Though President Trump tweeted on Wednesday that he had ordered the
Federal Emergency Management Agency to stop helping victims of last year's wildfires in California, a law applying to disaster and emergency declarations says that once a declaration has been made, the president “shall not ... delay or impede the rapid deployment, use and distribution of critical resources to victims of an emergency,” Sharon Bernstein
reports for
Reuters.
"In his tweet, Trump returned to his oft-repeated -- and disputed -- theme that California had mismanaged its forests, over-regulating logging and other measures that would thin them out to make wildfires less intense," though the fire likely began in a federally owned forest, Reuters reports. "It is not clear whether Trump was referring to money already approved, which FEMA is distributing, or to future funds."
The tweet came the day after the governors of Oregon and Washington published an open letter asking Trump to allocate more money for managing federally owned forests in the Western U.S., Bernstein reports.
"FEMA has so far made available about $50 million to help victims of the wildfires in Paradise as well as in other parts of [California] with housing needs, according to the agency’s website. There was no indication the funds had been cut off," Bernstein reports. "Last year, the state asked Congress to appropriate an additional $9 billion in assistance, about half of it from FEMA. That request has been delayed as Congress deals with the funding disputes that have led to a partial shutdown of the federal government."
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