The Trump administration says it is vetting aid requests more closely and has paid every dollar it approved for Los Angeles fire case management; about 1,400 households could lose their case managers when the state program ends Oct. 31.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration says the federal government is taking a harder look at every request for disaster aid, and that the change is about stewardship, not politics. “There is no politicization to the President’s decisions on disaster relief,” the White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to E&E News this year, adding that President Trump “provides a more thorough review of disaster declaration requests than any Administration has before him.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency has described the same shift in its own terms. It told E&E News that it has “returned to a more rigorous review process” to ensure that “requests for federal assistance are justified and not granted for routine or expected weather events.”
That approach is now meeting a deadline in California. A state-run program that pairs survivors of the January 2025 Eaton and Palisades fires with case managers is scheduled to end on Oct. 31, and California’s appeal for more federal money to keep it running through the 24 months FEMA originally approved is still pending, according to members of Congress and reporting by The Associated Press.
What FEMA has paid
The administration’s case begins with what it has already delivered. On Oct. 7, FEMA announced a final $3.3 million installment for disaster case management, bringing its total for the program to more than $13 million and, it said, supporting more than 3,000 survivors. The agency said the program reflects a “locally executed, state-managed and federally supported approach that promotes accountability and ensures taxpayer resources support recovery programs that deliver results.”
FEMA’s release put total federal assistance for the Los Angeles disaster at $6 billion, including more than $183 million in individual assistance to more than 35,000 households, $3.1 billion in Small Business Administration loans and $2.4 billion for debris removal. The agency called the removal of more than 2.7 million tons of debris “the fastest major debris-removal mission in U.S. history.”
The White House has also pushed back on California’s broader requests. Lauren Bis, a White House spokeswoman, told The A.P. that the administration has obligated billions of dollars for the recovery and called Gov. Gavin Newsom’s request for a $15.7 billion supplemental appropriation an attempt “to pass the blame for his horrible mismanagement of the LA wildfires and recovery efforts.”
What California is still asking for
The dispute is over money beyond the original award. California asked for $28 million for case management after the fires; FEMA instead awarded about $13.2 million for 24 months, to be paid in four installments, according to The A.P. Payments lagged: by August, only one installment had arrived, and the state said it could no longer front the costs.
FEMA released the second and third installments, totaling $6.6 million, on Sept. 30, the day the program faced a cutoff, according to Representative Judy Chu’s office. The state and its nonprofit partners then extended the program through Oct. 31.
Separately, California asked in March for about $6.5 million more to sustain the program for its full term. In a Sept. 24 letter to FEMA, Representatives Judy Chu and Brad Sherman and Senators Schiff and Alex Padilla, all Democrats, wrote that FEMA’s regional office in Oakland had declined a $6,568,265.60 supplemental request on Sept. 11, citing insufficient cost justification. The lawmakers said the program then had 1,288 active cases; the state has appealed.
Ms. Chu, whose district includes Altadena, welcomed the final installment and urged more. “FEMA must do the right thing and approve the State of California’s appeal for additional supplemental funding to sustain DCMP through the full 24-month timeframe that FEMA itself approved,” she said in an Oct. 7 statement.
The Inquirer asked FEMA, the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, Mr. Schiff’s office and CORE, one of the nonprofits running the program, about the status of the request and what happens after Oct. 31. None had responded by publication time.
The broader debate over declarations
The case management fight is unfolding as the president’s disaster decisions draw scrutiny in an election season. The New York Times reported this week that Mr. Trump told a North Carolina audience he would send more aid only if a Republican won the state’s Senate race, then immediately added, “No, I’m only kidding. You’re getting it.”
A POLITICO analysis cited by E&E News found that this term Mr. Trump had approved 23 percent of requests from states whose governor and both senators are Democrats, compared with 89 percent from states with Republicans in those posts. The administration has also approved aid for Democratic-led states, including Wisconsin and Michigan.
Political scientists have documented favoritism in disaster declarations under presidents of both parties, and denials of California requests are not new. Federal records in FEMA’s declaration denials dataset show California requests turned down under President Barack Obama in 2016 and President Joe Biden in 2023.
The Northern California stake
The tighter review has already touched the north state. California’s request for a major disaster declaration for the 2024 Park Fire, which burned 429,603 acres in Butte and Tehama Counties, and the Borel Fire in Kern County, was submitted by Mr. Newsom in September 2024, under President Biden. FEMA’s records show it was turned down on April 11, 2025, 199 days later, after Mr. Trump took office.
FEMA’s administrator, Cameron Hamilton, told state emergency managers this week that states should keep reserves to handle immediate disaster response on their own and that changes shifting responsibility to states could come within six months, The Times reported; he has also said FEMA will give states more time and help to build capacity.
“People are smart enough to know that if the president wants to take away some people’s disaster aid, they can take away your disaster aid, and that’s just a bad system,” Sarah Labowitz, a disaster policy researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Times. The administration’s answer is that a stricter review protects taxpayers and that the money it approved for Los Angeles has been paid in full.
Adaeze Monroe covers Congress, the White House and federal agencies, with a focus on what Washington’s decisions mean for California, for the Washington Bureau. More from Adaeze Monroe
