President Donald Trump, who has assailed Illinois’ governor and its largest city, denied disaster aid to thousands of Chicago residents even though his administration documented extraordinary damage from two major storms this summer, records obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News show.
Trump’s denials are the first time any president since at least 2007 — including Trump to this point — has refused to help residents recover from such extensive damage to their homes, federal records show.
Trump denied both aid requests from Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker on Oct. 22, two weeks after saying Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson — both Democrats — “should be in jail” for “failing to protect” federal immigration enforcement officers.
Trump has traded barbs with Illinois officials for months. The president has called Chicago a “hellhole,” drawn protests over immigration raids in the city and tried to dispatch National Guard troops to the state. Pritzker has sued to block the dispatch by Trump — dubbing him a “wannabe dictator.” Johnson has called Trump “a monster.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson answered questions about Trump’s denials by highlighting Illinois’ status as a sanctuary state for undocumented immigrants.
Pritzker “should know how to balance his budget for these types of repetitive losses,” Johnson said in a statement to E&E News, referring to damaging storms, “but instead prioritizes the state’s budget for illegals over Americans.”
Trump handles each disaster request “with great care and consideration, ensuring American tax dollars are used appropriately and efficiently by the states to supplement—not substitute, their obligation to respond to and recover from disasters,” Johnson added.
Trump’s denial of disaster aid has left thousands of residents in Cook County, which encompasses Chicago, waiting to remove mold and to repair homes that were damaged by flooding from a storm in July or a storm in August, said Alex Joves, executive director of the county’s emergency management agency.
“Damage still remains for many residents,” Joves said in an email.
Pritzker plans to appeal both denials. The state is gathering additional information about damage.
Trump has reduced and delayed disaster aid nationwide as he vows to weaken the Federal Emergency Management Agency and force states to pay more for disaster recovery.
But his denial of Pritzker’s two requests stunned former FEMA officials because of the large amount of damage the agency documented. E&E News obtained damage assessments for the two storms through a records request to the Illinois Emergency Management Agency and Office of Homeland Security. They have not been previously reported.
“These numbers indicate to me that Illinois and Pritzker are being penalized for standing up against the Trump administration,” a former senior FEMA official said after E&E News provided the damage assessments. E&E News granted anonymity to the former senior FEMA official to speak freely about the situation.
Michael Coen, who was FEMA’s chief of staff during the Biden and Obama administrations, saw the damage assessments and said Pritzker’s requests “definitely demonstrated through the financial costs” that disaster aid was merited.
“Compared to other requests we’ve seen that have been approved, it wouldn’t have been hard when I was at FEMA to recommend to the president that these be approved,” Coen said. “There are going to be a lot of families that are displaced or not able to repair major damage to their homes.”
The denial letters to Pritzker say disaster aid “is not warranted” and provide no further explanation. The letters, both dated Oct. 22, were written by David Richardson, who resigned Monday as FEMA’s acting administrator.
Flooding, heavy rain caused millions in damages
When disaster experts from FEMA and Illinois reviewed damage caused by three days of heavy rainfall and flooding in mid-August, they projected $83.5 million in recovery costs for residents.
The projection was huge — the second most FEMA has ever documented in post-disaster residential costs since the agency began publishing damage assessments in 2007, according to an E&E News review of every assessment document. FEMA gives households in disaster areas a few thousand dollars on average for minor home repairs and temporary lodging while homes are uninhabitable.
With state and local disaster officials, FEMA inspects weather-damaged areas to calculate recovery costs and determine whether to recommend a president approve disaster aid. The only exception occurs following catastrophic disasters such as Hurricane Helene in 2024 that cause so much damage that an assessment is not needed for a presidential disaster declaration.
The assessment for the August flooding found that 3,269 homes had “major damage” and that 99 percent were in overwhelmingly Democratic Cook County, which cast 70 percent of its vote in 2024 for Vice President Kamala Harris. The remaining 1 percent — a total of 43 homes — were spread across four nearby counties, which raises questions about why Pritzker bothered to include the counties in his request.
Pritzker cited significant damage “across northeastern Illinois” in a 10-page letter to Trump and FEMA requesting disaster aid. Left unsaid was that two of the four counties with minimal damage supported Trump in the 2024 election and the other two supported Harris by small margins.
The evaluation of Pritzker’s request had built-in subjectivity because Pritzker sought only FEMA aid for households — called individual assistance — which pays for temporary housing, minor home repairs and emergency expenses.
When governors request aid to rebuild public facilities — called public assistance — FEMA compares projected costs to a threshold it sets for each state based on population. Requests that meet or exceed the threshold are almost always approved.
FEMA has no threshold for individual assistance and instead weighs factors such as a state’s financial capacity, the demographics of affected households and total recovery costs.
The agency has erred on the side of approving individual assistance, the former FEMA official said.
“There was always a tendency to approve IA when there was a significant impact to make sure we were helping survivors recover,” the official said referring to individual assistance.
Another former FEMA official told E&E News that assessments of residential damage are “usually used to get someone to a yes — but in this case it seems it’s being used to get to no.”
FEMA tries to standardize evaluations by calculating the amount of residential damage compared to a state’s wealth. The damage-to-wealth ratio is a strong indicator of whether a president will approve individual assistance, FEMA records show. Higher ratios indicate a larger burden on states and are more likely to be approved.
E&E News’ review of FEMA records shows that since the agency began using the ratio in 2019, presidents have approved every request for individual assistance when the ratio was at least 12.5 — until now.
The ratio for the August flooding in Illinois was 71.21 — one of the highest FEMA has recorded.
Trump’s denial bucks precedent
Three days of storms in Illinois in late July caused less flood damage — $46.2 million was projected to be needed for recovery — but still an amount that has always prompted presidents since George W. Bush to approve individual assistance.
The damage-to-wealth ratio was 39.45 — also a level that has always led to approval. The combination of the ratio and damage was the most severe of nine levels on a matrix shown in the damage assessment verified by Amanda Ratliff, acting director of the recovery division in FEMA’s Chicago-based regional office.
The assessment also shows that the overwhelming amount of damage occurred in Cook County. Yet Pritzker included in his disaster request two counties in southeastern Illinois — Calhoun and Jersey — roughly 300 miles from Chicago. Both counties voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024.
Unlike the damage assessment for the August storm, the assessment for the July storm shows demographics of the neighborhood near Chicago Midway International Airport where most residential damage occurred.
The poverty rate is nearly double the national rate and the income level is 56 percent of the national level. More than 70 percent of the residents are Hispanic.
One summer day, as Johnson, the Chicago mayor, toured a damaged area and urged residents to complete damage forms, he acknowledged the risk of seeking help from Trump, whom he had accused of having “animus” toward women and minorities.
“I would hope,” Johnson told reporters, “the federal government would not use aid for the families in the city of Chicago as a weapon.”
Correction: A previous version of this article referred to White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson using an incorrect last name.
