Before the Biden administration left town, it gave California immediate federal aid with no strings attached for areas stricken by wildfires. Setting aside for the moment the disparate treatment given to western North Carolina and the extent to which Biden tried to tie the hands of the incoming Trump administration, it’s fine for the feds to ensure that the first tranche of disaster aid moves fast and unencumbered, even at the cost of a certain level of moral hazard.
This was also my view at the time of the initial pandemic spending bill or the initial efforts to stabilize Wall Street in the fall of 2008, or the initial military aid rushed to Ukraine. But you need to proceed with more caution when you have the luxury of time. If you keep shoveling money out the door after the first blush of a crisis without oversight or constraints, you end up regretting it to a very large price tag.
So it is in California. But Republicans eager to put more strings on further aid to California also need to be careful not to set precedents they will live to regret.
California is an easy target. Not only has its government generally mismanaged nearly every aspect of a society that ought to be basking in a geographic paradise full of vibrant industries, but it has specifically mismanaged matters very directly related to the wildfires, from water policy to brush-clearing policy and forest management to cutting fire prevention.
Nobody much disputes these days that acting as a backstop insurer to bail out states and localities for enormous natural disasters is a proper job for the federal government. But what can it ask in return? There’s a lot of discussion right now, as Donald Trump prepares to visit California, about how Washington’s next aid package to California should demand reforms:
California Republicans are pushing back against suggestions by President Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson and other Republicans that federal disaster aid for victims of wildfires that ravaged Southern California should come with strings attached. . . . In an interview aired Wednesday night, Trump said he may withhold aid to California until the state adjusts how it manages its scarce water resources. He falsely claimed that California’s fish conservation efforts in the northern part of the state are responsible for fire hydrants running dry in urban areas.
The second ranking Senate Republican, John Barrasso of Wyoming, told colleagues in a Senate floor speech that “We’ve seen massive mismanagement and gross incompetence by the Democrat leaders in California. That must change.” He introduced legislation that takes steps to improve forest management, and said “It should be attached to any disaster relief that goes to California.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., also said he wants conditions tied to aid. He told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he understands the need for disaster relief — after all, he’s from Louisiana — ”but then there’s also human error, and when the state and local officials make foolish policy decisions that make the disaster exponentially worse, we need to factor that in, and I think that’s a common sense notion.”
Trump has also made similar points. During his inaugural address Monday, the president said “We are watching fires still tragically burned from weeks ago without even a token of defense.”
If the feds are going to bail out states and localities, it’s reasonable to ask for some conditions. But it can also be a very dangerous precedent if those conditions aren’t very closely connected to local policies that contribute to disasters. It’s not hard to picture future Democratic administrations or Congresses using a similar justification to add conditions to aid to Louisiana, Florida, Texas, or North Carolina that ask for either broad regulation of their economies in the name of “stopping climate change” or, even more capaciously, demanding that states change their laws on topics such as abortion and transgenderism to fall in line with the priorities of Washington.
If Republicans want to avoid giving any cover to that strategy, they should be careful to tie any conditions scrupulously to the particular questions of managing the outbreak and/or fighting of fires.