The DOGE mass-firings could have serious consequences come wildfire season, as Elon Musk has fired the UC Davis smoke researchers who were working on ways to mitigate the effects of wildfire smoke on wine grapes. And wine country’s congressional rep is furious.

Monday was a day of protests of Elon Musk at Tesla dealerships, both in SF and across the country. And the focus of the protests was Musk’s unelected and hardly-official Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) that is carrying out mass-firings across the federal government programs that Musk and his band of born-at-third-base rich kids seem to have little understanding of.  

There was some more protest of Elon Musk, in the form of public statements at least, from wine country congressional representative Mike Thompson, who represents Napa County, plus parts of Contra Costa and Lake counties. Bay Area News Group reports that Thompson had a blistering response to the “unelected billionaire” Musk cutting a program that researched the effects of wildfires on wine grapes, as we now live in an era where wildfire smoke can sometimes ruin an entire year’s vintage.

“In firing the only two smoke exposure researchers in our region, Elon Musk and his Republican enablers are not only throwing out a decade of research progress, they are making it harder for our agriculture producers to recover after wildfires strike,” Thompson said in a statement. “The only waste, fraud, and abuse here is that losing this research is a waste, Musk is a government efficiency fraud, and our growers are being abused by this non-transparent process to cripple critical federal services.”

The program only employs two researchers at UC Davis, employed by the US Department of Agriculture, so this is not even a costly program. Rep. Thompson got roughly $6.2 million of the funds appropriated in 2023 and 2024, a seemingly minor investment in the $54.8 billion-a-year California wine industry.

The researchers were finding ways to quickly identify which wine grapes were damaged by wildfire smoke, what precisely caused them to be damaged, and how to mitigate any losses.

But considering that Trump thinks global warming and climate change are hoaxes, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, there will certainly be more devastating wildfires for wine country to deal with over the next few years.

Related: Elon Musk Furious That His Fresh-Out-of-College DOGE Employees Have Been Named By the Press [SFist]

Image: Dan Meyers via Unsplash