WASHINGTON, DC — President Donald Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner said the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) will “do exactly what it’s called to do” to help victims of the Los Angeles wildfires.
Turner, who began his first full day in office on Thursday, told Breitbart News that the fires, which burned through several neighborhoods in the L.A. area from January 7-31, were “devastating.”
“We are working very hard to help people,” he said during a press conference.
When asked if the FHA would be helping victims who lost their homes with loans to rebuild, Turner said, “The FHA will do exactly what it’s called to do, and what it’s supposed to do, and you can count on that.”
The southern California fires were officially declared fully contained 24 days after they first sparked in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood and took at least 29 lives, the New York Times reported.
The Palisades fire destroyed more than 6,800 structures and burned over 23,440 acres, while the Eaton fire destroyed more than 9,400 structures and burned over 14,000 acres, according to Cal Fire.
As people’s entire livelihoods burned to the ground, they also faced an insurance crisis after thousands of policies were dropped in the months leading up to the disaster, Breitbart News reported.
Around 1,600 insurance policies in the now-devastated Pacific Palisades alone were canceled by State Farm in July 2024, equivalent to about 18 percent of the neighborhood’s owner-occupied homes.
An August 2024 analysis of insurance data conducted by CBS revealed that State Farm also dropped over 2,000 policies in two additional L.A. zip codes, which include the neighborhoods of Brentwood, Calabasas, Hidden Hills, and Monte Nido.
As Breitbart News reported in 2023, many insurance companies stopped selling new policies in California altogether “because of the increased risk of wildfires and the rising costs of construction in the state — and because the state’s regulators will not allow it to price new policies based on future anticipated risk, only on historical risk.”
Many homeowners have since been forced to rely on California’s Fair Access to Insurance Requirements Plan, or FAIR Plan, if they want to be insured at all — a program described by Newsweek as a customer’s “last resort.”
According to data from the state insurer, roughly 1,400 of the Palisades’ 9,000 homes were covered by the FAIR Plan in 2024 — more than quadruple the number covered in 2020.
While it is unclear when or if the HUD’s FHA will help with rebuilding loans, Sec. Turner emphasized to Breitbart News that his department is “working very closely” with Los Angelenos.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Ambassador Ric Grenell joined new Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin at one of the damaged sites to tell federal, state, and local leaders that he would not tolerate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) criteria slowing down the clean-up and rebuild process.
Saying that he had heard that subcontractors for debris removal were being delayed because they were trying to find “the right mix” in terms of DEI requirements, Grenell said, “That bullshit can’t happen.”
“If we hear about specific instances, we’re going to highlight them,” he warned. “That bullshit can’t happen, okay? We want people who can get here and remove things. I don’t care about the color of their skin, I don’t care if they’re in a wheelchair. We want people to be able to do the job and get it done, and not hold up because we have some quota system.”
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