When record snowstorms hit the northeast this year, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island applied for help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Despite such requests having been routinely approved in the past, the Trump administration denied the requests to those majority-Democratic states. The administration did so even though, Politico reported Wednesday, FEMA’s regional offices agreed that, under federal guidelines, the requested assistance was warranted.
If everything goes according to plan, by this fall, Trump will have given himself the ability to veto any federal aid that might benefit his political opponents with little regard for the Americans his decisions impact.
The denials are part of a broader pattern that shows a major disparity in the Trump administration’s approval rates for disaster aid with the determining factor appearing to be the political leanings of the state. As of March, according to Politico, Trump had “approved just 23% of disaster funding requests from states with a Democratic governor and two Democratic senators,” while “states with a Republican governor and two Republican senators, it’s the opposite — Trump has approved 89% of their requests.” (White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told Politico about its earlier reporting, “There is no politicization to the President’s decisions on disaster aid.”)
That’s not believable. Trump has already used billions of dollars as a weapon against Democratic governors and, if everything goes according to plan, by this fall, he will have given himself the ability to veto any federal aid that might benefit his political opponents with little regard for the Americans his decisions impact. A new rule under consideration would allow political appointees to reject applications for federal grant if the projects don’t “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.” The New York Times reported that the White House hopes to finalize and put the rule in place by October, just in time to hedge against the GOP potentially losing control of Congress in the midterm elections.
Until recently, the administration had officially blamed various cuts to projects and delays in federal assistance on the need to prevent “waste, fraud and abuse.” Of course, Trump himself has never been subtle about playing favorites. When faced with a federal shutdown last year, the president said on social media that he would prioritize slashing funds and staffers at supposed “Democrat Agencies.” He likewise made clear to the press that states that voted against him in 2024 would hurt the most: “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”
FEMA assistance isn’t the only funding Trump has politicized. In response to a lawsuit filed by a group of California researchers who objected to the Trump administration canceling more than $7.5 billion in clean energy grants last year, Department of Energy officials conceded that the grants were canceled “based solely” on political considerations.
In any previous administration, such an admission would have been an absolute bombshell of a scandal. After all, here’s the government “picking winners and losers,” as Republicans accused the Obama administration of doing, based on nothing but the party of the governor or senators. But such hostility is par for the course for a White House that has gleefully used any opportunity to withhold money from “blue states,” even when it hurts Republicans who live there.
Just last week, the government extended holds on more than $1 billion in Medicaid funding to California and Minnesota, whose governors are two of Trump’s most outspoken critics. In January, the Department of Health and Human Services suspended several programs for needy families over potential “fraud” in five Democratic-led states.
Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, who has been eager to slash federal spending that he deems “woke,” has been spearheading that effort. Vought took advantage of the federal shutdown last year to withhold transit funding to Chicago and infrastructure money for New York. While he’s been better about sticking to the “waste and fraud” language than Trump, there’s no mistaking his criteria.
The one silver lining is that there’s a way to stop these efforts to hurt Democratic-led states, albeit one that requires a more muscular and assertive Congress than we’ve seen in decades.
Once the new rule he’s crafted is fully put in place, Vought will no longer have to pretend that suspicions of “waste and fraud” are driving his funding cuts.
The one silver lining is that there’s a way to stop these efforts to hurt Democratic-led states, albeit one that requires a more muscular and assertive Congress than we have seen in decades. The administration has so far taken advantage of areas where the law has left certain decisions in the hands of the executive branch. Approval of state disaster requests is entirely discretionary under federal law, for example, and the proposed new rule only applies to grants that don’t have explicit spending instructions from lawmakers.
It follows, then, that if lawmakers want to ensure the money they appropriate is spent, then their instructions need to be ironclad. Republican legislators may be OK with Trump’s weaponization of federal funds now, but it behooves them to act now before a future Democratic president applies the same precedent. If Vought wants to continue to play games and look for loopholes to spite Democrats, then Congress must bind his hands on every piece of spending legislation that reaches Trump’s desk.
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