Accurately Counting Risk Elimination Solutions Act

Floor Speech

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Mr. HUFFMAN. Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. The Forest Service manages millions of acres of forestland, including vital watersheds, critical wildlife habitat, and countless outdoor recreational areas.

The Forest Service's 10-year wildlife crisis strategy implementation plan stresses the importance of fire-adapted landscapes and hazardous fuel treatments to build resilient forests. These critical wildfire risk reduction projects are complex, multistep processes requiring significant planning and investments often carried out over several years.

In order for these projects to operate effectively, we must receive accurate, transparent, and accessible data on how they are planned and implemented. This bill proposes requiring the Forest Service and the Department of the Interior to include in the President's annual budget a report on hazardous fuel activities carried out in a given fiscal year to account for each treated acre.

The ongoing reporting requirement would enhance transparency and accountability, providing critical information that could help guide investments in the management of our national forests, including how we deploy the historic funding for wildfire risk reduction efforts that were included in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and in the Inflation Reduction Act if we can hang on to that historic funding in the coming months. I certainly support this bill for proposing that idea of an ongoing reporting requirement. However, I want to clarify that the bill does not actually require or even authorize it. The Congressional Budget Office found that the reporting requirements proposed by this bill would need significant funding, including for hiring 30 additional Federal employees.

Now, I think that would be a worthwhile investment for wildfire risk reduction. These days the Freedom Caucus tends to call the shots on these matters, and they don't allow us to consider bills that authorize that kind of money without spending reductions elsewhere.

So what we have before us is a revised version of the bill, a workaround, that doesn't even authorize the reporting activities that it describes. It is right there on the last page of the bill in all caps: No additional funds authorized.

Madam Speaker, you will notice that the CBO score on this bill is now zero. That is because the revised bill doesn't actually do anything.

We need to do better than this. We have a serious, real fire crisis in front of us. We can't fight climate change with window dressing or thoughts and prayers. I am going to support this bill because it doesn't do any harm and it does bring attention to a good idea, but this is nowhere near enough.

I will point out that the Biden-Harris administration achieved record acres of annual forest treatments thanks to the investments secured by House Democrats in both the IIJA and the IRA. This includes vegetation management to reduce hazardous fuels and prescribed burns.

That is important work worth doing, and I look forward to continuing to work with the majority and the new administration if they are willing to make those investments. We have to ensure that agencies have resources so they can continue reporting back with record-breaking numbers that we achieved under the last administration.

Unfortunately, this bill and the so-called Fix Our Forests Act that we will be considering later this week simply fail to provide any resources. Team extreme might be unhappy with a bill that includes a price tag, but I guarantee that it would be far less than the cost of the mass destruction from fires that we are seeing in places like L.A., and it is certainly worth the lives that would be saved.

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Mr. HUFFMAN. Mr. Speaker, I look forward to working with our friends across the aisle on the accounting issue that has been discussed here today. Obviously, we want to make sure that the Forest Service is not taking advance credit for phases of projects that haven't happened yet.

I think that is for the most part what has happened that the gentleman from Arkansas identified. I don't believe there has been any actual double or triple counting, but either way, we want it to be accurate. We all need good, accurate data on that reporting.

We will work together on that. In the meantime, I urge my colleagues to support this bill. I have no further requests for time, and I yield back the balance of my time.

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