2026-01-31 07:05:00
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is indicting two journalists for their coverage of a Minneapolis protest.
What happened? Don Lemon, a longtime CNN host who was fired from the network in 2023, and Georgia Fort, an independent journalist in St. Paul, Minnesota, were charged with conspiracy to deprive rights and interfering with religious freedom on Friday, along with multiple protesters.
The charges stem from their coverage of a Minneapolis-area protest earlier this month; activists interrupted a church service in St. Paul over a pastor at the church who works for ICE, while Lemon and Fort documented the protest.
The indictment, unsealed Friday, which charges nine total people on the same two counts, alleges Lemon, Fort, and the other defendants “entered the Church in a coordinated takeover-style attack and engaged in acts of oppression, intimidation, threats, interference, and physical obstruction.”
What’s the context? The Trump administration tried and failed to charge Lemon at least twice prior to Friday’s indictment by a grand jury. Shortly after the protest, a federal magistrate judge refused to sign an arrest warrant for Lemon; when the Trump administration appealed that decision, it was also rejected by a federal district court judge and by a federal appeals court panel.
Three activists were also charged last week in connection with the protests; in one instance, the White House digitally manipulated a photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong to make it appear she was crying when she was arrested.
Why does this matter? The indictment of journalists is disturbing on its face, as are the lengths the Trump administration went to to secure the indictment. Equally alarming is the administration’s apparent giddiness: The White House touted Lemon’s arrest in an X post Friday morning, writing “When life gives you lemons… ⛓️” over a black-and-white photo of Lemon. It also referred to the “St. Paul Church Riots” — plural, despite the fact that it was a single protest.
This story made me smile at the end of a long week: People raised more than $8,000 for a school crossing guard in Chicago, Joe Sass, after he went viral for helping a student across a street flooded with icy slush.
“I like being a helper,” Sass told the Washington Post (it’s a gift link). “And I think if people could think of me as that, then I think that’s like one of the most beautiful things in the world. I’m just a friend out here helping my neighbors.”
Have a restful weekend, and we’ll see you back here on Monday!
2026-01-30 21:30:00
“The mark of barbarism is that we treat babies like inconveniences to be discarded,” Vice President JD Vance bellowed to a crowd of zoomer nuns, bagpipers, and white nationalists at the annual March for Life in Washington, DC, last Friday.
The vice president then proceeded to announce a threefold expansion of the Mexico City policy, a decades-old, controversial foreign policy that prohibits organizations from receiving foreign aid if they mention abortion as a family planning option. It was reinstated last year when President Donald Trump resumed office.
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While it’s not uncommon for (usually Republican) administrations to reinstate it, this is only the second time the policy — which critics call the “global gag rule” — has been expanded. It now also prohibits talk of “gender ideology” or diversity, equity, and inclusion for all forms of assistance. The extended policy indicates that the administration will now be casting an even wider net against anything deemed woke, including groups that explicitly serve LGBTQ people, like a clinic that serves transgender people, for example, or that explicitly advocate for the rights of marginalized groups, such as funding a local school for an Indigenous community.
“This is about weaponizing U.S. foreign assistance to promote an ideological agenda,” Keifer Buckingham, managing director for the Council for Global Equality, told NPR last week.
The changes come almost exactly one year to the day since Donald Trump issued an executive order freezing billions of dollars in lifesaving aid, setting in motion the final death knell for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Researchers now credibly estimate that hundreds of thousands of people have died in the aftermath, as their health clinics closed, their food aid vanished, and their HIV infections went undiagnosed.
And while the Trump administration has moved in recent months to restore some funding for crucial health programs — like PEPFAR and the Global Fund — the expansion of the Mexico City policy means that many of the world’s most vulnerable and marginalized people, particularly mothers and young children, will continue to suffer disproportionately from the consequences of cuts.
In low-income countries, many women’s health organizations end up taking on the brunt of not only local family planning, but also reproductive and maternity care, cervical cancer screenings, HIV treatment, children’s health services, and resources for survivors of domestic and sexual violence. When the Mexico City policy disqualifies these groups from receiving funds, it affects all of those services too, leading to spikes in intimate partner violence, nutritional deficits in children, and HIV infections.
Paradoxically, research has consistently shown that the policy actually increases the number of abortions in countries receiving aid, because it disrupts people’s access to contraceptives. It also makes giving birth much less safe. One study estimated that during the first Trump administration, an additional 108,000 mothers and children died because their local health providers did not pass the rule’s sniff test. This amounted to over 1,300 canceled grants and at least $153 million in lost funding, every dollar of which meant fewer HIV testing kits, malaria nets, and baby formula for people in need.
This time around, the Trump administration has already slashed funding to most of these organizations. Trump slashed upwards of 90 percent of funding for maternal and child health organizations and family planning and reproductive health, compared with 38 percent in cuts to foreign aid overall. While it’s difficult to predict the full toll, it’s clear that hundreds of thousands of mothers and young children will likely die as a result.
The expanded Mexico City policy will now apply not only to foreign-run organizations — as it has in the past — but also to US-based organizations that work overseas, multilaterals like the United Nations, and potentially, foreign governments. It previously applied to a tranche of about $8 billion worth of global health funding, but now applies to over $30 billion of non-military foreign assistance.
Many groups will likely find themselves forced to choose between discontinuing services for some of the vulnerable populations they serve — or forfeiting a vital stream of funding.
If you want to help make sure their work continues, then now is a good time to show your support. MSI Reproductive Choices, a major provider of family planning services in low-income countries, has lost $15 million due to the reinstated Mexico City policy. Project Resource Optimization also has a database filled with specific lifesaving projects — including for maternal and child health — that were previously funded by USAID.
America’s culture wars should never have been a death sentence for hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of women and children in poor countries. But thanks to Trump and his administration’s petty policies, that’s increasingly what they risk becoming.
2026-01-30 21:00:00
If it feels like your algorithm is being hijacked by tiny, silver fish, you’re not just seeing things; sardines are experiencing a cultural moment right now. From influencers showing off snack plates and skin care tips to fitness experts raving about its high protein content, the internet can’t stop extolling the benefits of the formerly slept-on, salty snack.
It’s a bit like millennials experiencing “bacon-mania” in the 2010s or Gen Z’s more recent obsession with olives and pickles. The hype around sardines has gotten so big that some store owners are hiking up prices, citing increased demand and steep tariffs. Longtime sardine consumers have taken to social media to complain about the budget-friendly meal becoming more expensive and naming one culprit, in particular. “Sardines and canned fish in general being randomly expensive now — we hate you, TikTok,” wrote one X user last week.
The current cultural obsession with sardines isn’t being driven by memes or even insatiable cravings. It’s all about health, beauty, and the Gen Z concept of “-maxxing,” the internet-slang suffix for optimizing a specific area of one’s life. It’s the appropriately affordable snack for an increasingly unaffordable era that has led young people to invest in their self-improvement when they can’t monetarily invest in much else.
Watching social media brag about their sardine consumption feels a bit uncanny. Many of us have gone our entire lives passing up sardines at the supermarket for more mainstream seafood, whether that’s canned tuna or something more luxurious, like smoked salmon. If you were raised on sardines, it wasn’t exactly the type of meal you would show off during lunchtime. Maybe its most accurate moniker is a struggle food, an involuntary grocery pick for those on a tight budget. That was the case for influencer Ally Renee when she began incorporating them into her diet.
“I always watched my dad eating them growing up,” Renee said. “But I actually got into them by force, because they were like the cheapest thing I could afford in LA.”
Now, she’s become a big proponent of sardines on her page, describing it as “skincare in a can” in one of her latest videos. She says she genuinely enjoys the taste of them, but the fact that they’re filled with Omega 3’s and high in protein is a “win-win.”
“I notice my skin is more bouncy and the texture is a little better,” she said. “When I’m trying to tone up my body, it’s such a good source of protein.”
With 28 grams of protein per serving (around the same amount as a lot of pricey protein bars), sardines factor into the current obsession with protein intake and strength training. As a source of omega-3 fatty acids, they may help to reduce inflammation — one of the most-fretted-about medical conditions online — and boost collagen. You’ll also see sardines touted online as a way of “looksmaxxing,” “skinmaxxing,” “omega-3-maxxing,” and so on. The objective when eating them is never just to have a good meal, but to be improving your health and appearance at the same time while making the most out of every penny spent.
Kim Severson, a food culture reporter for the New York Times, sees a few other things contributing to the current sardine takeover, including high-end chefs incorporating sardines in their menus and the recent rise in tourism to Portugal, “the land of tinned fish.” She added that we’re also witnessing the “snack-ification of America,” where snack plates, girl dinners, and meals entirely made of side dishes have become a popular mode of serving food — and saving money.
“Affordability is a big part of it,” Severson said. “You can eat well with these little snack bites for less.”
The desire to eat well for less has driven a lot of food trends on social media since the pandemic, as people were forced to come up with creative dining options at home and on a budget. A few years ago, the rise of the girl dinner, which is essentially a homemade Lunchable, revolutionized the way many young people thought about healthy, affordable, and aesthetically pleasing food preparation. Self-proclaimed “snack plate girls” even started dedicating their pages to these protein medleys. Grocery prices continued to rise, and the snack plate came into fashion as more people embraced low-effort charcuterie boards. So, it felt appropriate, at the end of last year, when sardines became the centerpiece of many of these viral dishes. TikTok quickly became enamored with the aesthetic of a tin of oven-baked sardines surrounded by tomatoes, pickles, and hard-boiled eggs.
Severson says these sardine snack plates satisfy a “culinary itch” that consumers may not be able to scratch by spending money at fancy restaurants. But it’s just one of the ways sardines have become integral to aspirational living on a budget.
What was once a resource for famished soldiers during both world wars and foreign-born workers in the early 20th century has gotten a surprisingly glamorous makeover, thanks to its place in young people’s skin care regimes and sophisticated meals. There are even more expensive brands, like Fishwife, which sell “premium” sardines in artful tins with preserved ingredients that have helped boost the image of sardines as luxury.
However, the largely utilitarian function of sardines has seemed to remain intact. While you’ll find influencers raving about sardines’ briny taste, they’ve become more of a holy grail for wellness junkies and health nuts than something simply meant to be enjoyed. It shouldn’t be so surprising that a highly nutritious but affordable food is speaking to young people from a generation that’s hyper-focused on self-improvement and optimization in lieu of abundant job opportunities and wrestling with an economically uncertain future.
Maybe most glaringly, the current sardine obsession falls into a well-documented trend of Gen Z giving the cheapest items value. If they can turn affordable knickknacks into status symbols, why not make a $2 can of sardines the ultimate wellness secret?
2026-01-30 20:00:00
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
A series of recent polls hammer home just how unpopular ICE has become: Almost half of voters say they’d like to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and six in 10 say the agency has gone too far.
This week, Senate Democrats are attempting to leverage that disapproval into reform.
I want to be clear on one thing up top: We don’t yet know the nitty-gritty of the Democrats’ policy proposals. During a press conference on Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was asked if any of these issues represented “red lines” for him, and he essentially said that Democrats knew they needed to negotiate still.
That said, the proposals he presented provide an early look at one possible path forward. In today’s edition, we answer the question: What are Democrats demanding of ICE — and what are they leaving off the table?
Historically, ICE made relatively few arrests at homes, worksites, and other public places. Instead, “the vast majority of arrests that ICE used to conduct were really transfers of custody from a state or local authority to the federal government,” said David Hausman, a UC Berkeley Law assistant professor and the faculty director of the Deportation Data Project.
As Hausman recently explained to my colleague Christian Paz, however, that norm has changed — and radically — under President Donald Trump. ICE now carries out thousands of “at-large” arrests in public. Many stem from so-called “roving patrols,” in which immigration officers stop and interrogate people about their immigration status without a warrant.
Senate Democrats pitched a two-part solution to this roving problem: first, a requirement that ICE coordinate with state and local police; and second, a revision of the rules governing immigration arrest warrants.
Presumably, these reforms would nudge ICE back to its pre-2025 norm, when arrests almost always resulted from targeted enforcement actions. (Ironically, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to rein in roving patrols last year… and actually did the opposite.)
We’ve all seen the videos — and they’re often violent. ICE agents around the country have smashed car windows, rammed down doors, and tackled, beat or Tasered subjects of immigration enforcement operations. Since Trump’s second inauguration, agents used chokeholds and other banned, life-threatening maneuvers on at least 40 occasions without consequences, a ProPublica investigation found.
To curtail that violence, Democrats say that federal agents should be subject to the same use-of-force policies that govern state and local law enforcement agencies. Such policies differ in their specifics, but they typically require officers to deescalate dangerous confrontations and constrain when they can use deadly force. Just as important, use-of-force rules often include mandatory reporting and investigation requirements.
The devil is in the details, though: Who will conduct these investigations? And will victims of ICE gain the ability to sue the offending agents?
ICE’s new predilection for face gaiters and aviator sunglasses “enables abuse by making it harder for the mistreated to identify abusive officers, and thus hold them to account,” as my colleague Eric Levitz put it. That has been true even in the highest-profile and most closely scrutinized cases: According to the Minnesota Star Tribune, state investigators still don’t know the names of the agents who shot and killed Alex Pretti last weekend.
Democrats are demanding that federal immigration agents remove face coverings, carry visible identification, and wear body cameras in the future. “No more anonymous agents, no more secret operatives,” said Schumer.
This might be the most straightforward of the reforms, on paper. But it’s also a controversial one: Republicans insist that masks protect ICE agents from harassment, and some have also argued that the bipartisan funding bill negotiated before Pretti’s death included $20 million for body-worn cameras.
For those of you keeping score at home, you’ll notice that many would-be reforms didn’t make Democrats’ list. Senators reportedly debated more than a dozen ideas for reining in ICE before settling on what Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia called “a limited number of reforms that will put significant restraints on potential abuses.” Bills introduced in the Senate and the House over the past year have also proposed a wide range of potential guardrails.
Those include an explicit ban on racial profiling during immigration stops; a prohibition on ICE raids at “sensitive locations” such as schools and churches; the elimination of arrest quotas; the withdrawal of federal agents from Minneapolis; a ban on the detainment of US citizens; and a mandatory review of all use-of-force incidents.
Many activists and progressive lawmakers have also called for the dissolution of ICE, a position that — according to a couple of recent polls — has gained rapid traction with voters.
Schumer has reportedly instructed his caucus to focus on a different goal, however: “restrain, reform, and restrict” immigration enforcement. And if that doesn’t work, Congress, the courts, and the public still have several other options.
2026-01-30 19:45:00
When President Donald Trump announced that border czar Tom Homan would be taking over immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota, many anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement critics, conservatives, and media commentators sighed a breath of relief.
Instead of the firebrand Greg Bovino, Minneapolis would get an adult in the room at last: someone who worked under Democratic and Republican presidents, who had more experience with enforcement operations, and who has been relatively quiet as Trump’s mass deportations have unfolded this year.
Homan himself seemed to strike this contrast during his first news conference on Thursday after meeting with state and local leaders this week. “I didn’t come to Minnesota for photo ops or headlines,” he said. “You haven’t seen me.”
Given how outrageous Bovino’s leadership was, how chaotic ICE and Customs and Border Protection’s operations in Minneapolis have been, and how much bad press Trump and Bovino were getting from their own allies, one could be forgiven for believing that anyone would be an improvement.
Still, a closer look at Homan’s record reveals a more complicated — and potentially disturbing — picture.
His actions, his statements, and his prior controversies suggest that he is something other than the moderating “adult in the room” that he has been presented as by the Trump administration.
Homan’s charge was greeted warmly by Republican lawmakers.
“Tom is the expert’s expert and has dedicated his life to enforcing immigration law and policy in both Democrat and Republican administrations,” South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham remarked online after Trump’s announcement.
“There is no one who understands deportations better than Tom Homan,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) said. And Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) called Homan’s dispatch “a positive development — one that I hope leads to turning down the temperature and restoring order in Minnesota.”
To some extent, these hosannas have some validity.
Homan has a long history of working within the nation’s immigration and border apparatus. Before the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency was established, he worked for its predecessor agencies. Still, it wasn’t until President Barack Obama’s first term that he rose through the ranks and achieved some measure of national prominence.
When left-wing critics described Obama as the “deporter-in-chief,” they were really referring to Homan, who served as ICE’s director of enforcement removal operations starting in 2013.
That was a historic year for deportations, as the Obama administration oversaw more than 400,000 of them.
Similarly, Homan was praised for the Department of Homeland Security’s handling of a surge of unaccompanied minors and families, primarily from Central America, during Obama’s second term. Homan was credited — and awarded — for all of this.
Obama “believed in border enforcement. He took steps to secure the border,” Homan told the New York Times about that time. “So I did my job. I take it President Obama thought I did it pretty well, and he gave me an award.”
On January 13, 2016, Homan received the 2015 Presidential Rank Award, which ICE called “the nation’s highest civil service award,” bestowed by the president to “top career executive and senior professionals for consistently demonstrating strength, integrity and commitment to public service.”
After Trump first won in 2016, he asked Homan to serve as ICE’s acting director, where he would go on to make headlines for saying that undocumented immigrants “should be afraid” and for promising a strong domestic enforcement program.
Critics described this as “fear-mongering” at the time. Asked in 2023 if he regretted his rhetoric, Homan doubled down. “I stand by that statement,” he said. “If you’re in the country illegally, you shouldn’t be comfortable. You should be concerned because you broke our laws.”
Homan would also go on to play a key role in the family separation policy that resulted in 2018’s “kids in cages” news cycle — though he has argued that “it wasn’t about, ‘Let’s see how we can harm these people.’ It [was] about doing what we could so people wouldn’t put themselves in the hands of criminal cartels to get raped and get killed.”
“Now, hindsight being 20/20,” he conceded, “the [family] reunification process could have been better.”
That whole episode would result in more than 5,500 children being taken from their parents. It took years for hundreds of these families to be reunited.
And the controversy resulted in Homan’s retirement.
Compared to his peers in Trump 2.0, Homan has been less of a visible figure than he was originally expected to be.
He returned to the White House last year, trumpeted as Trump’s “border czar” who would seal up the southern border with Mexico, restrict legal and illegal immigration, and oversee the mass deportation program that Trump had promised during the 2024 campaign.
He was charged with domestic operations — working in New York City and Chicago to step up arrests, detentions, and deportations in sanctuary cities — but gained the most attention in 2025 for his confrontations with Democratic politicians like New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over her support of ICE protests, “Know Your Rights” education drives, and his track record during Trump 1.0.
He emerged as a kind of Trump bulldog, appearing on cable news, giving press conferences to criticize “sanctuary city” policies, and defending the administration’s deportation tactics — including when facing off against courts and senators for deportations to El Salvador in 2025.
It would also be a stretch to say that Homan’s rhetoric and tone have been measured.
At one point, back in 2019, for example, he reflected on speaking before a congressional hearing about his Trump 1.0 tenure, telling Fox News that he “hesitated a minute before I started yelling because I actually thought about getting up and throwing that man a beating right there in the middle of the room.”
“That man” was a US Congress member.
Last year, he threatened local officials in Boston for not wanting to cooperate with immigration officials, saying, “I’m coming to Boston, and I’m bringing hell with me.”
At another point, speaking of Mexican cartels, he threatened military action, saying they “would be foolish to take on the military” and would “expect violence to escalate…because the cartels are making record amounts of money…and [w]e’re taking money out of their pocket.”
Still, he’s not been as extreme as Stephen Miller, Greg Bovino, or DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who have all taken a much more antagonistic approach in their more recent showdowns with Democratic politicians, activists, protesters, and immigrants themselves.
For one, he hasn’t explicitly accused anyone of “domestic terrorism” or of being “domestic terrorists” like Bovino, Miller, and Noem have. He did say, however, that if “you look up this definition of terrorism,” Renee Good’s actions “certainly could fall within that definition.”
Part of this results from reported distancing and feuding between Homan and Noem over style, contracts, and heated personal rivalries.
Also, unlike Miller, Bovino, and Noem, Homan has previously defended due process and the courts system, saying: “People have a right to claim asylum. They have a right to due process. And you know what? They do.”
Still during Trump 2.0, he has been critical of “Know Your Rights” civic education initiatives. He’s called them efforts to “defy ICE” and impede law enforcement: “They call it ‘Know Your Rights.’ I call it how to escape arrest.”
That said, Homan is no Boy Scout. Homan has denied associations with white supremacist groups and far-right militias, like the Proud Boys.
You also might remember a specific and lurid allegation about Homan — namely, that in September 2024, he accepted $50,000 delivered in a paper bag from undercover agents posing as contractors seeking government contracts during the 2024 election.
The White House and Justice Department both came to his defense when the story broke in 2025, saying it was an effort to “entrap” him.
More recently, Homan has been a bit more critical and careful around enforcement operations, given the optics of him coming in to clean up the mess created by his predecessor in Minneapolis.
He’s admitted mistakes in the past, saying, “Nothing’s perfect, anything can be improved on, and what we’ve been working on is making this operation safer, more efficient, by the book.” He’s emphasized “targeted” work in Minnesota repeatedly and claimed that DHS’s “mission is going to improve because of the changes we’re making internally.”
He hasn’t fully thrown Noem, Bovino, and Miller under the bus yet, but he has suggested a reversal to how things have been operating, saying that his “main focus now is draw-down based upon the great conversations I’ve had with your state and local leaders.”
This track record demonstrates why nuance is required in any analysis of Homan’s rise. But more importantly, it is an example of a trend in the Trump era: Controversial figures can often end up being normalized because of the sheer number and degree of extremity of the figures surrounding the president. Who’s Homan, when you’ve dealt with Bovino, Noem, and Miller?
2026-01-30 19:00:00
A lot of us might assume that most homes that are destroyed by wildfires were in obvious, high fire-risk areas, like on the edge of forests that frequently burn. But wildfires are a faster-growing and much closer threat than we may realize — burning in places that rarely used to see them.
For instance, many homes that remain in the neighborhoods that burned in the historic Los Angeles wildfires last year are still considered as having “low risk” in assessments from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) despite the charred remains of their neighbors showing how vulnerable they might be to embers blowing from miles away.
It raises an urgent question: Do we actually know which homes face the most danger of burning?
Government risk maps are too coarse for the way wildfire works now. But new tools powered by AI are giving us a clearer picture. They could reshape how we understand the dangers that lie ahead and force a reckoning over where we live and how we build and protect our homes — if we choose to listen.
For decades, modelers calculated wildfire risk by looking at historical patterns of wildfires, but it’s increasingly evident that this vastly understates the scope of the problem. In fact, until 2023, California prohibited insurers from using forward-looking catastrophe models that included factors like future climate change to set their rates. “Wildfires have very complex dynamics, and a backward-looking approach is not sufficient,” said Firas Saleh, director of North America wildfire models at Moody’s, a financial analytics firm.
Now, one company, ZestyAI, says they have a new model that fills in “blind spots” in the government’s fire risk calculations, providing a sharper picture of the threats wildfires can pose to individual homes.
“Early on in our journey, we realized that insurance companies were writing property insurance without having a deep understanding of the properties themselves,” said Kumar Dhuvur, chief product officer at ZestyAI. “A lot of times, their way to get that understanding was to ask agents or the homeowners, ‘Hey, do you have a tree next to your house? Do you have a swimming pool?’”
To produce their estimates, ZestyAI used satellite images of neighborhoods to examine structures, vegetation, and terrain. They combined this information along with historical fire records and climate variables to train their AI model. This allowed them to calculate risks for specific houses.
“You’ve got to be very granular in your assessment of risk,” Dhuvur said. “There could be whole neighborhoods where the resolution is too low and becomes a no-go zone for an insurance company.”
When using its model to analyze the regions burned in Los Angeles wildfires last year, for example, ZestyAI found that more than 3,000 properties that were labeled as low or no risk in assessments from FEMA showed up as having an elevated fire risk in ZestyAI’s model. These properties have an estimated value of $2.4 billion. Across California, there are 1.2 million properties worth around $940 billion that were labeled as low risk in FEMA’s National Risk Index. ZestyAI found all of them to face greater danger.
It’s an alarming result when you put it in the greater context. Sprawling, destructive wildfires are extracting a massive and growing toll from the global economy. In 2025, fires around the world burned through 390 million hectares — more than 90 percent of the land area of all the countries in the European Union. The price tag of wildfires has been surging in recent decades, and the Los Angeles wildfires last year may be the most expensive disaster in US history.
This is a big jump forward from conventional fire risk models.
FEMA’s National Risk Index, for example, calculates threats over census tracts or counties (The National Risk Index has now been migrated into the new Resilience Analysis and Planning Tool). The dataset groups high-risk and low-risk homes together in ways that miss a lot of important differences between them. Some houses may have fire-resistant shingles and a wide defensible space that give them more protection. Others may have shared wooden fences with neighbors that create pathways for fire to travel, leaving those homes vulnerable to fires that start far away.
That was clear in the aftermath of the Los Angeles fires, when some homes were left standing despite just about the rest of the neighborhood turning to ash.
For its part, the Federal Emergency Management Agency told Vox that the National Risk Index is intended to be a baseline, not an absolute measure of risk.
“FEMA welcomes efforts by others to develop additional datasets that support communities in preparing for all hazards, including wildfires,” a FEMA spokesperson wrote in an email. “Increased research and data collection on risks enables communities to enhance their preparedness and resilience before disasters happen.”
But even though ZestyAI’s analysis provides a clearer picture of which homes are in danger, it can still leave some important complexities of wildfires, said Hussam Mahmoud, who leads the Vanderbilt Center for Sustainability, Energy and Climate and studies risks to communities.
Fire risk is not just a function of individual homes but of how whole neighborhoods and environments interact. A group of homeowners might clear a wide defensible space around their own homes, upgrade their sidings, and protect attic vents from cinders, but if one of their neighbors falls short, it could endanger the whole community when flames arrive. Even fire-resistant homes that meet upgraded construction codes can burn if they are pummeled for hours with waves of embers on hurricane-force winds, as the 2025 Los Angeles fires showed.
“I think AI is a very promising technology,” Mahmoud said. “It has limitations to how it can be used with a physics-based model.”
There are also tradeoffs between how precise risk estimates can be and how much they cost. Inspecting individual homes in person can yield the sharpest picture, but it’s intrusive, time-consuming, and expensive to send people to examine millions of homes. And in-person inspections still don’t tell the whole story.
“When you’re on the ground assessing buildings and looking if the building has good roof material versus good siding versus something else, you’re assuming that this building is a recipient of fire,” Mahmoud said. “You’re not looking at how the fire is propagating across the community.”
The story we tell about wildfires is shifting. They are not just a problem in wilderness areas that happen to spill over into cities and neighborhoods. Houses are now as much a part of the landscape as pine trees and chaparral. They are both fuels and sources of ignition, even far from forests and shrublands. The vast majority of wildfires are ignited by human activity, and when entire neighborhoods ignite, fires behave in hard-to-predict ways not seen in nature. That was evident as the Los Angeles fires last year engulfed coastal mansions in Pacific Palisades and entire neighborhoods in downtown Altadena.
But better models like ZestyAI’s can make a difference — if we’re willing to make hard decisions and act on them.
Some communities have already used specialized fire forecasts to target certain properties with mitigation measures to reduce their odds of igniting and then leveraging that to lower their insurance rates. And with regulatory reforms like allowing insurers to use fire models that look ahead, California is starting to lure some insurance companies back to the state.
The biggest challenge may yet be getting people to acknowledge their risks at all.
The home listing site Zillow last year decided to remove climate risk scores from property listings under pressure from California real estate groups that complained that the scores were hurting the resale value of some homes. It makes sense: A better map of fire dangers might not be in your interest if you’re trying to sell your home and its value suddenly drops because it shows up as having a higher risk of igniting. An insurance company might also use that information to raise your premiums or drop your coverage entirely.
There are more reasons why people might not want to think too hard about future fires. Faced with an urgent housing shortage, Los Angeles is under immense pressure to build as much as possible, as fast as possible. Yet despite all the efforts to speed up construction, especially in the wake of the devastating wildfires last year, building in Southern California is still an agonizingly slow process.
Anyone with money and time who has lost their home in a fire can afford to wait to assess their risks and rebuild their homes to be more resilient, or move. However, many lower-income fire victims don’t have a choice other than to try to go back to the same conditions that put them in danger in the first place. That’s part of why there have been more permit applications to date for rebuilding in low and middle-income communities — like Altadena, for example — that burned last year, and fewer in wealthier enclaves like Pacific Palisades.
“Families that are displaced from Palisades do have the wealth and means to look for alternatives as opposed to Altadena residents, for whom that’s their only option,” said Minjee Kim, an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of California Los Angeles.
AI and more advanced models can help us predict these risks and understand them better, but no algorithm can extinguish financial denial or do the political heavy lifting required to stop us from building tomorrow’s homes in burn zones that are only getting bigger.