With wildfires still burning in Southern California, congressional Republicans are getting more detailed about how they plan to handle the politically sensitive topic of delivering potentially tens of billions of dollars of federal disaster aid to the largely Democratic area.
Strings, they are making clear, will be attached.
Some House Republicans who met with President-elect Donald Trump this past weekend floated using the funding as a bargaining chip in debt-limit negotiations with Democrats. And there is an emerging consensus that some unspecified policy changes should be included to prevent future wildfires.
“We don’t play politics with disaster aid,” Speaker Mike Johnson said at a POLITICO Live event Tuesday. “But there were policy decisions that were made in California at the state and local level, by all appearances, that made this exponentially worse, and so those are things that have to be factored in with regard to the level of aid and whether there are conditions upon that.”