In fairness, righties claimed the states (cali) dropped the ball w/forest management. So what's the excuse now that the states can't squander the budge on welfare if there's a federal agency to handle it? Plus there's tons of federal land that I couldn't get an answer as how the states are supposed to handle it.
It's complicated and more than can be covered in quick posts.
Basically, as we know, the feds own most of the land in the west, including of course beaucoup of the forest land.
Naturally, there have been unlimited calls by the states to return that land to the states over the years, which has not happened. But in the attempts to assuage and tamp down this issue over the decades the feds have entered into sort of "home rule" type of agreements with the states delegating management to the states, including forest management, and related revenue receipts, etc, while technically retaining ownership and the right to approve or disapprove of practices that have been delegated to the states.
So it makes the finger pointing game a nightmare unless you put the actual state and area under the microscope to see who is running the show. Some people blame the feds but barking about how it fed land, except the feds delegated management to the states in response to state and environmentalist who thought they could have more influence with the states. Or they may blame a state, but in actuality it might be an area that is still totally or mostly controlled by the feds even though it carries the name of State Park because the recreational aspects etc are state run. Complicated.
Then you have- as in the western states- disasters related to the fact that the electrical power companies have forest management rights where the impact on utilities is an issue. Thus you have frigging power companies such as Pacific Power and PG&E paying out multi-gazillion dollar settlements for burning significant numbers of towns down (think Paradise, CA) through their failure to manage forest and brushland around their power grids or letting their grids get overloaded to the point where they are a fire danger. And all of their authority and responsibility to manage forest and range land is a different set of laws and regs (both fed and state) than those that I described above related to basic forestry management on fed lands, and state lands, and hybrid agreements between feds and states.
Yeh. You dont want to try to fit some of this on a bumper sticker.