In a functioning society, when fire breaks out, the trucks roll. In America today, they wait.
They wait because the trucks are broken. Not from wear or weather, but because the parts can’t be found. They wait because Wall Street found a way to turn fire into money.
Earlier this year, as wildfires tore through Los Angeles neighborhoods, emergency vehicles, fire trucks, ambulances, ladders, sat parked in city lots, unable to respond. They weren’t sidelined by budget cuts or incompetence. They were sidelined because one private equity firm had bought up the nation’s fire truck supply chain, patented the parts, and turned the repair process into a profit-generating bottleneck. Firefighters had equipment. They just couldn’t use it.
This isn’t a story about government mismanagement. It’s a story about corporate sabotage. About what happens when you privatize an essential public service and let financiers squeeze it dry.
For most of its history, fire truck manufacturing in the U.S. was regional and diverse, hundreds of small companies serving communities with equipment designed to last decades. But in the eyes of private equity, that kind of long-term reliability isn’t a virtue, it’s a liability. Profit needs churn. It needs dependency. It needs control. So in the 2010s, a firm called American Industrial Partners began buying up manufacturer after manufacturer, E-ONE, KME, Spartan, Ferrara, Smeal, until it had assembled a corporate conglomerate called the REV Group.
REV isn’t an acronym. It’s a mission statement. They were revving up for acceleration, streamlining supply, standardizing production, closing factories, and locking communities into proprietary part systems. What had once been a functioning, if imperfect, ecosystem of suppliers became a tightly gripped chokehold. By the time the pandemic hit, REV controlled the bodies of most new fire trucks in America, directly or indirectly.
The supply chain issues of 2020 gave them cover. Delays were expected. But as the world reopened, wait times only grew longer. The real cause wasn’t COVID. It was consolidation. REV told its investors this was the plan all along. Fire trucks had historically yielded around five percent profit. REV aimed to double that. And how do you double profits on equipment that can’t be made obsolete? You make the parts scarce. You shut down repair facilities. You create artificial competition, not among suppliers, but among desperate municipalities trying to outbid each other for the last truck off the line.
In Arkansas, a fire department waited nearly a year for a repair on a million-dollar truck that couldn’t drive. Another resorted to sending crews to fires in Ford pickups because the engine broke down en route. Firefighters joked that they could pass it on bicycles. In reality, no one was laughing. The truck was out of service for ten months. In Los Angeles, more than a hundred emergency vehicles sat dormant while homes burned.
Ten years ago, the needed part would have arrived in days. Now, with REV’s patents, it could only come through their supply chain, if it came at all. And the price? Up to three times what the same truck cost a decade ago.
This is the logic of privatization. It doesn’t optimize. It monetizes. It doesn’t serve. It exploits. It turns public need into private leverage and dares anyone to challenge the arrangement. Local officials call it "sacrificing public safety for profit." That’s generous. It’s extortion. And it's entirely legal.
What happened to America’s fire trucks isn’t isolated. It’s a business model, one that’s metastasized across sectors. Ambulances. School buses. Anesthesiology practices. Water utilities. Even the prison phones children use to call their incarcerated parents. All of them repackaged into investment opportunities, all of them subject to the same brutal math: public desperation equals private profit.
And this is just the beginning.
The same vultures are circling Social Security. Circling Medicare. Circling public housing, education, and disaster response. They’re coming for your retirement. Your electricity. Your clean water. They want to own the tools, set the prices, and sell them back to you—slowly, expensively, and only when they feel like it.
They don’t want fire trucks to roll. They want them to wait.
And when they do move, they want taxpayers to bleed for it.
It’s not just inefficient. It’s immoral. The fire truck story makes that clear. A public service held hostage for shareholder returns. A firefighter forced to crawl to a blaze. A community made to compete for the privilege of protection.
But here’s the thing: it doesn’t have to be this way.
This kind of consolidation is already illegal under existing antitrust law. States can act. District attorneys can act. The federal government can act. The tools exist. What’s missing is the political will to say that life-saving services should not be subject to the rules of the market.
Because when Wall Street owns the fire truck, it owns the fire. And sooner or later, we all get burned.