As President Donald Trump rushes resources to Texas to assist Kerr County with its recent fatal floods, his administration — along with Congressional Republicans — has yet to act on California's request for wildfire relief funds, according to Governor Gavin Newsom (D).
The Washington Post reported Wednesday on Newsom's comments, which the rumored 2028 presidential candidate delivered while visiting South Carolina. The California governor said Congress has not yet voted on the Golden State's $40 billion request to help Southern California recover from devastating fires earlier this year that displaced tens of thousands of residents (the state has received $3 billion in federal loans for small businesses impacted by the wildfires).
Newsom blasted Trump's conditioning of wildfire aid on California adopting voter ID laws that have typically disenfranchised low-income voters, young voters and other marginalized groups.
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“In Texas, they have very different points of view than we do in California on policy, but I would never imagine conditioning or arguing that our congressional delegation condition aid to Texas until they changed some policy on an ancillary issue,” Newsom said.
Kerr County received several months' worth of rain in just a matter of hours over the holiday weekend, leading to catastrophic flooding that has so far killed 117 people, with roughly 160 more people still missing as of Wednesday. Children reportedly make up approximately one quarter of those killed in the flood
The floods swept through Kerr County in the early morning hours, when many residents were sleeping. The New York Times reported that while the local office of the National Weather Service (NWS) sent out three alerts at 1:14 AM, 4:03 AM and 6:06 AM, the NWS meteorologist in charge of "warning coordination" previously accepted a buyout offer after Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency pushed for steep cuts to the NWS. Additionally, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had called for defunding the NWS' weather forecasting just days prior to the floods.
"This is an atrocious situation, but we’re doing everyone a disservice if every time something like this happens, we say, ‘Now’s not the time for politics,'" Texas Democratic Party chairman Kendall Scudder told the Post.
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