Trump Pledges White House Will 'Open The Coffers' For California’s Wildfire Recovery

California Gov. Gavin Newsom greeted longtime political rival President Donald Trump on the tarmac Friday as the newly inaugurated leader of the free world arrived to survey the damage wrought by devastating wildfires in Los Angeles. 

The pair shook hands before Trump led the short walk to the gaggle of reporters gathered a few dozen yards away. 

“We’re looking to get something completed, and the way you get it completed is to work together,” Trump said. “He’s the governor of the state and we’re going to get it completed, and they’re going to need a lot of federal help,” he said, before turning to Newsom and adding “Unless you don’t need any.”

“We’re going to need a lot of federal help,” the governor responded. 

The exchange set the tone for the president’s tour, which included a press conference with Democratic politicians like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and local civic leaders. It also stood in contrast to comments from some Republicans in Congress who had spent much of the week signaling that they would tie disaster relief to demands for political reforms. 

The shift in tone is welcome relief for California's elected officials and the 3.8 million people living in Los Angeles. Republicans in Congress had signaled they were looking for a fight, but Trump’s visit Friday has effectively extinguished the nascent feud, at least for now. 

“There can be no golden age without the Golden State,” Trump said Friday, a reference to his inauguration day speech where Trump declared that a new era had dawned in the country. “We're going to turn it around, and we're going to open the coffers,” the president said. 

Trump urged officials in California to eliminate regulations and cut red tape that he said has stifled development in the state for decades. Drawing on his own experiences, the president called out the state’s California Coastal Commission as getting in the way of development. 

“I've dealt with the Coastal Commission for a long time, they are considered the most difficult in the entire country, and we cannot have them play their games and wait 10 years to give somebody a permit,” he said. “I'm going to override the Coastal Commission, I'm not going to let them get away with it, their antics.”

The Coastal Commission was created by the California Coastal Act, which has been partially waived by Newsom for those rebuilding from fires.

Residents who had lost their homes in the fires called out from the audience to Trump, Bass and other elected officials, complaining they were still not being allowed access to their neighborhoods and asking when they would be allowed to start clearing away the ash and other debris that used to be their homes. 

After Bass responded that she was hoping to get them back to their properties within a week, Trump said that was too long for residents to have to wait and that the city should do more to expedite new construction. 

The federal government would fast-track all federal permits for the city, and municipal officials should do the same, Trump said.   

“I don't want to be the only one to give you permits in one day, and then I find out that the cities, the towns and the state are not going to give you permits,” he said. “The problem with permits is it only takes one, and you might need seven different permits. You shouldn't have any at this point, you should just let them build.”

He also suggested that victims who had lost their homes should be allowed to build beyond zoning rules to compensate them for the disaster. 

“Give them a bonus on size, maybe a little bonus on height, they went through hell,” he said.  

In addition to Newsom's executive order suspending two of the state's usual development review processes shortly after the fires broke out, Bass issued her own order aimed at streamlining debris clearance and expediting permitting.

“The mayor came out immediately with an emergency order to rapidly increase processing time of permits, waiving discretionary approvals,” Sean Burton, CEO of Los Angeles-based multifamily developer and investor CityView, told Bisnow last week. “If there's a model for doing that and it works, my hope is they can get the parts of it ported over to more traditional housing.”

Trump’s remarks followed a week where senior congressional Republicans floated potential conditions they could demand in exchange for aid.

The debate on Capitol Hill began as Eaton and Palisades fires blazed. They and other fires have killed at least 24 people and turned more than 40,000 acres into a scorched wasteland since they sparked earlier this month. 

Firefighters and first responders have brought the fires mostly to heel, but dry weather and high winds sparked new blazes like the Hughes and Sepulveda fires last week that threatened to force more than 50,000 people to evacuate their homes.

Rain sprinkled over parts of the city Sunday morning and more is in the forecast through Monday, bringing an end to an eight-month dry spell that created prime wildfire conditions.

The Eaton and Palisades fire alone damaged 4.5M SF of commercial property valued at $1.9B, according to CoStar. Properties backed by more than $1.3B worth of CMBS loans were inside evacuation zones earlier this month, and early estimates put the total price tag of the fires above $250B.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was among the Republicans indicating there would be conditions to disaster relief. 

“There are natural disasters — I'm from Louisiana, we're prone to that, we understand how these things work — but then there's also human error,” he told Meet The Press host Kristen Welker on Jan. 19. “When the state and local officials make foolish policy decisions that make the disaster exponentially worse, we need to factor that in. And I think that's a common-sense notion.”

In addition to policy changes in California, Johnson said Republicans were also weighing whether to leverage the disaster to achieve their national policy goals by combining an aid package with a bill to increase the debt limit. 

But those proposals were notably absent from the Sunday morning political talk shows this week, with Washington instead focused on some of the president’s executive orders and unconventional picks for key administration roles. 

“I have had wildfire victims in my district. I have met with families who have lost everything, priceless family heirlooms, their entire sense of identity,” Democratic Rep. Josh Harder said on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday. “I think these wildfire victims feel like political pawns. They have been failed by both California and Washington.”

While in North Carolina, where the president toured storm damage Friday before heading to California, Trump suggested his administration might move to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency. The comments raised hackles in states that are prone to natural disasters, and Vice President JD Vance appeared on CBS’s Face The Nation to add some context to Trump's comments.

On multiple occasions Friday, Trump said each state was better equipped to handle disaster relief than the federal government. He suggested that FEMA be eliminated and states take over providing aid, but said the federal government would reimburse states for operations rather than running them outright. 

Vance echoed that perspective Sunday.

“FEMA in North Carolina, in California, in Florida — with some of the hurricanes — has often been a disaster,” he said. “It's not because we don't have good people at FEMA, it's because bureaucratic red tape and garbage prevents the rapid deployment of resources to people who need it the most.” 

Even before fires tore through Los Angeles this month, the city needed to build roughly 400,000 homes to have a balanced market, according to Freddie Mac. Los Angeles frequently tops lists of the country’s least affordable cities and has grappled with a growing homeless population that climbed to 75,000 last year.

Californians are quick to point out that the state is a net contributor to U.S. tax revenue. In 2022, the state contributed $83B more in taxes to the federal government than it received. 

“California pays billions and billions and billions more in tax dollars to the federal government than it ever takes back in services,” Burton said. “It feels like we paid our bill, the federal government should help us rebuild.”