GOP Threatens to Play Politics With California Disaster Aid

Photo: Etienne Laurent/AFP/Getty Images

If anything is likely to appeal to the latent nonpartisan instincts and benevolent feelings of federal policymakers, it’s the sights and sounds of widespread suffering in natural disasters, like the California wildfires. That’s why federal disaster relief, which is triggered by a presidential declaration from funds ultimately controlled by Congress, is usually noncontroversial. Indeed, such funding is typically considered must-pass legislation and thus often becomes the vehicle for initiatives that might otherwise run into problems.

But now there is widespread talk among congressional Republicans about making disaster aid to California contingent on state policy changes of various sorts. Most of the proposed conditions stem from a Republican mythology about the fires being caused by Democratic water- and forest-management practices that are alleged to have exposed Los Angeles to deadly fires or made fighting them more difficult, as House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested.

“Obviously there’s been water-resources-management, forest-management mistakes, all sorts of problems. And it does come down to leadership and it appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in many respects,” Johnson told reporters, per USA Today. “So that’s something that has to be factored in. I think there should probably be conditions on that aid. That’s my personal view.”

As it happens, this “personal view” closely echoes arguments and threats Johnson’s boss Donald Trump has made for years, most notably at a California rally not long before the 2024 election.

“We’re going to take care of your water situation, and we’ll force it down his throat,” Trump said of California governor Gavin Newsom, per the Washington Post. “And we’ll say: Gavin, if you don’t do it, we’re not giving you any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires that you have.”

Trump was conflating a dispute over water rights being demanded by large Central Valley agribusinesses with water needed in Los Angeles and other Southern California cities; in fact, the reservoirs supplying firefighters are at near-capacity. Parallel Trump attacks on California’s (and the federal government’s) forest-management practices aren’t particularly germane to urban fires like the ones raging through densely populated areas right now. But part of the problem is that Republicans are threatening to take disaster aid hostage for all sorts of things they don’t like about Democratic-run California’s public policies, whether or not they are connected to current or future disasters, including the state’s broad approach to environmental protection. Conservative hostility to California, moreover, could affect the willingness of a Republican-run Congress to approve aid at all without some sort of policy or fiscal concessions, as this quote in The Hill from House Freedom Caucus member Ralph Norman suggests: “We got to get a pound of flesh for any dollar that’s spent on California, in my opinion.”

It’s worth recalling that during the first Trump administration the then-45th president decided to withhold criminal-justice grants from states and cities that refused to cooperate with his immigration-enforcement policies, a step that was still being kicked around the courts when Trump left office. Right now you can imagine we are one Truth Social post away from Trump demanding immigration-policy concessions from states like California as a condition for disaster aid.

Congressional Democrats are calling attention to the risk of an ever-escalating partisan war over disaster funds:

Perhaps this situation is just a coincidence of bad timing, with a major disaster coming in the midst of a perpetual legal battle between California and Trump that is resuming after Biden’s four years in office. It’s significant that the Los Angeles fires broke out just as California’s Democratic legislature was holding a special session to make funds available to “Trump-proof” the state via a blizzard of lawsuits against likely administration executive orders. But even if this is a uniquely volatile situation, the Republicans running the federal government right now should beware the precedent they will set if disaster aid becomes a regular lever for political warfare with states under a different party’s control.