Prior to drawing intense public scrutiny for her response to handling the wildfires ravaging Los Angeles, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass was held in the highest esteem by the Democratic Party’s most prominent figures.
President Biden once considered Bass to be a top contender for his vice presidential running mate in 2020, while former President Barack Obama previously predicted that she would be an “outstanding mayor” of the city.
When Bass was a U.S. representative from California, the Biden campaign interviewed her as the then-Democratic candidate’s potential running mate. As Politico reported at the time, the campaign considered the lawmaker to be “persuasive but not flashy,” “trusted by progressives but still respected by Republicans,” and “passionate, yet not someone who would allow her own objectives to overshadow her responsibilities as Biden’s No. 2.”
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Years before the Los Angeles wildfire crisis, President Biden once considered L.A. Mayor Karen Bass to be his vice presidential running mate, while former President Obama once predicted she would be an “outstanding” mayor of Los Angeles. (ROBERTO SCHMIDT / Contributor | Rodin Eckenroth / Stringer | Scott Olson / Staff)
After then-Senator Kamala Harris eventually secured the role, Bass went on to run for mayor of L.A. in 2022, and earned major praise from Obama, who called her that year and predicted she’s “gonna be an outstanding mayor of L.A.”
This high praise of Bass by two of the party’s top men is being called into question as Bass has been taking heat for how she has handled the wildfires destroying major portions of her city.
As flames have destroyed thousands of homes, killed at least 11 people, and forced nearly 200,000 people from their homes, the mayor has been hammered for enacting budget cuts to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
Between the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 fiscal years, Bass oversaw the cutting of the fire department budget by nearly $18 million, while her initial proposal was to cut it by even more – up to $23 million.
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LA Mayor Karen Bass and City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo unveil the 2024-25 fiscal budget at City Hall. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images) (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
The LAFD budget for the 2023-2024 fiscal year of $837 million was also dwarfed by the city’s homeless budget of $1.3 billion.
Bass took major heat for traveling overseas to Ghana earlier this week, which meant she was thousands of miles away from her city during the initial day of the destruction on Tuesday.
The mayor raced back home Wednesday, facing a barrage of media questions as to where she had been.
“Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning? And do you regret cutting the Fire Department budget by millions of dollars, Madame Mayor?” Sky News reporter David Blevins asked as Bass waited to deplane Wednesday following her trip to the African nation.
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The mayor appeared to struggle to answer the reporter’s initial questions. She eventually replied, “I took the fastest route back, which included being on a military plane, which facilitated our communications. So I was able to be on the phone the entire time of the flight.”
Filmmaker and former “Family Ties” star Justine Bateman summed up the anger that many local residents have been feeling towards Bass and other city officials, stating, “If you are going to run a city or run a state, you have to take care of the basics, and that’s to make sure that your fire and your police department are well-funded.”
“If you can’t cover the basics, get out of our city. You are useless to us. You are a liability and you have destroyed people’s lives because you didn’t do your job,” she said. “You didn’t do what you were hired for. You didn’t do what we pay you for,” she added.
The White House did not immediately reply to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
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Fox News Digital’s Sarah Rumpf-Whitten and Kira Mautone contributed to this report.
