In February, a major blizzard tore through the Northeast, leaving four states with hundreds of millions of dollars in damage. Months later, on Friday, the federal government finally gave them an answer.
New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island had requested a combined $227 million to recover from the storm. What came back instead was a flat rejection.
Just two days earlier, Trump had approved disaster funding for six Republican-led states, and he made sure everyone knew how pleased he was about it.
“I am pleased to announce that the Great State of Louisiana has been approved to be given $8.6 Million Dollars in its Disaster Declaration Request,” he posted, one of nine similar announcements that Tuesday. “Louisiana is truly a special place, with Governor Jeff Landry, Senator John Kennedy, soon-to-be Senator Julia Letlow, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, and Congressman Clay Higgins.”
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Somewhere in the Stafford Act, there’s presumably a line about disaster relief not doubling as a campaign endorsement, but Trump has never seemed especially bound by it.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul didn’t get a list of Republican names attached to her rejection. “After months of waiting, President Trump today, denied our request for a Major Disaster Declaration following the blizzard that pummeled New York City, Long Island, and the Mid-Hudson in February of this year,” she said.
Donald Trump just denied New York’s request for a major disaster declaration after February’s historic blizzard.⁰⁰Our first responders showed up when New Yorkers needed them most. Instead of having their backs, the President is leaving New Yorkers to foot the bill.⁰⁰We’ll…
— Governor Kathy Hochul (@GovKathyHochul) July 2, 2026
Rhode Island’s congressional delegation also wrote to Trump, accusing him of playing politics with disaster aid: “On the same day you approved major disaster declarations for several Republican-led states, you chose to leave Rhode Islanders out in the cold. It is unacceptable to politicize the disaster declaration process.”
New Jersey’s Andy Kim asked the question everyone else was already asking: “If there is a reason other than politics for him and his administration to withhold FEMA assistance, we need an explanation immediately.”
The administration, unsurprisingly, tells a very different story.
Spokesperson Abigail Jackson said “there is no politicization to the President’s decisions on disaster relief,” calling Trump’s process “a more thorough review of disaster declaration requests than any Administration has before him.” She also took a shot at the previous administration, claiming Biden-era FEMA officials had “refused aid to disaster survivors who displayed political signs and flags they disagreed with.”
The numbers, however, tell a story of their own.
Politico’s E&E News reviewed roughly 2,500 disaster declarations dating back to FEMA’s creation in 1979 and found nothing resembling the current approval pattern.
States led by a Democratic governor with two Democratic senators have seen just 23% of their requests approved under Trump.
Republican trifecta states sit at 89%.
A separate Urban Institute review reached a similar conclusion, finding FEMA approved 84 percent of requests from states Trump carried in 2024, compared with 42 percent from states won by Kamala Harris.
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
