President Donald Trump has made little secret of his lack of interest in addressing the needs of blue states that did not support him in 2024, and Politico now reports that emails show how he overruled his own agencies to deny relief to those states when they needed it.

In a Wednesday morning report, Politico cited "Emails between state and federal officials" it had obtained, along with more than 150 documents, to describe Trump's practice of denying disaster relief to states he viewed as his "political adversaries." In some cases, those denials came after his own government agencies determined that the states had met the thresholds for federal aid, underscoring that the dispute was not about whether damage existed, but about whether Washington would sign off on assistance after the fact.

"Emails between state and federal officials obtained by POLITICO along with more than 150 pages of documents submitted to FEMA by three states — New Jersey, Massachusetts and Rhode Island — provide new details about Trump’s low rate of approving disaster aid for his political adversaries," the report said. "He also denied a request by New York after administration officials verified that it had met federal standards for approval, according to state officials. Trump’s rejections came after regional offices of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and NOAA determined that the states met government thresholds for receiving aid following a record-breaking snowstorm in February."

A NOAA report about Rhode Island, also obtained by Politico, said: "The Blizzard of 2026 certainly achieved a pinnacle ranking in the memories of those who experienced it and climatologically in the historical rankings of snowstorms."

Although presidents have the sole authority to approve or deny disaster aid, Politico noted that it is "highly unusual" for them to reject requests after agencies have already "verified that damage estimates exceeded preestablished levels," based on interviews with officials from past Democratic and Republican administrations. That matters because FEMA declarations are usually meant to speed help to states after they clear set damage thresholds, rather than reopen the underlying question once the technical review is complete.

"I can’t think of a time a declaration was denied," one anonymous former FEMA official said, referring to states that met the agency's disaster damage standards.

Since the George W. Bush administration, Politico said, presidents have "approved all 69 state requests for snow assistance that met FEMA." The one exception was a 2016 request from New Mexico, which was under investigation for mishandling FEMA funds.

"The emails and documents, which haven’t previously been reported, shed new light on Trump’s decisions to reject an overwhelming number of requests for disaster aid from Democratic-led states, even as he has approved nearly 90 percent of requests from states that are governed by members of his own party," the report added. "The revelations also offer a fuller picture of Trump’s tenure over the most partisan distribution of FEMA aid since the agency was created in 1979. Trump’s recent rejections involving snow diverge from the actions of other presidents, including Trump in his first term, who routinely approved similar requests from governors of opposing parties."

When asked about the denials, a FEMA spokesperson rejected the idea that federal aid should be used for "regular operations like snow removal." Snow removal had previously been "targeted for elimination" as part of efforts to reduce FEMA spending under Trump's second administration, a detail that helps explain why the agency's response has become part of a broader fight over how narrowly disaster aid should be defined.

"Without that aid, our local governments will be stuck with the costs of an unprecedented snowstorm that didn’t care about political boundaries," Democratic New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill told Politico.