President Donald Trump’s seemingly off-the-cuff tweets about wildfires in California baffled experts who said the president did not seem to understand the basics about how the fires are being fought there.

Now, the Trump administration is turning those tweets into official administration policy.

On Wednesday, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross ordered the National Marine Fisheries Service to prioritize sending water to firefighters to use against the flames over other concerns – including making sure water flows to the habitats of endangered fish and other wildlife that that agency is tasked with protecting.

“American lives and property are at stake and swift action is needed,” Ross said in a statement, noting that twin blazes in Northern California called the Mendocino Complex Fire has become the largest on record in the state.

California, however, says it does not need any more water. In response to the Commerce Department directive, the state’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, otherwise known as Cal Fire, said Wednesday that there has been “no shortage of water supplies,” according to spokesperson Michael Mohler.

Indeed, some of the largest wildfires in the state are burning near upstream reservoirs from which firefighters can already draw water if necessary, such as Clear Lake near the Mendocino Complex Fire and Trinity and Shasta lakes near the Carr Fire to the north.

On Twitter this week, Trump tied the historic forest fires to the debate how water should be divided between Central Valley farms and downstream habitat for fish, including protected ones like the tiny delta smelt and the winter-run Chinook salmon.

The hatchlings of the latter species need enough flow in the Sacramento River to reach the San Francisco Bay. To the chagrin of Central Valley farmers and their Republican allies, the State Water Resources Control Board is considering allocating less water to agriculture and more to the river ecosystem to sustain the fish populations.

Trump, characteristically, sided with farmers while ignoring the role higher temperatures due to man-made climate change have exacerbated the fire issues out West. “Governor Jerry Brown must allow the Free Flow of the vast amounts of water coming from the North and foolishly being diverted into the Pacific Ocean,” Trump wrote on Twitter Monday. “Can be used for fires, farming and everything else.”

But modern firefighters extinguish flames with more than just water. State and federal workers in California and elsewhere in the West drop chemical fire retardants from above and clear lines of vegetation on the ground to control blazes.

Water experts in the state say the two ecological issues are entirely unrelated.

“Despite the president’s tweet, there’s zero connection between the fires and the amount of water that is available to fight them,” said Peter Gleick, a hydrologist in the state and founder of the Pacific Institute think tank. “And yet all of the sudden, now the federal agencies are starting to actually implement policies based on this completely false idea that will end up rolling back federal environmental protections. It’s weaponizing an ignorant tweet from the president.”

The directive asks the National Marine Fisheries Service, which enforces the Endangered Species Act for many aquatic animals, “to make clear” to other federal agencies that “the protection of life and property takes precedence over any current agreements regarding the use of water in the areas of California affected by wildfires.”

A department spokesperson declined to elaborate on which agreements it has in mind, but the federal government runs the Shasta Dam in Northern California, which is built across the Sacramento and regulates its flow.

Another administration official, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, penned an op-ed Wednesday in USA Today blaming “frivolous litigation from radical environmentalists” for blocking loggers from removing from forests dying trees that easily burn.

“Radical environmentalists would have you believe forest management means clear cutting forests and national parks,” Zinke wrote. “But their rhetoric could not be further from the truth.”

Thinning out trees in wooded areas near homes is often supported by both forest managements and environmentalists alike. “Proactive fuels management as mentioned in his op-ed can be an effective band aid to apply in certainly regions where there is a confluence of people living in fire prone regions,” said John Abatzoglou, a professor at the University of Idaho researching wildfires and climate change.

Republicans in Congress, with the administration’s backing, are pushing to loosen requirements for environmental reviews on timber projects that sometimes end up in the crosshairs of environmental litigants.

Giving the public less of a voice through the environmental-review process is concerning, says Greg Aplet, a senior science director at one of those environmental groups, The Wilderness Society.

“We don’t disagree with the notion that some management is appropriate,” Aplet said. “What we don’t want to see is people’s concern about fire used to change the rules that govern environmental review for projects. What we’ve found is that when stakeholders get together around the table, they reach agreement fairly quickly on what to do.”

Like Trump’s tweet, Zinke’s op-ed does not mention climate change despite research, including a 2016 study led by the University of Idaho’s Abatzoglou, suggesting climate change has already made forests out West drier and easier to burn.

California’s wildfire officials do make the climate connection. “There’s definitely no question,” Cal Fire spokesperson Mohler said. “We’re just seeing, it’s no longer fire season, it’s fire year.”

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