The Trump administration recently denied a funding request from the city of Asheville, North Carolina, to help its recovery from Hurricane Helene, telling the city it must cut a program meant to aid female and minority contractors. The mayor said the city has cut the reference to the program and now expects the plan to win approval.
During the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly used the devastation Helene wrought on North Carolina to spread lies and conspiracy theories about the Biden administration’s recovery efforts. In a speech in January, Trump claimed he’d be “taking strong action to get North Carolina the support that you need to quickly recover and rebuild,” and he specifically named Asheville as “a great place, and we’re going to have it be a great place again.”
“Strong action” apparently comes with some strings attached. Because on Monday, Trump’s secretary for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner, denounced Asheville’s 125-page funding plan because of one line, in a section touting the plan’s benefits for vulnerable populations, that said some of the funds to support small businesses would help the city “prioritize assistance for Minority and Women Owned Businesses (MWBE) within the scoring criteria outlined within the policies and procedures.”
“Once again, let me be clear DEI is dead at HUD,” said Turner in a statement. “We will not provide funding to any program or grantee that does not comply with President Trump’s executive orders.”
Now, let me be clear: Nothing in the plan suggested women- and minority-owned businesses would be the sole — or the even primary — beneficiaries of any federal funding Asheville receives. The plan merely listed the program as one of many that could provide aid. But as I reported last February, many white conservatives have framed programs that help minority business owners, who often require assistance to counter discrimination they’ve longed faced from private industries, as discriminatory against white people.
On Tuesday, Asheville Mayor Ester Manheimer said Asheville, like many cities, “has a program around contracting with minority- and women-owned businesses,” adding, “Apparently, the reference to that existing program is not something that they want to see in the action plan.”
The next day, she said, “We have modified the action plan to reflect [Turner’s] concerns, and we’ve been told the changes that we’ve made were acceptable.”
This rigamarole raises serious concerns about how Los Angeles County might expect to navigate its need for recovery funds after the recent wildfires, especially because much of the damage ravaged historically Black communities like Altadena, where residents have already expressed fears of being erased in the recovery efforts.
As HUD secretary, Turner has moved quickly to remake the agency in Trump’s image. Last week, I wrote about HUD’s reported invitation to Christian nationalist Sean Feucht to help the agency survey damage from the L.A. County fires. Feucht declared he’d been brought along to offer “advice” and “give divine perspective” on recovery efforts. An agency spokesperson told MSNBC that Feucht doesn’t have an “official role” with HUD and refused to answer whether he’s offering guidance in an unofficial role.
The Trump administration seems eager to use disaster recovery funding to bring communities to heel and force its political will on left-leaning local governments that may not otherwise accept it.