Washington (CNN) — Another natural disaster, another series of false claims from President-elect Donald Trump.
For years, Trump has littered his statements on California wildfires and other disasters with inaccurate assertions. He did it again as wildfires raged in Los Angeles County.
Here is a fact check.
FEMA funding
Trump claimed on social media that President Joe Biden is leaving him “NO MONEY IN FEMA.”
Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. Though FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund was depleted last year by a series of major disasters, Biden signed a bill in December that replenished the fund. “The current balance of the Disaster Relief Fund is approximately $27 billion,” FEMA told CNN in an email on Wednesday. That sum may well prove inadequate to meet the needs created by every disaster that ends up happening this year, but it’s not “no money.”
The December bill approved $29 billion in new money for the Disaster Relief Fund – Biden had asked Congress for $40 billion – plus billions more in other new disaster-related funding.
“Thanks to Congress’s recent passage of a disaster supplemental, FEMA has the funding and resources needed to respond to the needs of California,” the agency said in the Wednesday email.
Trump made similar false claims about FEMA being out of money in the wake of Hurricane Helene in the fall.
Newsom and a ‘water restoration declaration’
Trump blamed Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom for the wildfire crisis – claiming in a social media post that Newsom “refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way.”
Facts First: This is false. Newsom has never refused to sign a “water restoration declaration.” In fact, there is no such document, as Newsom’s office said on social media and experts on California water policy confirmed.
“There was no ‘water restoration declaration’ for him to sign,” Jeffrey Mount, a senior fellow in the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Institute of California think tank, said in a Wednesday interview.
“There was never a ‘water restoration declaration’ in California that the Governor refused to sign,” Brent Haddad, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in an email.
In 2020, Newsom did mount a legal challenge to a Trump plan to deliver more water from Northern California to farmers in the state’s Central Valley agricultural hub, saying he was seeking “to protect highly imperiled fish species close to extinction” in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in the north. Trump’s presidential transition team said Thursday that this is what Trump was referring to. But contrary to Trump’s assertion, this federal initiative was not a declaration for Newsom to “sign” or not – and critically, as we’ll explain in the fact-check item below, experts say there is no connection between this long-running policy battle and the current fires.
California water policy
In the same social media post, Trump continued that Newsom refused to sign the supposed declaration because the governor “wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California.”
Trump continued: “Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA! He is the blame for this. On top of it all, no water for fire hydrants, not firefighting planes.”
Facts First: These Trump claims include exaggerations, inaccuracies and an overarching false narrative. Most notably, experts on California water policy said Wednesday that there is no basis for linking the existence of the Southern California fires or challenges in the firefighting effort to the water that is kept in the north of the state to protect the smelt and other species and ecosystems. Southern California does not have a shortage of water for fighting the fires.
Mount said Trump’s claims in the social media post don’t make “any sense” and that “none of it is true.” He said the debate related to water in the northern Delta “has nothing to do with the fires in Southern California. There’s nothing.”
It’s entirely possible we will learn that state or local leaders made policy or planning failures that impeded the firefighting effort in Los Angeles County. But there is no apparent link to the particular question Trump has repeatedly invoked and was discussing again in this social media post – which is about how much water should be sent from the north to Central Valley farms that are separated from the Los Angeles area by a mountain range.
Whatever the merits or flaws of Newsom’s position on the protection of the smelt in the northern Delta, all but three of the state’s major reservoirs were filled at or above their historical averages as of Thursday morning. While it is true there were some dry hydrants in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles amid the extreme water demand of the firefighting effort, that significant problem was related to local logistical factors affected by the area’s mountainous geography, not the absence of water in the Los Angeles region.
“At no time was water scarcity in general an issue. Rather, there were local shortages of water during the firefight, principally due to infrastructure constraints. But Southern California has plenty of water in storage right now, so this was not a limiting factor,” Mount said.
The fire crisis was caused by a combination of exceptionally high winds and the exceptionally dry state of the hilly brushland in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which has had minuscule rain for months. Trump’s proposals to send more water to Central Valley agricultural properties would not have shielded Los Angeles brushland that is not irrigated.
Haddad said that Trump’s comments were so “stupid” that they should be ignored rather than discussed in detail. “There is no connection between environmental protection in northern California and low-flow fire hydrants in Pacific Palisades.”
Other Trump inaccuracies
There are various other factual problems with Trump’s claims in the post.
Trump’s vague claim that there are “not firefighting planes” is untrue. Firefighting aircraft were back in operation over Los Angeles County on Wednesday, armed with water, after being temporarily grounded starting Tuesday night because of high winds.
The claim that there is “no water for fire hydrants” is an overstatement. Hydrants in other parts of Los Angeles County did have water even as the Pacific Palisades hydrants went dry.
Advocates of preserving the Delta smelt want more water, not “less,” for the Delta area where the species lives. And contrary to Trump’s suggestion, Newsom hasn’t stopped water from flowing into the state entirely.
CNN’s Ella Nilsen contributed to this article.
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