise “when visiting with unvaccinated people who are at increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease or who have an unvaccinated household member who is at increased risk for severe COVID-19 disease.”

The CDC loosened up a bit in late April, saying fully vaccinated people “can gather or conduct activities outdoors without wearing a mask except in certain crowded settings and venues.” But it still was recommending masks for vaccinated people in many situations, including “indoor public settings,” private gatherings “with unvaccinated people (including children) from more than one other household,” and visits with “an unvaccinated person who is at increased risk of severe illness or death from COVID-19 or who lives with a person at increased risk.” It also advised vaccinated people to “avoid large indoor gatherings.”

As of yesterday, however, the CDC is saying “fully vaccinated people can resume activities without wearing a mask or physically distancing, except where required by federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance.” What changed in the last two and a half weeks?

“It was not entirely clear what prompted the new guidance on Thursday,” The New York Times notes. “It feels like a huge shift, and I’m not going to follow it,” John Swartzberg, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Times. “Each individual should look at what the CDC is recommending and see if that fits for them.” Swartzberg said “this shows tremendous confidence in how well the vaccines work” but added, “The CDC does have data to support this decision. It’s not like they’re operating on the fly.”

Did the CDC acquire those data since April 27, the last time it updated its advice? During a press briefing yesterday, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky cited data from Israel that were available months ago. She also mentioned a study published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on April 2 and another in the same journal that was originally published on April 28. The CDC surely was aware of the results reported in the latter study earlier than that.

Walensky added that other studies have shown that the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines are effective against “variants like B1351.” Those include two studies of the Pfizer vaccine “published just last week”—one in The Lancet, the other in The New England Journal of Medicine. “Previous research suggested that B.1.1.7 is more infectious and more deadly than other variants, but that vaccines still worked well against it,” The New York Times noted. “But vaccines appeared to be less effective against B.1.351, according to earlier studies.”

‘Why do we have to wear masks?’

Maybe those two studies provided the crucial pieces of evidence that made the CDC comfortable with relaxing its recommendations for vaccinated people. But it is likely that other factors also played a role.

The CDC seems to have recognized that expecting people to continue living constrained lives even after they get their shots reduces the incentive to get vaccinated, especially among Americans who are at low risk from COVID-19. More generally, the CDC’s excessive conservatism makes Americans less likely to take any of its advice seriously. As Sen. Susan Collins (R–Maine) noted during Walensky’s Senate testimony this week, “It undermines public confidence in your recommendations, in the recommendations that do make sense, in the recommendations that Americans should be following.”

Walensky recently has received a lot of criticism for grossly exaggerating the risk of outdoor COVID-19 transmission and for taking an absurdly cautious approach to the relaxation of COVID-19 control measures, epitomized by the CDC’s ridiculous, unworkable guidelines for summer camps, which epidemiologists and infectious disease experts criticized as “cruel,” “irrational,” and “unfairly draconian.” An exchange during a CNBC interview on Wednesday highlighted the growing impatience with the CDC’s unreasonable conservatism.

“Everybody in my work group is wearing a mask,” Shepard Smith told Walensky. “Everyone. Why do we have to? We’re all vaccinated. Why do we have to wear masks?”

Walensky could have responded by noting that the most recent CDC guidance actually allowed Smith and his colleagues to take off their masks, as long as no unvaccinated people were around. Instead she said this:

We have to look at the science with regard to how the vaccine has worked in the real-world setting….We were looking for signs to ensure that the vaccine works just as well in the real world setting as it did in the trials. We need to ensure that the vaccines are working against all of the circulating variants that we have here in the United States. We’re following that carefully. And then we need to make sure that you’re not an asymptomatic carrier, if in fact you’re vaccinated. So all of that science is emerging, that’s what we’re following and we will use to update our guidance.

Walensky added that “we are looking forward to updating our guidance very soon”—the very next day, in fact. It would be unfair to conclude that emerging science played no role in that decision, at least with respect to the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine against COVID-19 variants. But it likewise would be a mistake to pretend that the CDC’s recommendations are purely a matter of science.

As Swartzberg suggested when he said “each individual should look at what the CDC is recommending and see if that fits for them,” deciding what COVID-19 safeguards make sense requires value judgments. People have to weigh whether the tiny, possibly nonexistent risks that worry the CDC are worth the cost of forgoing enjoyable activities and the burden of masking and physical distancing. Public health bureaucrats do not have the information necessary to make that assessment, which depends on individual circumstances and preferences.

Most Americans are not as cautious as Swartzberg—or the epidemiologists recently surveyed by the Times, 80 percent of whom thought everyone should continue wearing masks in public for another year. The more the CDC insists that everyone should adopt its view of acceptable risk, the more Americans will rightly ignore its advice.

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Ron DeSantis Will Pardon COVID Violators. Why Stop There?


krtphotoslive901680

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Thursday evening that he would move to pardon anyone in the state who flouted mask or social distancing mandates—something that should be welcome news to anyone who supports criminal justice reform.

It likely won’t be, at least not among his more energetic detractors. Known by some as “DeathSantis,” the governor carved out a reputation during the COVID-19 pandemic for being skeptical of virus-related restrictions. Though the per capita death rate in Florida is not much higher than California’s—where even outdoor dining was shuttered for a chunk of the fall and winter—his approach earned him much scorn across the country, with some media outlets contorting themselves in knots to castigate his approach.

But whether or not you’re behind the basic tenets of criminal justice reform shouldn’t turn on the political persuasion of who is doing the reforming. Catalyzing DeSantis’ announcement were the arrests of Mike and Jillian Carnevale, gym owners in Broward County, Florida, who faced up to 120 days in jail for permitting people to exercise sans masks.

“It’s a total overreach,” said DeSantis on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program, adding that he will issue pardons when he meets with the state’s clemency board in the coming months. “These things with health should be advisory, they should not be punitive.”

That the government would lock anyone in a cage for allowing other people to make their own choices on face coverings is patently bonkers. Yet the Carnevales are far from the only ones who have fallen victim to an excessively punitive approach. Perhaps DeSantis could apply his newfound attitude on overcriminalization to the many other offenses that have people languishing away behind bars for stupid reasons.

Let’s start with the obvious: weed. In Florida, those arrested for marijuana possession under 20 grams face a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison. Those caught with more than 25 grams face up to 15 years behind bars, with a mandatory sentence of three years.

It’s likely that DeSantis, a law-and-order Republican, views the Carnevales’ crimes as victimless. Are they? Several COVID-19 outbreaks have been traced back to gyms where people forewent masks, including at a gym in Hawaii where 21 people contracted the virus over a three-day period and a gym in Chicago where 55 people contracted it during a week in August. Those gyms implemented social distancing measures, but allowed exercisers to ditch the face coverings.

Such gymgoers may have later given the virus to others. Smoking marijuana, however, is actually victimless—whether or not you agree with the choice morally. Florida has recorded about 36,000 deaths from COVID-19 over the last year; there have been zero recorded deaths from weed in U.S. history.

DeSantis isn’t convinced. “Not while I’m governor,” he said in 2019 when asked how he felt about legalizing recreational cannabis. “I mean look, when that is introduced with teenagers and young people I think it has a really detrimental effect to their well-being and their maturity.” That isn’t supported by the evidence. A study released by JAMA Pediatrics found that legalizing the drug may actually cause teens to lose interest in weed, something supported by preliminary data in Washington, Colorado, and Oregon.

But even if DeSantis’ claim were true—that recreational cannabis would have some sort of dire influence on teenage maturity—there’s a pretty hefty tradeoff involved: people wasting away in prisons and/or buckling under crippling fines for making a personal choice he does not agree with. Arguably more consequential is opting not to wear a mask when exercising, which, in theory, may have spurred someone’s untimely death.

If you were wondering where DeSantis stood in the criminal justice discussions happening nationwide since last May, he recently set the tone by signing some new legislation: an “anti-riot” bill. On the surface, it’s not all bad—very few serious people are in favor of burning and looting cities. But there are a few troubling components, like the part that prevents anyone arrested of “unlawful assembly” from being released before they go to court. Unlawful assembly is notoriously vague, and essentially allows police officers to arrest anyone protesting, whether or not they actually present a threat. This from the governor who claims to support free speech.

“I think they’ve been treated poorly,” DeSantis said last night, “but fortunately they’ve got a governor that cares.” There are many other people in Florida who have been treated poorly. Does he care about them?

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Republicans and Democrats Endorse Concept, but Gloss Over Details, of Funding Infrastructure With User Fees


reason-highway3

Republicans and Democrats are eager to pass some sort of infrastructure bill. They also might be converging on a means of paying for it.

On Thursday, Axios reported that several prominent Democrats have endorsed the idea of increasing user fees to help pay for any new infrastructure spending. “User fees have to be part of the mix,” Sen. Mark Warner (D–Va.) told the publication.

Warner’s comments match those of Sen. Tom Carper (D–Del.), chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee (which handles most infrastructure issues), who said at a Brookings Institution event in April that “things that are worth having are worth paying for and those that use roads, highways, and bridges have an obligation to help pay for them.”

User fees—like tolls to pay for highways and public transit fares—have been a mainstay of Republicans’ infrastructure proposals. A $536 billion spending plan released by GOP Sens. Pat Toomey (R–Penn.), Roger Wicker (R–Miss.), John Barrasso (R–Wyo.), and Shelley Moore Capito (R–W. Va.) in April calls for collecting user fees on electric vehicles and redirecting already-approved federal spending.

Axios reports that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D–Ariz.) has also endorsed the idea of user fees.

Support for the concept of user fee–funded infrastructure is far from universal, however.

President Joe Biden, in keeping with his pledge to not raise taxes on anyone making under $400,000 a year, has rejected the idea of paying for his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan with user fees, including a federal gas tax hike. He’s instead proposing a corporate tax hike—something Republicans’ infrastructure proposal explicitly rejects.

Progressive Democrats also don’t like the idea, which they say falls too heavily on the poor and middle class.

“Republicans’ insistence that middle-class families and local communities foot the bill for everything from roads to water to broadband, while mega-corporations not pay a penny more in taxes isn’t acceptable,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) in an April response to the GOP’s infrastructure bill.

Even if there were a consensus of making motorists and transit riders pay for the infrastructure they use, there are still the knock-on questions of what types of user fees might be applied and how much infrastructure they’d actually buy.

The simplest policy to implement under the user fee umbrella would be a federal gas tax hike. It’s also the most politically fraught.

Biden has rejected it explicitly, as has Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W. Va.). His fellow West Virginia senator, Capito, has also said no to a gas tax increase. Instead, she’s floated charging drivers a mileage-based fee, reports The Wall Street Journal.

The Biden administration has thrown cold water on that idea, however. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, while agreeing the idea has “a lot of promise,” said in a March CNN interview that it wouldn’t be part of Biden’s plan.

Several states, including Washington, Oregon, and California, are experimenting with mileage fee pilot programs. There are nevertheless a lot of practical problems with trying to implement it at the federal level.

“A mileage-based user fee is not ready for prime time,” says Baruch Feigenbaum, a transportation expert at Reason Foundation (the foundation that publishes Reason). We’re still years away from a federal mileage fee being feasible, he says, meaning that it can’t be used to fund any short-term infrastructure plans

Republicans’ other idea to impose a user fee on electric vehicles “is not going to raise that much money because there’s just not that many electric vehicles,” Feigenbaum says. “Right now, Republicans don’t have enough of a pay-for.”

The Journal reported yesterday that Biden has asked GOP senators to flesh out more ideas for funding an infrastructure proposal, meaning we could see more details on particular pay-fors soon.

Hanging over this entire debate is whether Congress will try to pass a stand-alone additional infrastructure bill like the one Biden has proposed, or instead incorporate some of those ideas into a reauthorization of existing surface transportation programs (including highway and public transportation spending) that are set to expire at the end of September.

The must-pass nature of a surface transportation bill could be a way to round up bipartisan political support for any proposal. The fact that it can’t be passed by reconciliation and would thus need a full 60 votes in the Senate would also mean Biden couldn’t use it as a vehicle to pass his most ambitious proposals.

One possibility would be for Biden to get as much of the traditional infrastructure parts of his American Jobs Plan put in a surface transportation bill, and then pursue stand-alone passage of his other proposals like funding nursing homes and affordable housing.

Expect much more political wrangling to come.

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Ron DeSantis Will Pardon COVID Violators. Why Stop There?


krtphotoslive901680

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced Thursday evening that he would move to pardon anyone in the state who flouted mask or social distancing mandates—something that should be welcome news to anyone who supports criminal justice reform.

It likely won’t be, at least not among his more energetic detractors. Known by some as “DeathSantis,” the governor carved out a reputation during the COVID-19 pandemic for being skeptical of virus-related restrictions. Though the per capita death rate in Florida is not much higher than California’s—where even outdoor dining was shuttered for a chunk of the fall and winter—his approach earned him much scorn across the country, with some media outlets contorting themselves in knots to castigate his approach.

But whether or not you’re behind the basic tenets of criminal justice reform shouldn’t turn on the political persuasion of who is doing the reforming. Catalyzing DeSantis’ announcement were the arrests of Mike and Jillian Carnevale, gym owners in Broward County, Florida, who faced up to 120 days in jail for permitting people to exercise sans masks.

“It’s a total overreach,” said DeSantis on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News program, adding that he will issue pardons when he meets with the state’s clemency board in the coming months. “These things with health should be advisory, they should not be punitive.”

That the government would lock anyone in a cage for allowing other people to make their own choices on face coverings is patently bonkers. Yet the Carnevales are far from the only ones who have fallen victim to an excessively punitive approach. Perhaps DeSantis could apply his newfound attitude on overcriminalization to the many other offenses that have people languishing away behind bars for stupid reasons.

Let’s start with the obvious: weed. In Florida, those arrested for marijuana possession under 20 grams face a $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison. Those caught with more than 25 grams face up to 15 years behind bars, with a mandatory sentence of three years.

It’s likely that DeSantis, a law-and-order Republican, views the Carnevales’ crimes as victimless. Are they? Several COVID-19 outbreaks have been traced back to gyms where people forewent masks, including at a gym in Hawaii where 21 people contracted the virus over a three-day period and a gym in Chicago where 55 people contracted it during a week in August. Those gyms implemented social distancing measures, but allowed exercisers to ditch the face coverings.

Such gymgoers may have later given the virus to others. Smoking marijuana, however, is actually victimless—whether or not you agree with the choice morally. Florida has recorded about 36,000 deaths from COVID-19 over the last year; there have been zero recorded deaths from weed in U.S. history.

DeSantis isn’t convinced. “Not while I’m governor,” he said in 2019 when asked how he felt about legalizing recreational cannabis. “I mean look, when that is introduced with teenagers and young people I think it has a really detrimental effect to their well-being and their maturity.” That isn’t supported by the evidence. A study released by JAMA Pediatrics found that legalizing the drug may actually cause teens to lose interest in weed, something supported by preliminary data in Washington, Colorado, and Oregon.

But even if DeSantis’ claim were true—that recreational cannabis would have some sort of dire influence on teenage maturity—there’s a pretty hefty tradeoff involved: people wasting away in prisons and/or buckling under crippling fines for making a personal choice he does not agree with. Arguably more consequential is opting not to wear a mask when exercising, which, in theory, may have spurred someone’s untimely death.

If you were wondering where DeSantis stood in the criminal justice discussions happening nationwide since last May, he recently set the tone by signing some new legislation: an “anti-riot” bill. On the surface, it’s not all bad—very few serious people are in favor of burning and looting cities. But there are a few troubling components, like the part that prevents anyone arrested of “unlawful assembly” from being released before they go to court. Unlawful assembly is notoriously vague, and essentially allows police officers to arrest anyone protesting, whether or not they actually present a threat. This from the governor who claims to support free speech.

“I think they’ve been treated poorly,” DeSantis said last night, “but fortunately they’ve got a governor that cares.” There are many other people in Florida who have been treated poorly. Does he care about them?

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Will the Spike in Murder and Violence Undermine Criminal Justice Reform?


GASCON_FOR_REASON

In 1960, the U.S. violent crime rate started rising, and for three decades this was one of the most vexing and discussed problems in America.

By the early 1990s, policy makers had mostly lost hope. And then violent crime started falling. And it kept falling.

Meanwhile, the number of incarcerated Americans continued to climb.

It was the crime decline that made possible a bipartisan movement to reckon with the injustice of mass incarceration and the failure of the war on drugs.

But last year, the United States experienced the largest rise in homicides in decades, and violent crime rose particularly sharply in big cities, which could bring the return of tough-on-crime rhetoric and undermine the criminal justice reform movement.

Critics say a recently elected group of district attorneys in elite coastal cities, who are dismissing routine property crimes and failing to jail potentially dangerous individuals, are exacerbating the problem.

This backlash underscores why it’s so important to distinguish between worthwhile criminal justice reform and simply failing to enforce the rule of law.

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is among this new crop of progressive prosecutors. He was raised by two famous left-wing radicals of the 1960s, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, and his biological parents were imprisoned on felony murder charges when he was a baby, stemming from their involvement with the Weather Underground, a radical left militant organization.

Since Boudin took office in January 2020, burglary, arson, and murder have all spiked in San Francisco, though rape and assault rates have fallen, and most of his term has taken place during the COVID-19 pandemic—a time when life in the Bay Area has been far from normal.

Boudin is facing possible recall for failing to prosecute and jail a man accused of committing several burglaries and then drunkenly running over and killing two women, and a man twice accused of domestic abuse who then murdered an infant.

But can other progressive district attorneys strike a better balance as they reform the system?

“I think that the big lie was, basically…that overincarceration, more police presence, and more prosecutions actually [were] leading to greater safety. When, in fact, it has probably led to greater insecurity,” says George Gascón, who took office this year as Los Angeles County’s new district attorney. He’s a former Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer and once held the same job as Boudin in San Francisco.

Gascón defeated the more conservative incumbent Jackie Lacey with his radical reform agenda, pledging to release up to 20,000 “low-risk” offenders. He immediately ended cash bail for misdemeanors and what he calls “low-level, nonserious crimes.”

“We saw people that were being held in pretrial incarceration for weeks or months, simply because they couldn’t afford a very low dollar a month to bail,” says Gascón. “They were not necessarily dangerous. So the reality is, there is no connection between how much money you have in your bank account and whether you’re dangerous or not.” 

Since taking office, Gascón has made good on his promise not to prosecute victimless crimes like low-level drug possession and sex work. But he’s also declining to prosecute actual property crimes like trespassing.

“Data is continuing to flow, and more so recently, that shows that deemphasizing the criminal process when it comes to low-level nonviolent offenses, actually increases the safety in general, not just for those types of crimes, but even for more serious crimes,” says Gascón. 

But the property crime rate jumped nearly 40 percent during Gascón’s almost nine-year tenure as San Francisco’s D.A., a fact Gascón attributes to local police retaliating against him for co-authoring California’s Prop 47, which reclassified many felonies as misdemeanors.

“A lot of cops said, you know, basically we’re not going to enforce any of this stuff anymore. They were against [Prop 47]. They wanted to basically teach me a lesson,” says Gascón. 

But Gascón’s critics in Los Angeles believe he’s stripping law enforcement of the ability to keep the city safe. 

“Quality of life crimes are not something that you want to prosecute on every instance, but you also don’t want to have a blanket policy that prohibits you from ever prosecuting them as well,” says Eric Siddall, vice president of the L.A. Association of Deputy District Attorneys, the prosecutors union that sued Gascón for directing the D.A.’s office not to pursue extra harsh sentences for repeat felons or for crimes involving gang members. A judge recently ruled partially in their favor.

Siddall says that the Los Angeles D.A.’s office has been making positive reforms for years and that Gascón is disregarding public safety

“There has to be a middle ground,” says Siddall. “And I think that’s what our office was trying to do prior to Mr. Gascón. But when you have a blanket policy that completely ignores quality-of-life crimes, then expect the quality of life to decrease in those neighborhoods.”

Seven municipalities including the Beverly Hills, Whittier, and Pico Rivera city councils have issued votes of “no confidence” against Gascón. The L.A. sheriff has publicly supported a recall.

Siddall worries that stripping prosecutors of the ability to pursue harsher sentences against gang members will set back the decades-long effort to stem gang violence in a city once plagued by it.

“He basically destroyed most components of our office and our ability to effectively prosecute cases,” says Siddall. “He pretty much dismantled [the gang prosecution unit] and redirected resources to other projects….So it’s very clear from his policies, his words, and his actions that he is not terribly interested in dealing with violent criminals here in Los Angeles.”

But in recent years, problems with L.A.’s gang database have emerged after LAPD officers were charged with fabricating gang affiliations of individuals they pulled over, forcing prosecutors to review hundreds of possibly tainted cases.

Gascón has also opposed long prison sentences even for the perpetrators of violent crimes.

“Data indicates that…as we get older, there’s a less likelihood that we’re going to re-offend,” says Gascón, who points out that California houses many senior citizen inmates at a great cost to taxpayers.

While it’s true that people are less likely to commit crimes as they grow older, the data on the effectiveness of long sentences on deterring and preventing violent crime is mixed. One study of California’s “three strikes” law found that the policy “significantly reduces felony arrest rates.” Another study from the Public Policy Institute of California that examined the state’s resentencing reforms, which saw the early release of thousands of inmates, found “little evidence of a relationship between more severe sanctions and better recidivism,” partially bolstering Gascón‘s argument. The researchers unsurprisingly discovered a significant drop in drug re-offenders as the state deprioritized drug offenses but a slight rise in repeat offenders in more serious categories like crimes against persons.

“This data and science argument that he uses is baloney,” says Siddall. “You’re not going to have less crime by letting violent criminals out of prison. You’re not going to have less crime by not punishing people appropriately. You’re not going to have less crime by not penalizing someone from using a gun. You’re not going to have less crime by basically saying, ‘We’re going to give a pass to the gangs.’ That’s just not going to work.” 

Despite his stated commitment to following the data, Gascón isn’t immune to political pressure. He repealed his own order not to seek long sentences for criminals who victimize children or the elderly or commit hate crimes, claiming that because former President Donald Trump had so poisoned the country with hate, he had no choice.

“Enhancements and your larger periods of incarceration do not work, even for hate crimes,” says Gascón. “However…I had a lot of people that came to me and say, ‘You know, hate crimes are on the increase. And we are wary that given the posture of the national administration at the time…the message you’re sending might be that hate crimes are OK.'”

While Boudin’s time in San Francisco may test the limits of criminal justice reform, it’s Gascón‘s tenure in one of the world’s largest cities that could test the very concept of the progressive prosecutor: that social services can fix most or all urban dysfunction and that withholding police and prosecutorial resources can force the adoption of those alternatives.

While he faces resistance from law enforcement, city governments, his own team of prosecutors, and the legal system itself, Gascón remains committed to the idea that broad, systemic change is needed for safety and justice.

“We are a country that has increasingly become a country of have and have-nots,” says Gascón. “The successful democracies in the world are the ones where you shrink that…difference between those that have incredible wealth and those that do not….And in those societies, you see not only greater levels of security and public safety, but you see a greater level of satisfaction across the board, both for those that are affluent and those that are not.” 

Produced by Zach Weissmueller; opening graphics by Isaac Reese

Photo credits: Ringo Chiu/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Olivier Douliery/ABACAUSA.COM/Newscom; Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom; Candice C. Cusic/MCT/Newscom; Jan Knapik/ Splash News/Newscom; Ringo Chiu/ZUMA Press/Newscom; J. Emilio Flores/La Opinion / La Opinion Photos/Newscom; Image of Sport/Newscom; Hans Gutknecht/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; JIM RUYMEN/UPI/Newscom; shealah_craighead/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Illustration: Lex Villena; Steve Rhodes, ID 24084034 © Brandon Bourdages ┃Dreamstime.com

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Will the Spike in Murder and Violence Undermine Criminal Justice Reform?


GASCON_FOR_REASON

In 1960, the U.S. violent crime rate started rising, and for three decades this was one of the most vexing and discussed problems in America.

By the early 1990s, policy makers had mostly lost hope. And then violent crime started falling. And it kept falling.

Meanwhile, the number of incarcerated Americans continued to climb.

It was the crime decline that made possible a bipartisan movement to reckon with the injustice of mass incarceration and the failure of the war on drugs.

But last year, the United States experienced the largest rise in homicides in decades, and violent crime rose particularly sharply in big cities, which could bring the return of tough-on-crime rhetoric and undermine the criminal justice reform movement.

Critics say a recently elected group of district attorneys in elite coastal cities, who are dismissing routine property crimes and failing to jail potentially dangerous individuals, are exacerbating the problem.

This backlash underscores why it’s so important to distinguish between worthwhile criminal justice reform and simply failing to enforce the rule of law.

San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin is among this new crop of progressive prosecutors. He was raised by two famous left-wing radicals of the 1960s, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, and his biological parents were imprisoned on felony murder charges when he was a baby, stemming from their involvement with the Weather Underground, a radical left militant organization.

Since Boudin took office in January 2020, burglary, arson, and murder have all spiked in San Francisco, though rape and assault rates have fallen, and most of his term has taken place during the COVID-19 pandemic—a time when life in the Bay Area has been far from normal.

Boudin is facing possible recall for failing to prosecute and jail a man accused of committing several burglaries and then drunkenly running over and killing two women, and a man twice accused of domestic abuse who then murdered an infant.

But can other progressive district attorneys strike a better balance as they reform the system?

“I think that the big lie was, basically…that overincarceration, more police presence, and more prosecutions actually [were] leading to greater safety. When, in fact, it has probably led to greater insecurity,” says George Gascón, who took office this year as Los Angeles County’s new district attorney. He’s a former Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officer and once held the same job as Boudin in San Francisco.

Gascón defeated the more conservative incumbent Jackie Lacey with his radical reform agenda, pledging to release up to 20,000 “low-risk” offenders. He immediately ended cash bail for misdemeanors and what he calls “low-level, nonserious crimes.”

“We saw people that were being held in pretrial incarceration for weeks or months, simply because they couldn’t afford a very low dollar a month to bail,” says Gascón. “They were not necessarily dangerous. So the reality is, there is no connection between how much money you have in your bank account and whether you’re dangerous or not.” 

Since taking office, Gascón has made good on his promise not to prosecute victimless crimes like low-level drug possession and sex work. But he’s also declining to prosecute actual property crimes like trespassing.

“Data is continuing to flow, and more so recently, that shows that deemphasizing the criminal process when it comes to low-level nonviolent offenses, actually increases the safety in general, not just for those types of crimes, but even for more serious crimes,” says Gascón. 

But the property crime rate jumped nearly 40 percent during Gascón’s almost nine-year tenure as San Francisco’s D.A., a fact Gascón attributes to local police retaliating against him for co-authoring California’s Prop 47, which reclassified many felonies as misdemeanors.

“A lot of cops said, you know, basically we’re not going to enforce any of this stuff anymore. They were against [Prop 47]. They wanted to basically teach me a lesson,” says Gascón. 

But Gascón’s critics in Los Angeles believe he’s stripping law enforcement of the ability to keep the city safe. 

“Quality of life crimes are not something that you want to prosecute on every instance, but you also don’t want to have a blanket policy that prohibits you from ever prosecuting them as well,” says Eric Siddall, vice president of the L.A. Association of Deputy District Attorneys, the prosecutors union that sued Gascón for directing the D.A.’s office not to pursue extra harsh sentences for repeat felons or for crimes involving gang members. A judge recently ruled partially in their favor.

Siddall says that the Los Angeles D.A.’s office has been making positive reforms for years and that Gascón is disregarding public safety

“There has to be a middle ground,” says Siddall. “And I think that’s what our office was trying to do prior to Mr. Gascón. But when you have a blanket policy that completely ignores quality-of-life crimes, then expect the quality of life to decrease in those neighborhoods.”

Seven municipalities including the Beverly Hills, Whittier, and Pico Rivera city councils have issued votes of “no confidence” against Gascón. The L.A. sheriff has publicly supported a recall.

Siddall worries that stripping prosecutors of the ability to pursue harsher sentences against gang members will set back the decades-long effort to stem gang violence in a city once plagued by it.

“He basically destroyed most components of our office and our ability to effectively prosecute cases,” says Siddall. “He pretty much dismantled [the gang prosecution unit] and redirected resources to other projects….So it’s very clear from his policies, his words, and his actions that he is not terribly interested in dealing with violent criminals here in Los Angeles.”

But in recent years, problems with L.A.’s gang database have emerged after LAPD officers were charged with fabricating gang affiliations of individuals they pulled over, forcing prosecutors to review hundreds of possibly tainted cases.

Gascón has also opposed long prison sentences even for the perpetrators of violent crimes.

“Data indicates that…as we get older, there’s a less likelihood that we’re going to re-offend,” says Gascón, who points out that California houses many senior citizen inmates at a great cost to taxpayers.

While it’s true that people are less likely to commit crimes as they grow older, the data on the effectiveness of long sentences on deterring and preventing violent crime is mixed. One study of California’s “three strikes” law found that the policy “significantly reduces felony arrest rates.” Another study from the Public Policy Institute of California that examined the state’s resentencing reforms, which saw the early release of thousands of inmates, found “little evidence of a relationship between more severe sanctions and better recidivism,” partially bolstering Gascón‘s argument. The researchers unsurprisingly discovered a significant drop in drug re-offenders as the state deprioritized drug offenses but a slight rise in repeat offenders in more serious categories like crimes against persons.

“This data and science argument that he uses is baloney,” says Siddall. “You’re not going to have less crime by letting violent criminals out of prison. You’re not going to have less crime by not punishing people appropriately. You’re not going to have less crime by not penalizing someone from using a gun. You’re not going to have less crime by basically saying, ‘We’re going to give a pass to the gangs.’ That’s just not going to work.” 

Despite his stated commitment to following the data, Gascón isn’t immune to political pressure. He repealed his own order not to seek long sentences for criminals who victimize children or the elderly or commit hate crimes, claiming that because former President Donald Trump had so poisoned the country with hate, he had no choice.

“Enhancements and your larger periods of incarceration do not work, even for hate crimes,” says Gascón. “However…I had a lot of people that came to me and say, ‘You know, hate crimes are on the increase. And we are wary that given the posture of the national administration at the time…the message you’re sending might be that hate crimes are OK.'”

While Boudin’s time in San Francisco may test the limits of criminal justice reform, it’s Gascón‘s tenure in one of the world’s largest cities that could test the very concept of the progressive prosecutor: that social services can fix most or all urban dysfunction and that withholding police and prosecutorial resources can force the adoption of those alternatives.

While he faces resistance from law enforcement, city governments, his own team of prosecutors, and the legal system itself, Gascón remains committed to the idea that broad, systemic change is needed for safety and justice.

“We are a country that has increasingly become a country of have and have-nots,” says Gascón. “The successful democracies in the world are the ones where you shrink that…difference between those that have incredible wealth and those that do not….And in those societies, you see not only greater levels of security and public safety, but you see a greater level of satisfaction across the board, both for those that are affluent and those that are not.” 

Produced by Zach Weissmueller; opening graphics by Isaac Reese

Photo credits: Ringo Chiu/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Olivier Douliery/ABACAUSA.COM/Newscom; Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA/Newscom; Candice C. Cusic/MCT/Newscom; Jan Knapik/ Splash News/Newscom; Ringo Chiu/ZUMA Press/Newscom; J. Emilio Flores/La Opinion / La Opinion Photos/Newscom; Image of Sport/Newscom; Hans Gutknecht/ZUMAPRESS/Newscom; JIM RUYMEN/UPI/Newscom; shealah_craighead/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Illustration: Lex Villena; Steve Rhodes, ID 24084034 © Brandon Bourdages ┃Dreamstime.com

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