Trump's Disaster Federalism

The president wants to condition aid to California and acknowledges that, yes, states can and do "take care of problems".

Last week, Donald Trump visited Los Angeles to survey wildfire damage. In addition to a confrontational press conference with L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and local officials, Trump told a gaggle of reporters on a separate occasion that he wants to condition federal aid on California adopting voter identification and reworking its water management system. Trump also questioned the utility of FEMA altogether, citing what he sees as FEMA’s inept response to the recovery effort in North Carolina. All of this raises interesting questions about federalism. Quid pro quo is part of Trump’s governing style in dealing with foreign countries—and indeed, it is deeply entrenched in Washington—but now that apparently extends to the federal government’s relationship with the states.

California has long been a punching bag for the right, just as the right has long been a punching bag for California liberals. Governor Gavin Newsom and Trump have been known to have a very public feud, but it appears they briefly set it aside when Newsom greeted Trump upon his arrival in the state. Newsom has made it clear that the state needs help, which, as time will tell, may embolden Trump to drive a harder bargain. On the other hand, back in 2018, during his first term when California was similarly ravaged by wildfires, Trump conditioned aid on California adopting better forest management practices. He was criticized at the time for this but ultimately approved the aid. Since then, California has taken some measures to improve forest management.

This wouldn’t be the first time Trump has withheld aid for personal, political, or policy gain. The most infamous case being the aid he withheld from Ukraine in exchange for damaging information on then-candidate Joe Biden, the subject of Trump’s first impeachment. He has demanded larger military contributions from NATO member states if they want the U.S. to stay committed to the pact. In 2018, the federal government shut down when Congress and Trump couldn’t agree to include border wall funding in an appropriations bill. Quid pro quo has also been a core part of Trump’s trade policy, where he has sought to punish foreign countries for trade practices or as leverage to advance his policy agenda as he successfully did with Colombia over the weekend.

And, let’s be real, egregious examples of quid pro quo — the sort of shady deals cut in smoke-filled backrooms — are rife in Congress, among federal regulators and across the public sector at the state executive and legislative levels.

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But as it pertains to Trump here, conditioning domestic emergency aid on policy preferences seems especially crass. The best argument for withholding the aid is the fact that California wildfires are an unambiguously local issue—not a federal one. To the extent preparation and recovery were insufficient, it may be the result of Californians' actions, though there is plenty of discourse about the extent to which fires of this scale were inevitable. How home insurance is heavily regulated in California, paired with counterproductive new anti-price gouging laws in Los Angeles, imposes burdens on those affected by the fires. Whether L.A. had enough water on hand to mitigate spread, or whether diverting water from other parts of the state is worthwhile, will be hotly debated. So, the question becomes: If California mismanaged this crisis why should the feds bail out the state without conditions — at least ones germane to the disaster itself?

Whether one believes outcomes or autonomy to be the overriding value might influence that answer. In any case, as long as the U.S. remains a federation even loosely committed to the well-being of its neighbors, it makes sense for aid to be pooled and sent to states in times of disaster.

But withholding aid could pose legal questions. Back in 2012, when the Supreme Court issued its ruling that upheld the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, in a vote of 7-2, it struck down the law’s provision requiring states to expand Medicaid or lose all existing federal Medicaid funding, ruling that the condition was unconstitutionally coercive, effectively turning financial assistance into a tool for commandeering state policy. A core principle of federalism is that the federal government cannot impose conditions that a state wouldn’t otherwise seek to meet on its own accord. In this case, states got to keep their existing Medicaid funds without having to expand the program. Trump’s approach here might raise similar constitutional concerns if he and Newsom reach such an impasse that they end up litigating this in court.

But these points fail to grapple with a deeper question: Why is disaster aid so heavily dependent on the federal government?

In a separate visit to North Carolina, Trump questioned the utility of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), saying states should “take care of disasters.” A CBS report quotes Trump as saying:

"I like, frankly, the concept: When North Carolina gets hit, the governor takes care of it. When Florida gets hit, the governor takes care of it, meaning the state takes care of it…To have a group of people come in from an area that don’t even know where they’re going in order to solve a problem immediately is something that never worked for me."

He continued:

“That’s what states are for, to take care of problems,”

The report says that Trump suggested the federal government simply pay the states directly after an emergency instead of managing disasters along with the states. Currently the Stafford Act, the law governing how federal disaster aid is disbursed through FEMA, has the agency covering 75 percent of disaster recovery expenses and states covering 25 percent though, in practice, presidents have waived that cost share and the feds have wound up covering the entire tab.

But I gotta say, listening to a president acknowledge explicitly that there are states and they, too, take care of problems is so banal and yet so refreshing within a national political and media landscape that operates on the premise the federal government runs the country. This isn’t Trump’s first very nonchalant expression of federalism, as he repeatedly had based his support for the Dobbs decision on favoring an approach where states, and ultimately the people, determine abortion regulation. Indeed, states have the capacity and the expertise to plan for and respond to disasters within their borders and without the federal government leading the effort.

Trump's suggestion to bypass FEMA and have states manage their disaster relief funding directly also addresses the inefficiencies and complexities of federal aid distribution. Federal programs like FEMA often come with complex guidelines, delays in approval, and a long process for disbursing funds. If states received direct funding post-disaster, they could implement recovery efforts faster, potentially saving costs that would otherwise be spent on federal bureaucracy. Additionally, governors are more accountable to their citizens for how these funds are spent, which could drive more effective use of resources. Another impediment is that the federal government, despite its reputation for supplying the country in a blanket of comforting uniformity, often introduces inefficiencies that misplace or delay resources, or disrupt local coordination and existing expertise. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in 2010 come to mind.

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That perspective will have its skeptics among most newsrooms, quoted experts, and policy wonks who are wedded to preserving federal power. A PBS report, which very clearly and very falsely claimed the president blamed the wildfire response on a type of rare fish, speculated that if states led disaster relief instead, the cost of living and taxes would go up, according to one quoted academic. That’s indicative of a common fallacy in responding to the devolution of federal power to states: the assumption that there will be zero incentive for anyone to fill the void left by the federal government.

Indeed, during these wildfires in Los Angeles, several states came to the aid of California, including Oregon, Washington, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Montana, and Texas, all deploying several dozen firefighting teams. Texas Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Division of Emergency Management and Texas A&M Forest Service to deploy emergency management and medical personnel. Mexico, too, sent firefighters, and Canada, in coordination with its provinces of Alberta, Ontario, and Quebec, offered substantial support, including water bomber aircraft.

In the end, the absence of federal intervention in matters competently managed by states may be as good an indicator as any that the political culture of the union is strong.

Ah, and it’s worth mentioning that the same PBS report critically covering Trump’s aid conditions acknowledges that FEMA and other purported experts believe that recovery-related conditions on aid may be necessary. So the question is less whether conditions are ethical but what the conditions are.

How Trump arrives at the conclusions he does might be impulsive, “fact-challenged,” and scatterbrained, but occasionally they wind up directing scrutiny toward a status quo that believes itself to have a monopoly on expertise and that has benefited for decades from the security of never having to explain its existence as times change.