These blue states aren’t getting fire prevention money from Trump
Nestled in the middle of rural Northern California woods, the Hoopa Valley reservation is primed to burn. Wildfires sweep through every few years, over the same burn scars, threatening to consume the nearly 900 homes on the brush-filled valley floor.
And with the wild, intensifying swing of historically wet winters often followed by unrelenting heat, the dense vegetation surrounding the reservation’s houses, dirt roads and evacuation routes has become dangerous. The tribe has gotten lucky in the past, but RobRoy Latham knows that it only takes minutes for the bone-dry, sacred mountains to erupt in fire.
The tribe’s emergency manager and disaster expert, Latham spent nearly four years working on a grant to clear about 600 acres of potential fire fuel and create defensible spaces around evacuation roads, communication towers, water tanks and dozens of vulnerable homes, documents provided to The Washington Post show. The Federal Emergency Management Agency obligated $7 million for the work, Latham said, and the state agreed to match 10 percent of the grant, according to an email viewed by The Post.
Then, Latham said, “everything stopped.” The hazard mitigation grant the Hoopa Valley Tribe sought comes out of an often bureaucratic program under the Department of Homeland Security that helps recovering communities prepare for the next big disaster. It is one of about 1,000 such grants held up in President Donald Trump’s second term, according to internal records obtained by The Post.
FEMA dramatically slowed its distribution of these grants last summer, according to a Post analysis of public data through May 4. The agency went from awarding roughly $91 million per month between February and June in 2025 to about $3 million per month for the rest of the year, the analysis shows. After facing legal scrutiny for holding up disaster-related funds, the agency reversed course and released $760 million in grant funding in March alone, of a total of $1.1 billion so far this year.
But two states facing heightened wildfire risk this year — California and Colorado — have received scarcely any of the money since last July, The Post’s analysis found. The delay has affected about 20 wildfire-related projects across the West, according to internal records, most of those in California and Colorado.
Although the Trump administration has made it clear it wants to give states less federal money for disasters, especially for projects related to climate change, 10 current and former FEMA staffers, state officials and disaster experts say it is unusual for specific states to consistently not receive federal assistance.
“There’s a pattern — a state like Colorado is repeatedly being denied FEMA aid and others like California are waiting on FEMA money that’s already been approved,” said Debbra Goh, a research assistant at Carnegie Endowment’s Sustainability, Climate and Geopolitics program who has studied the grant data. “Hazard-mitigation funding is designed to help communities prepare for the next disaster. Without it, communities are rebuilding into the same risk.”
In a statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said, “There is no politicization to the president’s decisions on disaster relief.”
“The president responds to each request for federal assistance under the Stafford Act with great care and consideration,” Jackson said, “ensuring American tax dollars are used appropriately and efficiently by the states to supplement — not substitute — their obligation to respond to and recover from disasters.”
The administration, she added, “remains committed to empowering and working with state and local governments to invest in their own resilience before disaster strikes, making response less urgent and recovery less prolonged.”
FEMA sent a handful of other states, including Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Minnesota, less than $500,000 each since last July.
By contrast, FEMA sent $239 million in hazard-mitigation grant funding to Florida, $131 million to Texas and $117 million to Louisiana during the same time period.
In a statement, FEMA said the 76-day lapse in appropriations for the agency “significantly impacted FEMA’s capacity to review and process grant applications across the country. FEMA is actively working to clear the backlog and expedite approvals for all pending projects, including those in California and Colorado.”
The delays to these grants, however, predate this year’s shutdown, which began in mid February. In an exchange with then-DHS Secretary Kristi L. Noem in March, Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-California) said his office starting pressing her department in December to send about $2 million designated in June 2025 for Plumas County, a highly fire-vulnerable region he represents.
After the federal government declares a major disaster, FEMA sets aside money for these grants based on the scale of the catastrophe, and the funds become available about a year later for projects such as buying out flood-prone properties and making homes less flammable. After an often lengthy review process, the agency awards the money.
But a policy instituted by Noem, requiring her approval for any grant of $100,000 or more, created a significant backlog and slowed the agency’s ability to give these funds to communities such as the Hoopa Valley Tribe.
California received just $830,000 from the program since July 2025, less than 1 percent of the total funds it received from February to June 2025. The state is waiting on $1.68 billion, according to the state’s office of emergency services — some of which is for wildfire-related projects in counties that Trump won in 2024. Other delayed grants were supposed to help Los Angeles County streamline its permitting processes to speed up the rebuilding process; meanwhile, Trump has attacked state and L.A. officials, saying they are not rebuilding fast enough.
To date, Trump has not approved any money related to preventing wildfires in L.A
FEMA Hazard Mitigation Grant Program payments by month
Under Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s leadership, the agency dramatically reduced grant spending beginning in July 2025. It has released $1.1 billion so far in 2026 after facing legal challenges.
Colorado has not received any federal funding to prevent disasters since July 2025, according to The Post’s analysis and to two people familiar with the situation who — like others interviewed for this story — spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter.
“It’s plain evidence that the president is playing political games with disaster relief,” Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colorado) said in an interview. “I think it is unconscionable.”
A California ‘grant termination effort’
Trump officials concluded that they did not want to give additional grants to some states, such as California, because they were not spending the money fast enough, according to two former senior FEMA officials and one former congressional staffer with direct knowledge of the situation.
Trump appointees at DHS halted all grants and awards for review after arriving at the department last year, instructing FEMA officials to search for terms such as “climate change, social media, diversity, equity or inclusion” and stop funding those efforts.
Appointees also discussed whether they could stop sending California federal aid money last year, according to a June 2025 email obtained by The Post. In it, Josh Gruenbaum — then the commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service — wrote to DHS and U.S. DOGE Service officials: “There is a Gov wide CA grant termination effort on monday. … Please let us know if DHS has any grants that would fit.”
In January, a year after the historic Los Angeles fires, the president issued an executive order claiming the state, county and city did not manage the blazes and that onerous permitting rules prevented homeowners from rebuilding. The order criticized California for not spending $3 billion in funds that it already had, demanding a state audit to show if communities used the grants “in a way that demonstrably mitigated the impact of future wildfires on its citizens.”
The state already has to submit quarterly and annual reviews to FEMA of how it is spending the grants. California is not the only state with at least a third of federal grant money unspent, according to one current FEMA official and two former senior officials.
Take Texas, for example.
Historically, California and Texas have faced similar disaster risks, experts and FEMA officials said, and they have received comparable federal assistance. From 2005 to 2022, FEMA authorized $1.5 billion in mitigation grants to Texas, which has been able to get 56 percent of those funds. California, which had nearly twice as many disasters during this time, was authorized to receive about the same: $1.6 billion, and it has received about half of that amount, internal agency data shows.
Last month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) laid out what the delay has meant for L.A. County neighborhoods: “Communities still have damaged park facilities, fenced-off trailheads, and patched-up roadways that wash out in heavy rain because permanent work cannot move at full speed without the promised federal reimbursement. Schools still wait for dollars to rebuild facilities and classrooms that burned or were heavily damaged.”
‘Climate change is a five-alarm fire’
For Colorado, the grant delays mark the latest standoff with the administration over disaster assistance and other kinds of federal funding.
In March, Trump again rejected the state’s request for a disaster declaration in connection to Colorado’s fifth-largest blaze. The wildfire damaged power lines, ranch land and homes and torched parts of northwestern Rio Blanco County, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) said in a news release that it was the first time in 35 years that the federal government has denied the state this kind of aid.
The White House said that the administration did respond, mobilizing two aerial firefighting systems for Colorado to use during the blazes and offering “enhanced aviation support to Colorado as they battled the Lee and Elk fires.”
The state is still waiting for approval on about a half-dozen wildfire projects, according to internal FEMA records, most of which propose clearing dangerous brush and preparing homes to better withstand flames.
“Climate change is a five-alarm fire — literally — for our state,” Neguse said. “We’ve already had a number of fires, and I anticipate this year could be the most difficult fire season we’ve had in some time. And unfortunately, right now, we find ourselves at a time when the administration has no regard for the communities that it is supposed to serve.”
Colorado, he said, is “entitled to the same relief that folks in Kentucky and South Carolina and other Republican states have been able to access.”
‘Trying to reverse time’
Latham lives smack in the middle of Hoopa Valley’s danger zone: Bald Hill. His ancestors, who used to burn this sacred land above the redwood forests, had a saying, he explained. When brush concealed the high prairies, “our lifeline will be over.”
“They are now almost completely covered,” he said. “We are trying to reverse time as a tribe.”
Hoopa Valley and its surrounding areas face a greater risk than usual this summer, according to the most recent analysis from the National Interagency Fire Center. The tribe’s wildfire plan is now on hold.
Latham said that the Hoopa Valley reservation, whose poverty rate hovers around 21.5 percent, cannot afford to buy or rent the hand tools, machinery and staff to clear all the overgrowth that has invaded their Bald Hill mountains. Some tribes, he added, had already encountered financial problems waiting for the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs to reimburse them for wildfire-related work.
Roughly 150 miles away from Hoopa Valley, officials in California’s mountainous Plumas County are unsure whether they will be able to protect about 65 of their most vulnerable homes. Some of the state’s worst wildfires ravaged this region earlier this decade, devastating the mountain town of Greenville, which has yet to be fully rebuilt.
With the help of a federal housing program, California was going to match 25 percent of Plumas’s federal award, according to Tracey Ferguson, the county’s planning director, but after multiple extensions and nine months “in limbo” trying to get a response from Noem’s office, the match commitment has expired. The county will have to muster about $640,000 on its own to match, she said.
And that is “likely not feasible,” Ferguson said, unless the county board of supervisors votes to take the money out of a settlement from Pacific Gas and Electric Company over its equipment’s role in the 2021 Dixie Fire. The fund was supposed to fund Greenville’s new town hall and a library.
Plumas County now has to choose, she said, between “rebuilding what we lost, or trying to protect what we could lose.”