Disaster relief no place for political football
By Erika D. Smith / Bloomberg Opinion
As (bad) luck would have it, both President Joe Biden and California Gov. Gavin Newsom were in Los Angeles this week, arriving just in time for some of the worst wildfires ever to hit Southern California. Seeing the trail of death and destruction, Newsom did what any governor would do: He requested federal disaster aid. And Biden, seeing the same, did what most presidents would do: He quickly approved it.
“No politics. No hand-wringing. No kissing of the feet,” Newsom told reporters as a gigantic plume of black smoke billowed above his head and over the Pacific Ocean. “The president of the United States said, ‘Yes. What else do you need?’”
Newsom should be able to expect the same from the next president of the United States, Donald Trump. But he can’t. And that should matter to not only Californians, but all Americans who, thanks to climate change, are experiencing more weather-related disasters than ever and going broke trying to rebuild their lives and businesses.
-snip-
Olivia Troye, a homeland security adviser in the first Trump White House, has divulged that local elected officials regularly sought out her help because Trump would refuse to sign documents approving federal disaster aid. Troye and another Trump 1.0 official, Mark Harvey, told Politico last year that Trump only wanted to send such aid to states and counties that voted for him. “We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas,” Harvey said. On the other hand, assistance to reliably red Florida and Alabama flowed freely.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-disaster-relief-no-place-for-political-football/
= new reply since forum marked as read
