Spencer Pratt — yes, that Spencer Pratt — filed to run for mayor of Los Angeles, and his opening salvo landed squarely on Karen Bass and the city's fire leadership. The former star of The Hills is demanding the firing of multiple L.A. Fire Department officials, including the fire chief and fire battalion chief, over what he describes as a deliberate cover-up of the catastrophic wildfire response in January 2025.
In a video captured by a FOXLA reporter, Pratt laid out his case plainly:
"We're going to find out what failures the mayor and LAFD and the state parks and everyone involved to those 12 people burning alive, 7,000 structures [destroyed]. There's no looking forward until we get the answers and the people that are responsible are fired. That includes the fire chief, the fire battalion chief, that includes the mayor, it includes anybody that had anything to do with [the failed fire response]."
The celebrity-turned-candidate isn't running on vibes. He's running on fury — and on a story that should enrage every Angeleno who watched their city burn.
At the center of Pratt's campaign launch is an allegation that Mayor Bass ordered the watering down of the LAFD's after-action report on the January 2025 wildfires. As Breitbart News reported in December, the report allegedly went through several revisions designed to delete negative aspects of the city's fire response — a response that left more than two dozen people dead and thousands of structures in ashes.
Think about what that means. A city government presided over one of the worst urban fire disasters in modern memory, and instead of conducting an honest accounting of what went wrong, allegedly took a red pen to the findings. Not to fix the failures. To hide them.
Mayor Bass has offered no public response to these allegations within the reporting. Neither has the LAFD. The silence from City Hall is doing a lot of work here — and none of it is reassuring.
Los Angeles has become a masterclass in how one-party governance handles failure: spend lavishly, deliver nothing, and when the bill comes due, edit the receipt.
Pratt also aimed to reduce the city's homelessness spending, promising to audit Los Angeles's budget. The city has poured billions of tax dollars into homelessness programs, and every year the problem metastasizes. The encampments grow. The streets deteriorate. The money vanishes into a bureaucracy that measures success by inputs — dollars spent, programs launched — rather than outcomes. Anyone who has walked through downtown L.A. in the last five years can see where those billions went. Which is to say, nowhere visible.
This is the environment Pratt is stepping into. A city where the political class spends without accountability, fails without consequence, and allegedly sanitizes the evidence when someone tries to document what happened.
The instinct is to dismiss Pratt's candidacy. He's a reality TV personality, not a policy wonk. The political establishment will treat him as a punchline.
But that dismissal misses the point entirely. Pratt lost his home in the Palisades fire. He's not theorizing about government failure from a distance — he lived it. And in a city where the professional political class has produced nothing but decline, the question voters should ask isn't whether Pratt has governing experience. It's whether the people with governing experience have actually governed.
Karen Bass came into office with every institutional advantage. She had the party infrastructure, the media goodwill, and the full backing of Sacramento. And when the fires came, the hydrants ran dry, the response faltered, and more than two dozen people died. The after-action report that was supposed to ensure it never happened again was allegedly gutted on her orders.
Pratt may or may not be the right person to run Los Angeles. But he's asking the right questions — questions the incumbent has refused to answer.
The mayoral race just acquired a candidate with name recognition, a personal connection to the disaster, and zero loyalty to the political machinery that produced it. Pratt has promised a full audit of city spending and a relentless pursuit of answers on the fire response. Whether he can build a campaign infrastructure to match the rhetoric remains to be seen.
But here's what's already clear: the political establishment in Los Angeles would prefer this story disappear. They'd prefer the after-action report stay scrubbed. They'd prefer voters move on, accept the losses, and keep electing the same people who produced them.
More than two dozen people are dead. Thousands lost everything. And the city's own accounting of what went wrong was allegedly rewritten to protect the people responsible.
Someone was going to run on that. Now someone is.
