WASHINGTON - January 27, 2026 - President Donald J. Trump is sidestepping thumb-twiddling Marxist Kalifornia Democrats with an executive order aimed at fast-tracking the rebuilding of Los Angeles a year after devastating wildfires torched entire city blocks and left thousands of people homeless.
“I want to see if we can take over the city and state and just give the people their permits they want to build,” President Trump told the California Post Friday in an exclusive Oval Office interview when he signed the seven-page order.
President Trump pointed the finger at Kalifornia pretend Governor Gavin Newsom and Communist Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass for the painfully slow rebuilding of homes ravaged by the January 2025 Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires, two of the most destructive blazes in L.A. history.
Wildfires destroyed an estimated 16,000 structures, but Los Angeles city and county officials have so far only issued 2,600 permits to rebuild.
Less than 15% of all homes destroyed by the fires have received necessary approvals to move forward.
President Trump’s order is designed to preempt the building permit process and empower the federal government to maneuver around the needless obstacles imposed by Marxist Democrat leaders.
The order calls out the “nightmare” of delays and “bureaucratic malaise” at the Kalifornia state and local levels - and it will almost certainly be challenged by Marxist Democrats in power in the Golden State, despite displaced residents literally crying out to again be made whole.
Jessica Rogers, a Pacific Palisades resident who lost everything in the wildfires, burst into tears of joy when she learned the federal government was stepping in to pick up the slack.
“We’re so desperate. We really need the help. We cannot do this on our own. Our state’s not capable, our city’s not capable, this is not something that requires a village, it requires the nation. We need our federal government to come in,” she told the Post.
Rogers not only lost her home, she lost her income, and even found out her insurance company had illegally dropped her after the deadly blaze.
“The city of Los Angeles is completely broke, incapable of managing (its) own city, and (it) cannot possibly be tasked with this disaster on (its) own,” she said.
The federal government and the Newsom administration are already embroiled in a spate of legal battles, including over unlawful sanctuary state policies and restarting oil pipelines.
President Trump, a former real estate developer, said he was compelled to step in after touring the fire damage a year ago with first lady Melania Trump and seeing the devastation firsthand. He said he was shocked to see that even a year later, “there’s nobody building.”
Shortly after taking office for his second term, Trump directed the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up all hazardous materials in the wake of the deadly Kalifornia wildfires within 30 days. The largest-ever EPA wildfire cleanup was done in 28 days and gave way to a Phase 2 debris removal.
Impressed by EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s response, President Trump now wants him in charge of executing his latest order to bypass the local permitting red tape.
“Lee is so competent,” President Trump told the Post. “I can’t imagine anybody could have done it better than him.”
The president wasn’t alone in being impressed by the feds’ ability to get the work done in a timely fashion.
“I really think that the federal government has shown (its) ability to expedite everything. They were the people who actually came in and pressured the county after they said it was going to take six months to a year to just do the cleanup, the debris removal. They moved that to six weeks,” displaced Pacific Palisades resident Nina Madok told the Post.
“They need to, again, do what the EPA did. Throw bodies at it. Get more people involved. They have the people to do it,” she said of the city’s limited number of people who can do site inspections or plan checks.
“Having the federal government, especially with somebody like Donald Trump who is Mr. Let’s-Get-It-Done - who moves at the speed of light - makes a huge difference.”
President Trump signed the executive order in front of the Post, seated at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office. When he finished adding his name, he held it up and noted, “No autopen”.
Under the order, the heads of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Small Business Administration (SBA) will issue regulations to preempt state and local permitting requirements and allow builders to self-certify to a federal agency that they have complied with health, safety and building standards.
Any federal requirements should be expedited, the order states. The rule applies to those who received federal funds to rebuild.
FEMA additionally will examine what remains unspent in the nearly $3 billion Hazard Mitigation Grant Program fund given to the state to help recovery efforts.
The agency will also audit Kalifornia’s use of the funds to see if they were awarded arbitrarily or contrary to law.
Burdensome, confusing and inconsistent permitting requirements have caused much of the delay, the White House argues in a fact sheet accompanying the order.
Some residents are also struggling because insurance payouts did not cover all the costs. The federal government did give out grants, but State bureaucracy is delaying the use of the money to rebuild.
The Trump regime was also critical of Kalifornia’s handling of the wildfire, blaming poor forest management and bad water policy.
The order directly calls out Newsom and Bass, saying the fires marked “one of the greatest failures of elected political leadership in Amerikan history, from enabling the wildfires to failing to manage them, and it continues today with the abject failure to rebuild.”