Fewer than ten of the 13,000 homes that were destroyed have been rebuilt.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Tuesday granting federal agencies the authority to speed up the wildfire rebuild in Los Angeles.
In the year since wildfires devastated nearly 40,000 acres in Pacific Palisades and Eaton Canyon, about 2,600 residential permits have been issued for the more than 13,000 houses and residential properties destroyed. Fewer than ten homes have been rebuilt so far, according to the White House.
California’s bureaucratic red tape has delayed permitting, Trump said in his executive order, which was first reported by the California Post. The president directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Administrator of the Small Business Administration (SBA) to issue regulations that “preempt State and local procedural permitting requirements and enable builders to self-certify to a Federal agency designee that they have complied with State and local substantive health, safety, and building standards.”
The EO also gives residents the ability “to expedite waivers, permits, and approvals that may be required from the Federal government.”
Governor Gavin Newsom has lauded the state’s permitting numbers, saying that California’s current pace is quick relative to other rebuilding efforts. A Los Angeles Times investigation found last year that out of the 22,500 houses wrecked in fires between 2017 and 2020, less than 40 percent were rebuilt by 2025.
“I feel that everybody’s forgotten about us,” Monica Monica Stuhlman, whose Altadena home burnt down in the fires told NR last year. “The government — they don’t care. The mayor doesn’t care, the governor doesn’t care. All they’re thinking about is revenue, the Olympics, the World Cup, and that’s it.”
Some of the holdup is due to complicated and time-consuming disputes with insurance companies. Once houses are permitted, residents may not have the funds available to rebuild, due to unexpectedly low insurance payouts.
And, “overly burdensome, confusing, and inconsistent permitting requirements, duplicative permitting reviews, procedural bottlenecks, and administrative delays have effectively stalled recovery efforts,” Trump’s order reads. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, who directed an impressive wildfire cleanup in the immediate aftermath of the fires, will oversee Trump’s latest order.
“Lee is so competent,” Trump told the Post. “I can’t imagine anybody could have done it better than him.”
EPA crews cleared more than 9,000 properties of hazardous materials within 30 days of the fires, the fastest-ever hazardous debris removal effort, Newsom’s office said at the time.
“Under the leadership of EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, crews cleaned hazardous waste from thousands of properties in less than 30 days, a record pace never seen before at this scale,” Newsom said.
Trump’s order also directs FEMA to assess whether “any of California’s nearly $3 billion in unspent Hazard Mitigation Grant Program funds were awarded arbitrarily or contrary to law, and to conduct a full audit of California’s use of those funds.”
In a statement to the Post, Newsom spokeswoman Tara Gallegos called Trump “an old clueless idiot who believes that the state and federal governments can issue local rebuilding permits and LA gets its water from the Pacific Northwest.”
“He should keep LA out of his mouth unless he is planning to grant them the federal disaster funding they need.”