These House newcomers came to the Capitol with big plans. Then the wildfires hit
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- In their first full week on the job, three freshman members of Congress rushed back to L.A. to deal with the wildfires.
- One legislator worried that recent executive orders from President Trump could hamper California’s recovery from the disaster.
WASHINGTON — Rep. Luz Rivas had barely begun her day in Washington when her cellphone rang at 7 a.m. The Hurst fire had erupted around 10:30 the night before and — fueled by high winds and dangerously dry conditions — ballooned to more than 500 acres in her northern Los Angeles County district by morning.
On the line was Rep. George Whitesides, her new neighboring congressional colleague, who was already rushing to Ronald Reagan National Airport that Jan. 8 morning for the first flight back to Los Angeles.
“Are you planning to go? Are you staying?” she recalled him asking. “Let’s coordinate.”
The two agreed that Whitesides would immediately start on-the-ground outreach to folks affected by the Hurst fire, which broke out in Sylmar and bordered their districts. Rivas would make calls to the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the White House.
She took a later flight to Los Angeles to join him and Rep. Laura Friedman, another newcomer to Congress, whose district borders Rivas’ and was surrounded by infernos. They had been sworn in as members of Congress just five days earlier.
“All three of us, that was our first instinct: We have to be home. We have to go assess the damage, we have to see what the community needs. And then come back with, what can we do together?” Rivas said in an interview in her Washington office.
“While it’s not what I envisioned for week one or month one, I felt prepared and ready,” Rivas added. “That’s why we get elected, right? To serve our constituents and to be there for what they need from the federal government. And I felt the L.A. delegation has done that.”
The Democratic trio knew each other before coming to Washington. Rivas and Whitesides campaigned together last year. Friedman and Rivas served in the California Legislature together. Now the three freshman Congress members have a partnership literally forged by fire.
Veteran Reps. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands) and Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) hold the positions of Democratic Caucus chair and vice chair, respectively.
An altered agenda
Rivas had anticipated a little time to get used to her Washington digs. She intended to rearrange the sitting area in her office and hang art on the walls. Three weeks in, the walls remained bare. A “New Members Orientation” memento candle on the side table was unlit.
Rivas and Friedman hadn’t completed hiring their congressional staffs in their rush “to get the doors open and get the phones working,” to help constituents, Friedman said.
After eight years in the Legislature, Friedman faced her new job in Congress with the mindset that she could “walk in feeling that I can do the job.”
“But what I thought was going to be a more typical transition, of course, was interrupted by the devastating fires that have traumatized my community in Los Angeles,” Friedman said. “So my focus has had to shift, as many others have, towards support and recovery. But I feel very determined to be able to do that work.”
An engineer by trade, Rivas had campaigned on climate change resiliency. She went from chairing the California Assembly’s Committee on Natural Resources to joining the same committee in the U.S. House. Now, she is clear-eyed that the wildfire recovery will take up much of her time and attention for her two-year tenure in Congress.
“We’ve gone through several big wildfires in California while I was a legislator, and so it’s not completely new to me,” Rivas said. “[But] I didn’t envision this to be the focus of, like, week one.”
The most destructive fires this season — the Palisades and Eaton fires — took place in the districts of veteran Congress members Brad Sherman (D-Sherman Oaks) and Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park), who in another January weathered a mass shooting at a ballroom in her district.
But whole swaths of northern Los Angeles County were also torched and blanketed by smoke. Whitesides’ district, the 27th, includes the Santa Clarita Valley. To the south and east is Rivas’ 29th District. That, in turn, abuts Friedman’s 30th District, which is centered on Burbank.
“We haven’t seen the vast structure loss that we’ve seen in Altadena and the Palisades, but that’s kind of just like dodging a bullet. It is a matter of time before we have our own next wildland fire,” said Whitesides in a phone interview on Jan. 15.
A week later, the Hughes fire erupted in his district.
As the cleanup phase of recovery begins after the devastating fires in L.A. County, displaced residents grapple with new uncertainty surrounding the cost and timeline for rebuilding.
A flurry of wildfire legislation
The California fires have baptized the new lawmakers in Washington politics. They coincided with a torrent of executive orders from President Trump — including several that Friedman said could hamper California’s recovery.
“We can’t hire firefighters to keep California safe,” Friedman said, noting Trump’s hiring freeze on federal workers. “We’re not going to be able to hire enough people to remove debris and build new houses. So there’s profound ramifications to the policies that are being designed without Democrats.”
The fires were still raging when House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) first floated the possibility of tying future federal funding for California’s disaster to conditions, such as forcing the state to observe strict voter ID laws.
The House Democratic Caucus — led by California Reps. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands) and Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) — swiftly pounced on the suggestion, reminding Johnson that conditions were not added to funding for previous disasters. Days into her tenure in Congress, Rivas joined her party’s senior leaders for a news conference in the Capitol.
“Constituents who evacuated and were unsure if their home was still standing called my office and asked how they could help their neighbors,” Rivas said. “This is what L.A. is about, and it is what my California congressional delegation colleagues on both sides of the aisle know to be true. … This isn’t about party or politics. It’s about getting our constituents the resources that they need to rebuild their lives in the wake of this disaster.”
Friendman echoed the comments later, saying, “It’s really wonderful to be here and see how close the California delegation is.”
Group text message chains abound, with lawmakers sharing articles, updates, meeting times and locations.
In the few weeks since taking office, Rivas, Friedman and Whitesides have pushed for legislation dealing with wildfires or disaster response — including joining their San Diego neighbor and fellow Democrat, Rep. Sara Jacobs, to introduce legislation to streamline the bureaucracy of federal disaster response.
Whitesides, who co-founded the organization Megafire Action, also co-sponsored the Fix Our Forests Act — a sweeping piece of legislation that passed the House last week.
“Unfortunately, this is what I ran on,” Whitesides said. “Every campaign event that I did over the last two years, I would talk about my fear that we would have a wildland-initiated fire that would sweep down into a dense community and set off a house-to-house conflagration. And I did not expect that we would get not just one, but two massive examples of that on my first week. That’s exactly why I ran.
“Now,” he hastily added, “is it the only reason I ran? No. I want to solve all kinds of problems.”
But for Whitesides, Rivas and Friedman, their tenure in Congress is already being defined by fire and, perhaps when reelection comes around, determined by it too.
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