Here’s What Trump Can — and Can’t — Do to Disrupt Los Angeles Wildfire Aid

During the heat of the presidential campaign in September, then-candidate Donald Trump made an extraordinary threat. He vowed that if California suffered a wildfire during his presidency, he’d withhold disaster aid from the state unless Governor Gavin Newsom signed a document that delivered more water to farmers in the state’s agriculture-rich Central Valley.

“If [Newsom] doesn’t sign those papers, we won’t give him money to put out all his fires,” Trump said. “And if we don’t give him all the money to put out the fires, he’s got problems.”

In the wake of the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles, which have destroyed thousands of homes and killed dozens of people over the past two weeks, Trump’s threat to withhold aid from the Federal Emergency Management Agency has surfaced again. As the fires raged, the new president rushed to blame them on Newsom’s water policies, repeating his disproven claim that the state’s policy of limiting water deliveries out of the Sacramento Delta to protect a species of endangered fish has hobbled firefighting efforts. He then appeared to repeat his threat on Truth Social: “NO WATER IN THE FIRE HYDRANTS, NO MONEY IN FEMA.”

As Trump takes office and prepares to visit Los Angeles this week, his allies in Congress are picking up the threat as they consider a supplemental bill that would provide billions of dollars in aid money to fire victims through the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, a representative from Louisiana, said that he believes there “should be conditions” on that aid.

“Obviously, there’s been water resource mismanagement, forest management mistakes, all sorts of problems,” he said in a comment to reporters last week. Even some California Republicans, such as Representatives Doug LaMalfa and Darrell Issa, agreed that Congress should consider limiting long-term aid.

But disaster experts say these threats aren’t likely to bear fruit — or at least will be harder to accomplish than many of the new president’s other climate-related policies.

“I don’t know how you stop it so much as you just make it a pain in the butt,” said Craig Fugate, who led FEMA under President Barack Obama.

The difficulty for Trump is that the FEMA recovery process in California has already begun. President Biden issued a disaster declaration just hours after the fires began, giving FEMA the legal authority to spend money on emergency response, rescue, and shelter efforts in Los Angeles, and to begin doling out money to victims who have lost their homes and belongings. Even if Congress doesn’t send the agency any more money, FEMA has enough funding in the bank to address victims’ immediate needs. This is by design: When Congress set up FEMA in 1980, it gave agency officials flexibility to deploy money fast as new disasters happened. Lawmakers (usually) top up the agency’s budget before each disaster season takes place.

But bigger costs are yet to come. FEMA itself doesn’t rebuild roads or water systems in disaster-affected areas. Instead, the agency reimburses states and cities for the money they spend on those rebuilding efforts. In order to get reimbursed, states have to submit cost estimates, and it’s far too early for California to assess the cost of recovery.

But once the state does submit those reimbursements, FEMA doesn’t have the authority to approve or deny them discretionarily, according to Fugate.

“I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it would be really difficult for any administration to try to hold funds arbitrarily,” he said. “It’s just like writing a check, it’s kind of hard to cancel it after you’ve already written.”

The most Trump could do would be to delay the aid process through bureaucratic channels. The federal Office of Management and Budget has to review all FEMA projects with values over $1 million, and Trump could order that office to quibble with the details of every request before approving them. Later on this year, FEMA could also decrease the share of rebuilding costs it offers to pay, but it would still be on the hook for most of the money. Trump did not mention FEMA in his dozens of day-one executive orders this week, but he did sign an order seeking to revise federal policies for moving water out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, an issue he has inaccurately linked to L.A.’s recent fires. (The Trump transition team did not respond to requests for clarification on the president’s threat.)

Even if Trump does throw sand in the gears of reimbursement, California might be able to handle some delay. The state is the world’s sixth-largest economy, with a more than $300 billion budget, and lawmakers are already conferring about whether to pass supplemental state money to aid in the wildfire recovery. (California’s Office of Emergency Services did not respond to a request for comment.)

Wildfires also represent a lower share of FEMA’s disaster spending than do other disasters like hurricanes and floods. FEMA has spent an average of $345 million on infrastructure rebuilding per fire since 2015, compared to an average of almost $1 billion per hurricane, according to FEMA data compiled by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Fire victims account for just 1 percent of FEMA’s individual aid applications since 2015.

That’s in part because most fires tend to strike less populated areas — and because insurance tends to cover a larger proportion of wildfire destruction, said Sarah Labowitz, a nonresident fellow at Carnegie and an expert in disaster funding.

“It’s supposed to be a three-legged stool, where FEMA sits along insurance and private money,” she said. “For fires, typically people have some kind of fire insurance, so the level of uninsured loss could be lower than for a big water event.” But given the scale of the loss in these urban fires, and the fact that many insurers have pulled away from places like Pacific Palisades, FEMA may have a larger tab this time than it has in past fires.

Rather than the new Trump administration, it’s Congress that California should be worried about. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD, has over the past two decades allocated tens of billions of dollars toward long-term disaster recovery with Congress’ blessing, including after blazes such as the 2018 Camp Fire. Many states use this federal money to aid in housing redevelopment; for instance, California used the largest share of its Camp Fire money to build and acquire new multifamily properties.

This housing money will be essential in L.A.’s strained real estate market, where median rents are over $3,000 per month and an average single-family home goes for close to $1 million. But unlike FEMA, which can start spending money out of its main disaster fund as soon as the president declares a disaster, HUD needs explicit permission from Congress to start a recovery program for each new disaster. Speaker Johnson is now suggesting he would like to see California agree to “conditions” before he gives HUD the nod, telling reporters earlier this month that “we have to make sure there are safeguards on the precious treasure of the American people.”

Without this supplemental HUD money, it will be hard for California to pursue the kind of long-term recovery that experts believe is necessary after climate disasters like the Los Angeles wildfires. The state might be able to find money in its own coffers to make up for delays in critical aid money from FEMA, but it will be much harder to come up with cash to build new homes or stand up a workforce development program, as California has sought to do with the $1 billion in recovery aid it received from HUD for the 2018 Camp Fire. Not only is Los Angeles one of the most expensive places in the country to build a home, but California just finished closing a more than $50 billion budget deficit, leaving it with little money to spare.

Labowitz says that Congress has dithered on passing HUD aid before. For instance, lawmakers took until December 2024 to give the agency authority to spend money on the Maui wildfires, which occurred in August of 2023. But despite the threats from Johnson and other Republicans, she said it’s likely that lawmakers will send aid money eventually, if only to ensure that Democrats don’t withhold it from disaster-prone states like Texas and Florida in the future.

“We have a federal infrastructure that finds a way to make itself work most of the time,” she said. “Usually for the biggest disasters, the system does find a way to work to deliver aid.”