When Disaster Strikes, the Federal Government May Not Be There to Help; Paramount Threatens to Ditch California–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Aug. 13, 2026

Indy Digest: Aug. 13, 2026

I am writing today from Reno, Nevada, my hometown. To the north of here, two wildfires have been burning for the better part of a week, and have thus far burned nearly 140,000 acres.

The Bug Fire and the Stallion Fire, as they’re called, have forced thousands to evacuate and have burned at least nine homes, probably more. On Aug. 10, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo declared a state of emergency. It’s possible that in the coming days or weeks, he may request a federal emergency declaration, which has to be approved by the president of the United States.

Because Lombardo is a Republican, and because President Trump won Nevada in 2024, that request is more likely to be OK’d than a similar request from a “blue” state—like California.

The Associated Press reported last month (via PBS News):

During his second term, Trump has denied a greater percentage of disaster requests than any president dating to 1989. Those denials have not been evenly distributed among states.

Trump has approved 80% of the disaster requests from Republican governors but only about 60% from Democratic governors, according to the AP’s analysis of FEMA data.

The discrepancy is even more apparent when analyzing major disaster declarations based on presidential elections. Trump has approved more than three-fourths of the requests from states that voted for him in the 2024 election but less than half the requests from states that did not. Although there are federal criteria for disaster aid, decisions ultimately are at the president’s discretion.

A batch of denials earlier this month included four Democratic states—Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island—seeking federal aid for a February snowstorm.

Regarding those snowstorm relief-aid denials, Politico reported on July 29:

President Donald Trump overruled his own agencies when he denied disaster aid for four Democratic-led states this month.

Emails between state and federal officials obtained by POLITICO along with more than 150 pages of documents submitted to FEMA by three states—New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island—provide new details about Trump’s low rate of approving disaster aid for his political adversaries. He also denied a request by New York after administration officials verified that it had met federal standards for approval, according to state officials.

Trump’s rejections came after regional offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and NOAA determined that the states met government thresholds for receiving aid following a record-breaking snowstorm in February. …

The emails and documents, which haven’t previously been reported, shed new light on Trump’s decisions to reject an overwhelming number of requests for disaster aid from Democratic-led states, even as he has approved nearly 90 percent of requests from states that are governed by members of his own party. The revelations also offer a fuller picture of Trump’s tenure over the most partisan distribution of FEMA aid since the agency was created in 1979.

Trump’s recent rejections involving snow diverge from the actions of other presidents, including Trump in his first term, who routinely approved similar requests from governors of opposing parties.

Federal declaration requests didn’t used to work this way—and they shouldn’t work this way.

In any major disaster—be it a wildfire, a severe storm, an earthquake or something else—the people who need help span party lines and political beliefs. Registered Democrats are harmed by disasters in “red” states, just as registered Republicans are harmed by disasters in “blue” states.

On Aug. 4, the same day Trump appeared at a fundraiser in Rancho Palos Verdes, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a statement asking the president to approve funding requests to help victims of the January 2025 Los Angeles-area wildfires:

Since February 2025, when President Trump pledged he would “take care” of wildfire survivors, Governor Newsom has submitted multiple supplemental funding requests to the federal government.

None have been approved, and the federal government continues to delay funding it has already committed to.

“After more than 18 months of delay, I hope President Trump’s visit brings long overdue federal recovery funding directly to the families rebuilding after the LA wildfires. This is an opportunity for the President to honor his commitment to provide these survivors with the funding he promised them. There are moments that rise above politics. This could be one of them, Mr. President,” (Newsom said.)

Even in cases when some sort of federal is approved, the Federal Emergency Management Agency under the second Trump administration is taking longer than ever to actually provide that aid. Here’s the lede to an April NPR piece:

Placerville, Calif., bears all the markers of a community at risk of a wildfire. The city’s rolling hillsides are dense with brush, which dries out during the hot summers. Older homes made of wood, which are more prone to igniting, are dotted throughout.

“It’s a perfect storm for devastation,” says Tanya Harlow, wildfire resilience officer for El Dorado County, where Placerville is located.

Local officials are trying to do something about it. The community is one of a handful piloting a program to help houses survive wildfires. Residents can get financial support to add fire-resistant building materials and to clear flammable brush around their homes. The program is largely funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

For three years, the county staff has been preparing to enroll more than 500 homes. But under the Trump administration, the project has been stalled for more than a year. The county needs FEMA to approve the project plan, but the agency hasn’t responded.

Placerville is one of hundreds of communities around the country waiting on a growing backlog at FEMA. States say that under the Trump administration, disaster funding payments have slowed to a trickle, delaying crucial projects that could help communities withstand wildfires, hurricanes and floods.

In all, FEMA owes communities almost $10 billion, according to internal agency documents obtained by NPR. Much of that funding would reimburse local governments for what they’ve already spent repairing infrastructure after major disasters.

By the way, Placerville is in El Dorado County, where Trump received 54.6 percent of the vote in 2024, compared to Kamala Harris’ 42.6 percent.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• A Palm Springs resident who used to work for the Southern Poverty Law Center—an organization that battles white-supremacist groups, and is currently in the Trump administration’s crosshairs—is being charged with fraud. ABC News says: “Heidi Beirich was arrested in California Wednesday morning and charged with several counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering. ABC News was not immediately able to reach her attorney Wednesday afternoon. Prosecutors say Beirich, who previously led the SPLC’s hate groups tracking section, was one among several individuals who oversaw payments to individuals who infiltrated white supremacist groups and acted as informants for SPLC.  In April, the SPLC was charged as an organization with bank fraud and money laundering offenses related to its paying of informants to infiltrate hate groups. Beirich is the first named individual to face criminal charges in connection with the case. The SPLC has rejected allegations it misled donors and has said payments to informants were in line with the organization’s broader mission of rooting out and exposing the internal workings of white supremacist and other hate groups.” Ugh.

• A new report says morale is disturbingly low aboard a U.S. Navy ship. The Washington Post (gift link) reports: “Senate Democrats are demanding answers from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after reports of deteriorating conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea that has been deployed since November. The Defense Department downplayed the situation Thursday amid reports of supply shortages, attempted suicides and sewage problems on the ship, which has been at sea more than a month past its scheduled seven-month deployment. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) sent a list of questions Wednesday to Hegseth and acting Navy secretary Hung Cao regarding his ‘serious concerns’ about the carrier’s extended deployment to support military operations against Iran. Blumenthal said conditions seem to be worsening as reports come out from sailors’ families about alleged food shortages, broken toilets, moldy showers, water contamination and faulty mail systems that prevent care packages from arriving. … The Military Times reported this week that at least two sailors have attempted to jump overboard, with the wife of one sailor saying burnout caused her husband to try to jump.”

• Paramount is threatening to leave the state of California unless the state attorney general backs off his opposition to the company’s merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Variety reports: “(David) Ellison told Paramount senior execs last week that he will relocate Paramount’s operations outside of the state of California if the deal doesn’t close by Sept. 30, sources confirmed to Variety. The final hurdle to closing the Paramount-WBD merger is the states’ antitrust case; therefore, if (Attorney General Rob) Bonta does not agree to negotiate a settlement in the case by then, the company will begin the process of exiting California starting Oct. 1. Ellison told his team the Paramount Skydance board has approved the move. Paramount declined to comment. Ellison’s threat to relocate Paramount in retaliation for California’s Bonta leading the charge to kill the WBD deal—a move that would include much of its studio operations, over time—was first reported by industry newsletter Puck. In response, Bonta called Ellison’s planned exit from the state an ‘attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through.’”

VOTE NOW!

• In attempt to ease a flood of recent criticism (including some locally), Flock Safety has pledged privacy updates for its automatic license plate reader cameras. The New York Times (gift link) says: “Flock Safety, a company facing increasing scrutiny of its nationwide car-tracking technology, announced several updates on Thursday it said would improve privacy protections and prevent misuse. … ‘I realized we had a responsibility to do more,’ said Garrett Langley, chief executive of Atlanta-based Flock. Some cities, including Los Angeles and Dayton, Ohio, have stopped using Flock cameras in order to prevent immigration authorities from gaining access to their data. To provide more local control, the company said on Thursday, it will allow individual police departments to restrict what other law enforcement agencies can see—allowing access to data to find stolen vehicles, for example, but not for immigration violations, the company said. It also is shortening the default time for data retention to a week, down from 30 days, though departments could change those settings. Reducing the time that data is retained is a positive development, said Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel from the American Civil Liberties Union. But he noted that it was easy for police departments to keep the data longer. The heightened local control, too, is ‘good in theory,’ Mr. Marlow said, but has never been proved to work.”

• Congrats. You have lived through the hottest month ever recorded in the contiguous United States. The Associated Press says: “July averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit (24.94 degrees Celsius) across the Lower 48 states, eclipsing the Dust Bowl’s July 1936 by an eighth of a degree. Records go back to 1895. ‘It’s not good when you’re breaking records from the Dust Bowl, which we are in this case,’ said meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections. ‘And that was a crazy sort of situation where you put tens of millions of people in motion. You had this great migration because of the drought and the heat that hit the center of the U.S. — just a cataclysmic event in U. S. history. If we’re exceeding records from The Dust Bowl, that says that we’re in deep trouble.’ Although it was unusually cool in Alaska, hotter-than-normal conditions blanketed the Lower 48, with the most excessive heat in the Mountain West, Southwest, Northern Plains and Southeast. The heat was so widespread that every one of the Lower 48 states was at least 1 degree Fahrenheit (nearly 0.6 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average, said Russ Vose, chief of monitoring at NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information.”

• And finally … today’s recall news involves … miniature refrigerators! The AP reports: “Cooluli has recalled roughly 250,000 of its minifridges due to fire and burn hazards. According to a Thursday notice published by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, the now-recalled ‘10-Liter’ and ‘15-Liter’ minifridges have an electric switch that can short circuit. ‘On some older units, the selector switch that toggles between Cooling and Warming modes can overheat,’ Cooluli explained on its website. To date, per the CPSC, the company has received at least 19 reports of the products smoking, sparking, burning, melting, overheating or catching fire. Such incidents have led to property damages totaling more than $80,000, the CPSC noted, and one customer reported smoke inhalation.”

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