Our new book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The first year of the second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments. Trump is weaponizing the flow of federal funds to the states.
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 Blizzard of 2026 certainly achieved a pinnacle ranking in the memories of those who experienced it and climatologically in the historical rankings of snowstorms,” said a NOAA report confirming Rhode Island met the requirement for disaster aid.
Presidents retain sole authority over granting federal disaster aid to states, but it’s highly unusual to deny a governor’s request after FEMA field offices have verified that damage estimates exceeded preestablished levels, according to a former agency official who worked under Republican and Democratic administrations.
“I can’t think of a time a declaration was denied” for a state that met FEMA and NOAA standards, said the former FEMA official who was granted anonymity to speak about internal decision making.
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.
