House Speaker Mike Johnson said alleged failures of state and local leaders should be a factor that determines any conditions on federal aid.
WASHINGTON—Any disaster relief funding issued by Congress in response to recent wildfires in Los Angeles may come with policy conditions, House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Jan. 13.
The wildfires, which began on Jan. 7 amid low humidity and high winds, have affected over
40,000 acres of land in Los Angeles County—particularly, the Pacific Palisades in the City of Los Angeles, Altadena, and the City of Malibu—and killed at least 24 people as of publication time.
President Joe Biden
declared a disaster on Jan. 8, which allowed victims to access funds from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and his outgoing administration has pledged to support relief efforts. However, larger funds to support the recovery will need to be approved by Congress, for which Johnson said conditions are necessary.
“I think there should probably be conditions on that aid. That’s my personal view. We'll see what the consensus is,” Johnson
told CNN’s Manu Raju as he walked through the precincts of the House of Representatives on Jan. 13. “It'll be part of the discussion, for sure,” he said, referring to the House GOP’s plans to respond to the disaster.
Johnson joined the chorus of Republicans who have been critical of the State of California and the City of Los Angeles—both of which have Democratic leaders controlling all branches of their government—for their leadership decisions prior to the wildfires, accusing them of cutting fire prevention spending and mismanaging water resources.
“Obviously, there has been water resource mismanagement, forest management mistakes, [and] all sorts of problems—and it does come down to leadership, and it appears to us that state and local leaders were derelict in their duty in many respects. So that’s something that has to be factored,” Johnson said.
President-elect Donald Trump has called for Gov. Gavin Newsom, who some expect to run for president in 2028, to resign amid the crisis.
Apart from Newsom, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has also faced criticism from Republicans and some Democrats. When the fires began, she was traveling abroad in Ghana. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is from California,
canceled the final foreign trips of their terms to focus on the
disaster response.
California leaders have vowed to counter certain proposed policies from the incoming administration that they disagree with following Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election and the party’s gaining control of both houses of the 119th Congress.
On Dec. 2, Newsom convened a
special session of the California Legislature to enact new laws to resist the policy agenda of the incoming Trump Administration. The session resulted in $50 million of taxpayer money being earmarked for two new legal defense funds—one to sue the new administration over policies affecting California, and another to defend illegal immigrants in the state against deportation and removal from the United States, among other purposes.
“The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need,” Izzy Gardon, director of communications for the office of the governor of California, said in a statement to The Epoch Times regarding Johnson’s remarks.
