Fact check: Trump can't withhold wildfire relief - Entrepreneur Generations

Though President Trump tweeted on Wednesday that he had ordered the Federal Emergency Management Agency to stop helping victims of last year's wildfires in California, but federal laws show that he can't withhold disaster relief once an emergency has been declared.

"In his tweet, Trump returned to his oft-repeated - and disputed - theme that California had mismanaged its forests, over-regulating logging and other measures that would thin them out to make wildfires less intense," though the fire likely began in a federally owned forest, Sharon Bernstein reports for Reuters. "It is not clear whether Trump was referring to money already approved which FEMA is distributing or to future funds."

The tweet came the day after the governors of Oregon and Washington published an open letter asking Trump to allocate more money for managing federally owned forests in the Western U.S., Bernstein reports.

"FEMA has so far made available about $50 million to help victims of the wildfires in Paradise as well as in other parts of [California] with housing needs, according to the agency’s website. There was no indication the funds had been cut off," Bernstein reports. "Last year, the state asked Congress to appropriate an additional $9 billion in assistance, about half of it from FEMA. That request has been delayed as Congress deals with the funding disputes that have led to a partial shutdown of the federal government."

from The Rural Blog http://bit.ly/2H6zpA2 Fact check: Trump can't withhold wildfire relief - Entrepreneur Generations

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