In early September 2020, wildfires tore through eastern Washington state, obliterating tens of millions of dollars of property, displacing hundreds of rural residents and killing a 1-year-old boy.
But then-President Donald Trump refused to act on Gov. Jay Inslee’s request for $37 million in federal disaster aid because of a bitter personal dispute with the Democratic governor, an investigation by POLITICO’s E&E News shows.
Trump sat on Inslee’s request for the final four months of his presidency, delaying recovery and leaving communities unsure about rebuilding because nobody knew if they would get federal help.
Trump ignored Inslee’s 73-page request even after the Federal Emergency Management Agency found during weeks of inspection that the wildfires easily met the federal damage threshold for disaster aid.
“It really was an outrageous abuse of power,” Inslee said in a recent interview with E&E News.
Trump’s campaign did not respond to E&E News’ questions.
The two men had been feuding in the months leading up to the wildfire with Trump calling Inslee “a snake,” a “nasty person” and a “failed presidential candidate” after the governor criticized the administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. And Inslee, in an open letter two days before seeking disaster aid, assailed Trump’s “reckless statements” on climate change and his “gutting of environmental policies.”
Trump’s spurning of Washington — documented by internal emails, letters, federal records and interviews — is the latest example of how the former president used disaster requests to punish political foes. E&E News reported in early October that Trump had refused to give disaster aid to California after wildfires in 2018 because the state is strongly Democratic.
E&E News’ current investigation found other previously unreported examples of Trump denying or delaying disaster aid to governors who had criticized him, though the reasons for the White House moves are unclear.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican representing the wildfire-damaged area in Washington state, asked Trump at least twice to approve disaster aid and wrote him a desperate letter on Dec. 31, 2020, obtained by E&E News.
“People in my district need support, and I implore you to move forward in providing it to those who have been impacted by devastating wildfires,” McMorris Rodgers wrote. Her district was one of three in Washington state to support Trump in the 2020 election. Washington has 10 congressional districts.
Five months after Trump left office, McMorris Rodgers introduced a bill to require presidents to act on governors’ requests for disaster aid within 30 days. She did not respond to a request for comment.
President Joe Biden ultimately approved Inslee’s request two weeks after taking office — 141 days after Inslee had made it — and has given Washington $45 million.
The time span — nearly five months — is the longest it’s taken a president to approve a disaster request, according to an E&E News analysis of more than 1,000 FEMA damage reports since 2007 when they first became publicly available.
The average time period for presidential approval is 17 days.
Trump has faced scrutiny of his record with disasters as he has criticized the Biden administration during recent campaign stops in Georgia and North Carolina for its response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton.
But Trump recently endorsed using disaster aid to bully opponents. During an Oct. 12 rally in rural California, Trump celebrated a proposal to increase agricultural water supplies by weakening endangered-species protections and threatened Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.
“We’ll force it down his throat,” Trump said, “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 forest fires that you have.’”
Newsom recently told POLITICO that Trump withheld disaster aid to California “on multiple occasions” over political differences and stepped up the threats during his final months in office.
“He was very threatening,” Newsom said. “He was telling me right before the [2020] election … ‘You better work with me now, because I’m going to get reelected, and you’re going down on this.’”
‘Everything was gone’
The wildfires in Washington burned 640,000 acres — an area more than three times the size of New York City. Fueled by high winds, low humidity and drought conditions, the fires burned with such intensity that local resident Larry Frick heard ammunition popping from homes across the town of Malden, population 216.
“It looked like a landscape of hell or a war zone,” Frick said. “Everything was gone.”
Fire destroyed 80 percent of the homes in Malden as well as town hall, the post office, library, food bank, fire station and most trees.
Malden is largely rebuilt, but what Frick remembers is “the childishness” of Trump’s refusal to act on Inslee’s request.
“We’re supposed to be taking care of one another, and that didn’t happen at a federal level,” Frick said.
Malden Mayor Dan Harwood said that Trump’s inaction “slowed down the start” of recovery and “made things stressful” because federal aid was uncertain.
“The unknown didn’t help anybody,” Harwood told E&E News.
As wildfire survivors waited, Inslee and other Washington elected officials urged Trump through public letters and private emails.
Casey Katims, Inslee’s director of federal affairs, was in regular contact with the White House, promoting the disaster request and trying to understand the holdup.
In a Nov. 8, 2020, email obtained by E&E News through a public-records request, Katims pleaded with Nicholas Pottebaum, the White House deputy director of intergovernmental affairs.
“Our emergency management teams at the state and local levels are struggling and unable to proceed with response and recovery efforts until we get a decision,” Katims wrote.
“Nic would take my phone calls but was not forthcoming about the reason for the delay,” Katims said in a recent interview.
Pottebaum, now a Republican staffer on the Senate Budget Committee, declined to comment.
The inaction troubled all 12 members of Washington’s congressional delegation.
“There was a feeling of exasperation and frustration that little could be done to persuade the president to grant a declaration for assistance that was so needed and warranted,” Katims said. Katims is now executive director of the U.S. Climate Alliance, a coalition of governors.
Four days before Trump left office, an unnamed aide to McMorris Rodgers told the Spokesman Review in Spokane that the “holdup now is the relationship between the president and Gov. Inslee.”
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said she had called “numerous Trump administration officials” about the disaster aid and her staff engaged with the administration “countless times.”
“Never in my lifetime have I seen a President withhold disaster aid over politics — until Trump came into office,” Murray said in a recent statement to E&E News. “Donald Trump’s treatment of the town of Malden was a complete disgrace.”
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said in a statement, “Trump let a request for desperately needed federal aid go unanswered while hundreds of residents were left in the dark not knowing whether they had resources to rebuild.”
Inslee said he doesn’t recall what triggered Trump’s inaction and that he never spoke to Trump about the disaster request.
“There was no rationale at all given for this by anybody at any time,” Inslee said. “It was a hugely traumatic experience, and this just added to the trauma.”
Delays in three other states
Trump learned the political value of disasters after Hurricane Harvey overwhelmed southeastern Texas in 2017 and Time magazine wrote a flattering accountof the administration’s response, said Mark Harvey, who was Trump’s senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff.
“It really got stuck in his mind at that point-of-disaster response, that showing up and doing this disaster theater is a way for him to garner support and a way for him to be admired — and that feeds into his personality,” said Harvey, who is supporting Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
Harvey said that as Trump’s presidency continued, he more frequently delayed disaster aid based on factors that had nothing to do with helping with cleanup and rebuilding.
“It was, ‘What looks good for me,’ not, ‘What’s the right thing to do,’” Harvey said.
E&E News found instances that fit the pattern described by Harvey in which Trump, after he lost the 2020 election, delayed or ignored requests for disaster aid from governors who had criticized him. E&E News could not determine reasons for the delays and inaction, which can result from extensive White House review.
In a 2022 book by the journalists Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, a Democrat, and then-Gov. Larry Hogan, a Maryland Republican, recalled that Trump told them to “ask nicely” for additional disaster aid, which he then granted. (Martin and Burns wrote the book while employed at The New York Times but now work at POLITICO, where Martin is the politics bureau chief and Burns is the head of news.)
Pete Gaynor, whom Trump put in charge of FEMA in 2020, said in an interview that he did not recall details of individual requests for disaster aid.
“I will emphatically say I never had a conversation with the president, the vice president, OMB or anyone else in that orbit that said, ‘Drag your feet,’” Gaynor said referring to the White House Office of Management and Budget. Gaynor left FEMA at the end of Trump’s presidency and is a senior adviser at McChrystal Group business consultants.
Under federal law, FEMA calculates damage from an event, determines whether it exceeds a threshold for disaster aid and makes a recommendation to the president, who makes the final decision.
Georgia
On Nov. 21, 2020, three days after asking Trump for disaster aid to recover from a tropical storm, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia enraged Trump by certifying election results declaring Biden the winner of the state’s 16 electoral votes.
Trump, who had been urging Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to declare him the winner in Georgia, assailed the governor as a “moron” and a “nut job” after his certification. Trump sat on the disaster request for 55 days before approving it with eight days left in his term.
Kemp, who has endorsed Trump and appeared at campaign rallies with him, declined to comment.
Utah
Trump took 97 days to approve a disaster request by then-Utah Gov. Gary Herbert, a Republican, following damaging storms in October 2020 despite a FEMA report showing the state sustained twice as much damage as needed to meet the threshold for providing disaster aid.
While Trump was considering the request, Herbert was one of the first Republican officials to recognize Biden as the election winner and denounced a decision by Utah’s attorney general to join a lawsuit challenging the 2020 election results in four states that Trump lost.
Herbert, who left office in January 2021, did not respond to a phone message.
Maryland
Trump took no action on a Nov. 12, 2020, request for aid by Hogan after a tropical storm caused damage that FEMA said was sufficient to qualify for federal aid.
Hogan, a moderate Republican in a heavily Democratic state, assailed Trump’s handling of Covid-19 and made a well-publicized trip to South Korea to buy 500,000 test kits.
Ten days after Hogan’s request, Trump mocked Hogan on Twitter, calling him “just as bad as the flawed tests he paid big money for!”
Hogan, who is running for U.S. Senate this year, did not respond to E&E News questions.
After Biden approved the request on Feb. 4, 2021, Maryland Emergency Management Agency Director Russell Strickland told a congressional hearing that the “delay caused us to miss opportunities” to strengthen the state against future disasters.
“Citizens do not have the ability to wait months to receive assistance and return to their homes and businesses,” Strickland testified.
Chris Cadelago contributed to this report.
