With California and much of the West facing serious drought, record heat and wildfire risk, President Biden on Wednesday announced he is raising the pay of federal firefighters, expanding the use of the National Guard to help fight fires and broadening efforts to use federal satellites to detect fires as soon as they start so crews can more quickly limit their spread.

“The truth is, we’re playing catch up,” Biden said during a video meeting from the White House with Western governors, including California’s Gavin Newsom. “This is an area that has been under-resourced. But that’s going to change if we have anything to do with it. We can’t cut corners when it comes to managing our wildfires or supporting our firefighters.”

Biden said that 36 major fires were burning across the West on Wednesday, compared with 21 this time last year. He cited triple-digit heat waves, California’s drought, and the frequency of fires as situations that have been worsened by climate change. Major investments — such as the $50 billion in his pending infrastructure package to reduce the risk of fires and other disasters — are needed, he added, to reduce fire danger and expand firefighting capabilities.

“This is a wakeup call to the rest of the public,” Biden said. “I’ve had people say to me when I’ve been on the road the last three weeks, ‘Oh my God, I didn’t think things were really changing that much. I saw those photographs of the reservoirs in California, and, oh my God, there’s no water?’ Or people saying ‘117 degrees in Portland?’ ”

Newsom was in Siskiyou County to monitor the Lava Fire, which had burned more than 17,590 acres as of Wednesday morning in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest just west of Mount Shasta. Speaking in a video link with the forest behind him, Newsom praised the White House approach and said it stands in stark contrast to California’s experience under former President Trump, whom he did not mention by name.

“It goes without saying, in California we were engaged in a relationship with the federal government that was more like sparring partners, not working partners,” Newsom said. “We have an opportunity here to turn the page on the finger-pointing and the rhetoric. We were debating raking policies — literally debating raking policies — in this country in the last few years.”

In 2018, while touring the wreckage of the city of Paradise after the Camp Fire, Trump drew widespread ridicule for saying California needed to rake its forests to reduce fire risk, as they do in Finland.

“You gotta take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forest, very important,” Trump told reporters as Gov. Jerry Brown and then-Lt. Gov. Newsom stood nearby. “You look at other countries where they do it differently, and it’s a whole different story. I was with the president of Finland and he called it a forest nation, and they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things and they don’t have any problem.”

Afterward, the president of Finland, where winter temperatures reach -45 degrees, said he never discussed raking forests with Trump.

Sauli Niinistö said he met Trump briefly in Paris at a World War I commemoration and told him when the subject of California wildfires came up that “Finland is a country covered by forests,” and that to avoid forest fires “we have a good surveillance system and network.”

During his presidency, Trump did not mention climate change, the role of fallen power lines in causing California’s fires or the fact that many big fires don’t burn in forests at all, but in chaparral and other landscapes in Southern California.

“There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor,” Trump tweeted at one point.

Overall, 57% of the forests in California are owned by the federal government, mostly the U.S. Forest Service. The state owns 2%. Private citizens own the other roughly 40% with the majority held by small landowners who own less than 500 acres, according to a 2018 study by the Little Hoover Commission.

This week, Biden named a Bay Area resident, Randy Moore, who is chief of the Forest Service’s regional office based in Vallejo, as chief of the U.S. Forest Service.

In August, Newsom and the federal government signed an agreement to double the rate of forest thinning and prescribed burns to 1 million acres a year in California by 2025. Last year, the Forest Service treated 213,842 acres, according to Forest Service spokesman Jon Groveman, down slightly from  214,374 acres the previous year.

Newsom, who is facing a recall election later this fall, has come under criticism recently for the state’s efforts. Although he promised Cal Fire would conduct fire prevention work on 90,000 acres in 35 critical areas shortly after taking office in January 2020, state statistics show that work has only been completed on 11,399 of those acres, according to an investigation by Capital Public Radio in Sacramento and NPR.

“As California prepares for what could be its worst wildfire season ever, Gavin Newsom still won’t explain why he lied about his own wildfire prevention efforts,” California Republican Party Chairwoman Jessica Millan Patterson said in a statement.”

After a record season last year in which 4.3 million acres burned in California and more than 10 million burned across the West, federal agencies have had trouble filling some openings for firefighter jobs. Starting pay for a U.S. Forest Service firefighter is $13.45 an hour, less than workers at McDonald’s make in California. Biden said he learned about the low pay last week.

“Come on, man. That’s unacceptable to me,” Biden said Wednesday. He announced bonuses and other mechanisms to raise the base pay above $15 an hour and said he will work with Congress to further boost firefighter pay and benefits.

“These courageous women and men take an incredible risk of running toward the fire,” Biden said. “They deserve to be paid and paid good wages. You know that old expression, ‘God made man and then he made a few firefighters?’ Well it’s true.”

With Mount Shasta in the background, a firefighter cools down hot spots on Monday, June 28, 2021, after the Lava Fire swept through the area north of Weed, Calif. (Scott Stoddard/Grants Pass Daily Courier via AP)