Our research finds that conditions were placed on $12 million in Katrina aid, out of nearly $122 billion.
Analysis by Glenn Kessler
“If there is culpability for what happened, there really need to be conditions that follow that aid. It’s not unprecedented, by the way. After Katrina, in my state, there were conditions placed upon the funds. It happened after Hurricane Sandy, up in the northeast. There’s a tradition of doing this.”
— House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), remarks on “The Sean Hannity Show,” Jan. 21
Johnson signaled that Congress will impose conditions on aid to California after recent fires destroyed thousands of structures in Los Angeles. He accused Democrats in the state for making “decisions that made that disaster exponentially worse” and said Congress had a responsibility to ensure “they follow common sense in California” when aid is provided.
“What we are talking about here is restoring common sense, even in the state of California,” he said.
He sidestepped a question from Fox News host Sean Hannity about whether the conditions would include unrelated issues such as scrapping no-bail laws. Some Republican lawmakers have suggested refusing aid unless Democrats agree to hike the debt limit. President Donald Trump, in a visit to California, said he wanted to require the state to impose a voter ID law before he signed a bill providing aid. (Without evidence, Trump has claimed he would have won the state if it had laws requiring voters to show an ID before casting a ballot.)
For the purposes of this fact check, we’re interested in Johnson’s claim that conditions were placed on aid provided after Hurricane Katrina struck Louisiana, his home state, in 2005 and after Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
The Facts
Trump, when he visited North Carolina last week, said he wanted to get rid of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and simply have states submit a bill for reimbursement from the federal government. But that’s already largely how the system works, with FEMA repaying states for most of their expenses during a natural disaster.
Congress then provides additional aid to help rebuild devastated areas and to fund improvements. Katrina and other hurricanes in 2005 caused such devastation in Louisiana and neighboring states — insured losses were estimated by insurance companies to total $57 billion —
that 11 federal departments and four federal agencies provided nearly $122 billion in federal assistance to the Gulf Coast states, according to the Congressional Research Service.
As a matter of course, congressional appropriations for disaster relief have conditions that determine eligibility, but that’s clearly not what Johnson is talking about. Such bills also include demands for regular reports from agencies handling the funding.
Congressional appropriations often contain clauses that might withhold some funding unless certain parameters are met. We found that one Katrina bill authorized $12 million for a Louisiana hurricane protection study but stipulated the money would not be provided “until the State of Louisiana establishes a single state or quasistate entity to act as local sponsor for construction, operation and maintenance of all of the hurricane, storm damage reduction and flood control projects in the greater New Orleans and southeast Louisiana area.”
But this was a relatively minor condition regarding a small amount of money, given the overall size of the rescue package. We can find virtually no news coverage of this condition by Congress — and there was wide agreement the previous system did not work. Previously, five different levee districts operated as separate local sponsors for federally built flood protection. The state in 2006 established the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority to oversee the levee districts. Congress eventually provided $14.5 billion to the Army Corps of Engineers to build a flood protection system that held firm in 2021 against Hurricane Ida.
As for the Sandy legislation, Republicans in 2013 sought to amend $17 billion in relief to require a reduction in unrelated domestic spending — but that amendment was defeated.
In defense of Johnson’s statement, his office pointed to the $12 million appropriation we had identified — which was rather minor in the context of almost $122 billion in aid. The office could not point to conditions on Sandy aid, and we couldn’t find any either.
His office also highlighted some bills that over time have added broad conditions to aid, such as the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000, which required states and others to develop and update hazard mitigation plans as a condition to receive certain types of FEMA assistance, and the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006, which required states to include a catastrophic incident annex in state emergency preparedness plans that are required as a condition for assistance. The office also noted that Congress has placed conditions on community development block grants, required cost-sharing by states and demanded oversight of spending.
But these are all general — not specific to a particular disaster such as the California wildfires.
The Pinocchio Test
Johnson suggested that congressional conditions imposed on aid after a disaster is “not unprecedented” and part of “a tradition.” As examples, he pointed to aid provided after Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy. But that’s greatly overstating the case. In Katrina, the only item we could find placed conditions on just $12 million in aid — out of tens of billions. We turned up nothing on Sandy.
In reality, the tradition is that, after a disaster, virtually no conditions are placed on aid that would require a state to make policy changes. What would be unprecedented would be tying the aid to policy adjustments that have nothing to do with the disaster, such as mandating voter ID.
Johnson earns Three Pinocchios.
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