While Gov. Newsom met with President Trump in Washington, Trump envoy Ric Grennel was in Los Angeles observing the city’s effort to recover from the devastating firestorms. The former acting director of national intelligence was surprised to find DEI practices hindering the work.

Efforts to find “the right mix” of DEI-approved contractors had slowed efforts to remove debris from burned-out Pacific Palisades and that was not acceptable. “We want people to be able to do the job and get it done,” Grennel told EPA and local officials, “and not hold up because we have some quota system.” As it happens, California had already dealt with such a system nearly 30 years ago.

The California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), Proposition 209 on the 1996 ballot, banned racial and ethnic preferences in state education, employment, and contracting. The disaster the quota forces predicted never took place, and as Thomas Sowell showed in Intellectuals and Race, graduation rates for blacks and Hispanics actually improved. Contrary to woke opinion, the measure did not eliminate “affirmative action.”

The state could still cast the widest possible net and lend a hand up on an economic basis. Even so, the state’s ruling class fought CCRI from the start. Governors Jerry Brown and Gavin Newsom both opposed the measure and California has since established a vast DEI bureaucracy that wastes money and serves no practical purpose.

In a similar style, California’s major cities seem unaware that in 2020 voters rejected Proposition 16, which would have overturned CCRI, and continued to hire on the basis of DEI quotas instead of merit. Los Angeles Deputy Fire Chief Kristine Larson, who heads the LAFD Equity and Human Resources Bureau, is on record that if she’s not strong enough to carry a man out of a burning building “he got himself in the wrong place.”

Blaming the victim is not an acceptable policy but at this writing, Deputy Chief Larson has not offered to step down. Neither has Mayor Karen Bass, who flew off to Ghana while the smoke was rising. For his part, Newsom toured the devastation, met with President Trump, and has now produced executive orders helpfully broken down here by Katy Grimes of the California Globe.

The orders aim at “hardening” homes located in high-risk areas by banning most flammable material within five feet of buildings. As the Globe explains, many trees survived the fires next to houses that burned to the ground.

Newsom also spoke of “increasingly extreme weather” and “the state’s ever-evolving climate-induced challenges.” That recalls the governor’s response to the 2020 fires, which he blamed on “climate change.” While maintaining that the world was getting hotter and drier, Newsom did little to increase the water supply and continued to resist responsible forest management. So Grimes has good cause to blame the loss of homes and businesses on “willful negligence by state and local government.”

A Newsom order suspended permitting requirements under the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Embattled Californians have a right to wonder why such action wasn’t taken years ago to lower the state’s sky-high building costs. The governor’s order also repeated the suspension of permitting requirements for fire victims by the California Coastal Commission.

This is the same commission that opposed the removal of brush that provided kindling for wildfires, and in 2023 quashed a desalination plant that would have provided millions of gallons of fresh water for arid southern California. Like Republican and Democrat governors alike, Gavin Newsom has made no move to eliminate an unelected heavy-handed commission that overrides scores of elected governments and rides roughshod over Californians’ property rights.

Newsom has kept rather quiet about the effect of DEI policies on public safety and fiscal responsibility. The governor claims that devastation in Pacific Palisades and Altadena doesn’t teach “new lessons” but fails to learn the lessons already in evidence for decades: the need for forest management, increased water supply, and public safety workers hired on the basis of merit alone.

So to paraphrase George Santayana, Californians may be destined to repeat the devastation still unfolding in Los Angeles.