The Brief

When the Big One or another major disaster hits California, the emergency response will need to be massive. Fixing roads and other infrastructure; restoring power and cellphone service; providing food, shelter and and other essentials.

For decades, state officials have operated knowing the federal government would step in almost immediately when they request help with response and recovery, including by providing hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance. However, California and federal disaster recovery officials say they’re concerned that President Donald Trump may retaliate against the state by delaying or withholding major disaster aid.

And they’re sounding the alarm.

“ We never really thought about what the president would do if a disaster were to happen,” said one longtime Federal Emergency Management Agency insider.

But today: “You don't really have any idea which way it would go,” said the California-based FEMA employee who spoke anonymously for fear of professional retribution. “ Everyone just has to plan to be self reliant. And I'm not talking just individuals, but the states.  Because honestly it's really unpredictable to know what you can rely on.”

Emergency management professionals and observers told LAist they now expect that offers of federal help from the Trump administration will come with strings attached.

“Disaster declarations, especially in California, will be conditional on political policies being made in the state,” the FEMA employee said.

It’s a reality state leaders are preparing for.

“The governor basically told us that we need to think through when the next disaster happens and there's no federal assistance,” said Brian Ferguson, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s deputy cabinet secretary for emergency management.  ”The modern era of emergency management, which started under Jimmy Carter, is forever changing.”

Some experts told LAist it’s unlikely Trump would flat-out deny aid to California — the optics would be too bad, they said. But they did say delays wouldn’t be a surprise.

Their concern is rising as the broader system of disaster response is compromised by cuts and attrition in FEMA and other agencies, leaving the state and its nearly 40 million residents even more vulnerable to disasters.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said FEMA is “focused on warranted, non-political disaster response.”

“In California and throughout the country, FEMA remains fully prepared and capable of responding to natural disasters,” the spokesperson said via email.

Before publication, the agency did not respond to a request seeking the name of the spokesperson and did not agree to a phone interview.

Why insiders are worried

Myriad signs point toward the likelihood Trump could curtail or deny disaster assistance.

During the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed the Northern California town of Paradise, Trump waffled on giving aid until he was told that it was his supporters who were affected.

“We went as far as looking up how many votes he got in those impacted areas … to show him these are people who voted for you,” a former Trump aide told Politico then.

Trump also denied aid to California after a string of wildfires — including the Creek, Bobcat and El Dorado blazes — in 2020, according to CNN, before changing his mind.

During his campaign in 2024, he talked about denying disaster aid.

“We’re not giving any of that fire money that we send you all the time for all the fire, forest fires that you have,” he said in the Central Valley, according to KQED.

And he threatened to withhold wildfire money in response to California’s water management policies.

“The level at which this has become politicized is unlike anything we've seen,” said Mark Ghilarducci, who ran the California governor’s Office of Emergency Services from 2012 to 2022.

Even now, California is waiting on $34 billion of wildfire aid requested by Newsom after the L.A. fires. It includes requests to Congress for more than $20 billion to help rebuild communities.

It’s not just the threats to disaster response and recovery funds that have observers worried. It’s also a pullback from funding disaster preparation.

In April, FEMA said it was ending its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Program, calling it “another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program … more concerned with political agendas than helping Americans affected by natural disasters.”

The program was supposed to provide almost $33 million in funding to help reduce Land movement in Rancho Palos Verdes has slowed down, but the city is bracing for winter rains, according to a lawsuit filed by California and other states in response. Other projects on the chopping block were $21 million for flood mitigation in Sacramento and $32 million to retrofit a hospital in rural Kern County.

What’s happening inside FEMA 

Several officials told LAist that even if aid is granted, so much damage has been done to the emergency management system that immediate response and long-term recovery will likely be compromised.

The California-based FEMA official said Region 9 — which responds to disasters in California, Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii — has been hemorrhaging employees with extensive experience in disasters.

 ”Most people at FEMA just don't know what the future really holds, so they’re looking for other jobs,” the official said.

Between January and June of this year, the number of FEMA employees fell by about 2,500, according to a recent report from the Government Accountability Office. The losses include 20 senior executives. Exact numbers for Region 9 weren’t immediately available.

There’s an air of unease among federal emergency response workers, said a former White House employee who worked on emergency management and requested anonymity because of the fear of harassment. Those workers worry they could rush to help in the immediate aftermath of a disaster but then be second-guessed by a presidential administration that might see them as assisting a political enemy, the former official said.

“ The smallest little things that run counter to the narrative that this administration prefers  run the risk of retribution,” the person said.

Emergency officials may worry they could be fired or “reassigned to ICE or something like that.”

“Whether it's happening or not,” the person said, “I think the environment has been created where people feel fearful of that.”

Meanwhile, Southern Californians affected by the January fires already have struggled with what they say is a lack of federal support.

“The federal government was always a backstop in times of need. And it's very possible that there's no additional help coming beyond the state and local responders.  So we're going to adjust to that reality,” said Ferguson, the senior Newsom adviser.

But, Ferguson added, the smaller, rural, Trump-voting parts of California would be hit most heavily by a federal pullback.

“With FEMA  stepping back, we're actually going to be less ready at a local level for whatever the next disaster is,” he said.

Let’s hope that by the time you’re reading this, the waters are calm as ever and the streets are bone dry.

If not, we might as well be called Short Beach.

After waves supercharged by Hurricane Marie battered a series of beachside homes, tore up a city boardwalk and ripped away enough sand to reveal a decades-old bulkhead, Long Beach is looking at spending roughly $3 million to stabilize the Peninsula, with a much larger price tag looming behind it.

In a memo released Friday, Public Works Director Joshua Hickman lays out the damage plainly: about 200 feet of boardwalk decking and support beams need to be replaced, roughly 1,000 feet of bulkhead needs new top caps, and another 450 feet of bulkhead planks have to be restored. That repair work alone is expected to cost about $1.5 million, funded through the city’s Tidelands Emergency Reserve, with crews aiming to finish by November.

With the city entering a super El Niño season, Hickman recommends the city spend another $230,000 moving 50,000 to 100,000 cubic yards of sand into place, ahead of an $11.4 million dredging project in the Alamitos Bay entrance channel that, starting next month, will pump about 415,000 cubic yards of sand onto the Peninsula, potentially widening the beach by up to 250 feet. Originally not expected to be done until early next year, the city is pushing to have it done by the end of November.

To get all of that moving at once, the city is asking the council to release $3 million from its $10.3 million emergency reserve, with more funding requests expected as the response continues.

But those repairs are dwarfed by what engineers say is needed to keep the Peninsula beach above water and habitable going forward. What gets approved, however, will depend on the damage done by storms.

From five plans optioned by the city’s contracted design firm, Moffatt & Nichol, the city wants to advance a $6.8 million plan for designing and permitting a rock revetment — a wall of boulders that would sit behind the beach as a backup, built only if the sand washes away again. Only $1 million in design money is currently covered.

Coastal engineers hired after the storm evaluated five different versions of a rock or sheet-pile barrier, ranging from $1.5 million for a simple sheet-pile wall to nearly $9.5 million for a full engineered rock revetment built to withstand a 100-year storm. Every option trades something away — beach space, permitting speed, or the boardwalk’s historic look — for protection, and the firm’s bottom-line advice was to move sand now while permitting the rock wall to sit ready.

That boardwalk being fought over is not easily replaceable, even setting aside the money. Built in the 1920s, at 9 feet wide and 3,600 feet long, it’s the last wooden boardwalk left in Los Angeles County.

When hurricane-charged waves hit, city crews responded with thousands of sandbags and 16-hour shifts of bulldozers building berms that washed away as they went up. The total cost of that emergency response is still being tallied, but officials expect it will easily clear $1 million.

It’s also important to remember that past efforts to combat sand loss have come and gone.

Three million cubic yards of sand brought in the 1940s were gone by the ’80s; 100,000 cubic yards added in 1979; a failed plan in 1980 to bring a mix of imported river sand and birdseye gravel; 145,000 cubic yards across dumpings from 1991 to 1993 between 55th Place and the Belmont Shore Pier; 200,000 cubic yards of sand from 55th to 72nd place in 1996; installation of artificial reef (made of polyester bags) in 1991 and separately, artificial kelp installed through the 1980s; emergency additions in 1992, 1993 and 1994. All of it either washed away or simply didn’t work, and the reef was eventually pulled out.

Today, the city’s baseline defense is a maintenance routine — bulldozers and dump trucks moving sand from the western side where it currently piles up back to the winnowing eastern flank, five days a week, at a cost of $1 million to $1.5 million a year — that adds no new sand to the system at all.

And the timing couldn’t be any more swell. Long Beach sits smack in the middle of the Eastern Pacific hurricane season, which runs from mid-May through November, when southerly swells charged by storms off Mexico and Baja California are most likely to find the one gap in the city’s usually sheltered coastline. Marie found it two weeks ago, sending waves 10 feet high that battered the Peninsula, toppling sand-berms and sending enough water ashore to force the evacuation of about 20 homes.

Now forecasters are warning of a strong El Niño winter, and both the city and state have declared emergencies that allowed them to open their pocketbooks much quicker and easier.

Eventually, officials say it may cost $150 million to $350 million for a full habitat and shoreline restoration of the Peninsula — funded partly by state mitigation credits — as the kind of project that would take massive amounts of approvals and planning and likely some delays. The city council for now has approved $30,000 to look into it further.

It’s a decision that might not sit well with many, at a time when gas is inching north of $6 a gallon, personal budgets must now accommodate rain gear and extra supplies and a time when the city’s own budget has gone belly up, forcing layoffs and ends to popular programs.

But the consequence of doing nothing, of relenting stretches of beach to the sea, attacks the city’s very name.

California lawmakers are cracking down on expensive concert experiences by targeting “ghost tickets” — so called because the person selling access to the show doesn’t actually own the ticket yet. It’s an issue that has stumped regulators who are combating deceptive e-commerce fueled by artificial intelligence.

Gov. Gavin Newsom on Sunday signed a bipartisan bill meant to rein in that market by banning the sale of tickets that are not yet owned by the people who advertise them and prohibiting the use of software to manipulate a venue’s purchasing restrictions.

“Buying a ticket shouldn’t come with hidden risks or unfair practices,” he wrote on social media after signing the measure, Assembly Bill 1349.

The bill requires ticket resellers to “implement reasonable measures” to prevent speculative tickets. Sellers found in violation could face misdemeanor charges and penalties.

The bill’s author, Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, cited an incident in which he and his friend searched for tickets for a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. The tickets listed online were expensive and were posted before actual tickets went on sale.

“Many fans buy these tickets not knowing that they are listed at a price greater than they would actually be when they eventually go on sale,” said the Culver City Democrat during a June hearing. “In the worst instances, fans never actually acquire the ticket that they paid for, leaving our small venues in California ultimately on the hook.”

What the major vendors are saying

The measure changed dramatically in the final days of the legislative session and Newsom in a signing statement asked lawmakers to revisit it because it may exempt marketplaces that he suggested should be regulated. He did not name them, but critics of the law pointed to Stubhub as a platform that appeared to be exempt from the law.

Initially, the bill moved forward with support from Live Nation, the entertainment behemoth that owns Ticketmaster. In a January statement, the company argued “no one should be able to scam fans by listing tickets they don’t have”.

Live Nation’s backing of the bill fueled skepticism from critics, who feared it would ultimately help the company squash its competitors.

Ticket reseller Stubhub lobbied heavily against the bill, spending $4.4 million in the two-year legislative session to influence the measure and several others.

In a surprise, Stubhub supported the final version of the bill, which is less favorable to Live Nation. Live Nation has not yet responded to a request for comment about the law from CalMatters.

The National Independent Venue Association, which supported the original version of the bill, argues the version Newsom signed creates liabilities for music venues and festivals while exempting Stubhub. Its leaders worry that independent venues and event promoters will break the law if they sell presale, VIP or waitlisted tickets.

It opposed the final version of the bill and urged Newsom to veto it.

AB 1349 “puts the small businesses and nonprofits that put on shows every night at risk,” Stephen Parker, the association’s executive director, said in a written statement after lawmakers passed the bill.

The association also argued that the amendments protects ticket resellers, such as StubHub, by exempting resale marketplaces from being classified as speculative ticket sellers, “even though every speculative sale happens on their platforms.”

Where things stand now

Newsom in his signing statement wrote, “While there may be good reasons for exempting certain sellers from the bill’s provisions, such a carve-out deserves further discussion, and I encourage the author to work with stakeholders to refine this policy.”

The Legislature had also considered another related bill that would have put a 10% markup cap on resale tickets. But it stalled in August in the Senate Appropriations Committee.

CalMatters Deputy Editor Adam Ashton contributed to this story.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

This story first appeared first on LA Local.

Cory Joseph still remembers the last day he rolled across the rink at Word on Wheels. 

The beloved skating rink shuttered in 2021 as part of a downward trend in places where you can groove on four wheels under luminescent disco balls and hot tunes. 

“I also was at Skate Land in Northridge on its last day, and I went to Skate Depot in Cerritos on its last day,” Joseph told The LA Local. 

The closing of these skate hubs struck a nerve for Joseph, who grew up in San Diego and is the son of two professional skaters — Maureen Joseph and Timothy Carter — from the disco skating heyday in the 1970s and 1980s. 

It’s no wonder he felt a desire to open the Sunshine Skate Center in Inglewood to fill this void. His journey to open Sunshine, named after his parents’ old skating team, took three long years of hurdles and obstacles until finally opened on Sept. 4, 2025. 

A year of serving Inglewood

Cory Joseph still remembers the last day he rolled across the rink at Word on Wheels.

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The rink celebrated its one-year anniversary this month.

 “Skating for a lot of people is their therapy. It’s their way that they cope with things. It’s the way that they navigate through things,” Joseph said, adding that he understood how these places once served as third spaces for Black L.A.

“I think it’s more than just skating,” he said. “I really understand skating as a place for community.”

Cory Joseph still remembers the last day he rolled across the rink at Word on Wheels.

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On a Friday night this past summer, Joseph’s ethos was seen in action. 

Looking around the rink, the range of skaters varied widely in ability — from folks dance-skating to rolling backward, along with beginners using tools to help them on their first journey on wheels. Some were there with their families. Others were there with their friends. Spectators were delighted as they watched from outside the rink and the surrounding seating. 

The unapologetic free flow of joy was palpable. Joseph said that when he sees the impact on Inglewood’s youngest residents, the three years it took him to open the rink feels worth it.

“You have a lot of kids that are not physically active,” he explained. “We’re able to engage kids [to] have them off their phones for certain periods of time when they’re skating.”

The debate over the potential benefits and safety risks of accelerating artificial intelligence development reached a crescendo this month, as supporters and critics of the technology clashed over warnings that increasingly powerful AI could pose existential risks to humanity.

On September 8, Jacob Coxon, a researcher-turned-whistleblower, publicly resigned from major AI firm Anthropic after a previous stint at OpenAI, accusing the companies of "racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

Coxon's claims supercharged an ongoing debate over the potential damage AI could wreak on society and prompted Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and other AI CEOs to call for a slowdown in AI development.

Over the past two months, companies including OpenAI and Anthropic disclosed multiple incidents in which their AI agents accessed the internet when they weren't supposed to and carried out unapproved activities. In OpenAI's case, swarms of agents worked together to hack the open-source software platform Hugging Face and OpenAI itself, without alerting humans.

The debate over the safety of AI and whether and how it should be regulated is not a simple clash between two opposing sides. There are multiple factions with a variety of goals and assessments about the technology's promise, dangers and how it should be governed. Here are the main arguments shaping that debate.

Effective accelerationists and the tech right

Those who have an aggressively optimistic worldview of AI are often referred to as effective accelerationists (sometimes shortened to e/acc) — a term reflecting their belief that AI should be rapidly advanced.

People belonging to the faction are emphatically optimistic about AI and its future benefits to society. They believe that the technology can propel medical advancements, boost economic productivity, increase living standards and automate dangerous or undesirable work. To achieve this, they argue that AI development should be accelerated, not restricted.

Effective accelerationists' ideology overlaps with that of the "tech right" in that both camps wholeheartedly believe in accelerating AI development and deployment and minimize critics' concerns over safety and security.

However, the tech right takes a more nationalistic stance, championing U.S. dominance in the global AI race. Like effective accelerationists, they believe that AI research and deployment should be unencumbered by regulation, arguing that could slow innovation or allow adversarial governments such as China to overtake the U.S. in the AI race.

Venture capitalist David Sacks is one of the leading accelerationist voices in the AI safety debate and was President Trump's AI and cryptocurrency advisor.

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The tech right's philosophy is represented by figures such as former White House AI and cryptocurrency advisor David Sacks, whose views remain influential with the Trump administration. Other significant players include venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, and OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman. The three founded the Leading the Future super PAC to support pro-AI political candidates, and campaign against those who advocate for regulation.

Andreessen also penned a 2023 widely-read blog post titled "Why AI Will Save the World," in which he claimed that fears of AI triggering mass unemployment are overstated. He argued that previous waves of automation ultimately created more jobs and economic activity than they eliminated, and the fears of existential risk are overblown.

Recently, Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, whose chips are used by most AI companies, has emerged as one of the industry's leading voices pushing back against calls for a slowdown and urging a light regulatory approach.

Populist right

AI has exposed an ideological split within President Trump's political coalition. While Trump and his advisers overwhelmingly favor accelerating AI, parts of his MAGA base believe the powerful corporations he has aligned himself with could undermine the U.S. economy.

Figures including former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson have been vocal about potential job losses, the tech industry's political power, child safety and threats to traditional social and religious values.

This month, Bannon formed an unlikely partnership with independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist, to call for significant restrictions on AI development, government oversight and corporate accountability at the Pro-Human Assembly conference in Washington, D.C.

Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has sharply broken with the Trump administration around AI policy.

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Still, the two have differing stances on what any of those measures should look like. Sanders called for an immediate pause on AI development until clear safety rules are established by scientists, a permanent ban on the development of artificial "superintelligence" (AI systems that are more intelligent than humans in all domains), and an international treaty with China in an effort to avoid an AI arms race. Bannon, meanwhile, argued for slowing the pace of AI development, the formation of a national regulatory organization and cutting off China from U.S. AI technology.

"So why are we letting the Chinese Communist Party drive us? Oh, we have to do this or China wins," said Bannon in his speech at the event in Washington. "We should quarantine now every aspect of the ecosystem of artificial intelligence away from the Chinese Communist Party today. We should cut them off."

Safetyists

Safetyists are primarily concerned with the potential risks of the rapid advancement of AI. Their worries center on the possibility of catastrophic or existential outcomes, such as the death of humanity at the hands of autonomous machines.

High-profile members of the safetyist community include Geoffrey Hinton, who is commonly referred to as the "Godfather of AI" because of his pioneering work in deep learning that helped launch the modern era of AI. In recent years, Hinton, who previously worked at Google, has issued a series of warnings about existential risks associated with AI, particularly if an AI model surpasses human intelligence and becomes autonomous.

Another vocal AI safetyist is Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher at OpenAI and co-author of AI 2027, a paper published last year that discusses how super-intelligent AI could lead to human extinction by the mid-2030s.

Effective altruists

Effective altruists (often shortened to "EA") generally believe in maximizing humanity's long-term welfare. The movement originally focused on material ways to reduce global poverty. But more recently, many EA thinkers have focused their concerns on the possibility of existential risks from advanced AI and other potential societal-scale disasters such as nuclear war, climate change and pandemics. They particularly worry about the consequences for future generations. People from the EA camp prioritize AI safety, alignment — which is the science of making sure AI systems behave in a way that is reflective of human values and in line with safety rules — and reducing the probability of catastrophic outcomes.

The key difference between EAs and safetyists is that EAs generally provide funding for AI safety research and risk mitigation, whereas safetyists are researchers and advocates undertaking AI safety work and publicly calling for regulation.

Other AI factions often derisively describe effective altruists as so-called "AI Doomers." EA has also become a focus of criticism from the Trump administration since Coxon's resignation from Anthropic.

"Americanism, not effective altruism. The United States will continue to be AI DOMINANT!" said one Defense Department post this month.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is associated with the effective altruists and argues for stronger regulations on AI.

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Well-known people in the EA movement include Eliezer Yudkowsky, co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which focuses on mathematical approaches to making advanced AI systems safe. He is also the author of Harry Potter fan fiction that helped popularize ideas associated with EA. Holden Karnofsky, an American entrepreneur and philanthropist, founded Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), an organization that funds causes central to the EA mission, including AI and biosecurity. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is considered to be aligned with effective altruism. Karnofsky also works at Anthropic and is married to Daniela Amodei, who is a co-founder of Anthropic and the sister of Dario Amodei, the CEO.

Another high-profile supporter of the EA movement is Sam Bankman-Fried, who founded major cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In 2023, he was convicted of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the misuse of customer and investor funds and is currently serving a 25-year prison sentence.

AI ethics

The AI ethics camp argues that society should focus on the harms AI is already causing, rather than on hypothetical existential risks. Some proponents contend that emphasizing existential threats from a hypothetical future superintelligence can serve as a distraction from the more immediate harms and accountability issues surrounding AI today.

AI ethicists' concerns include how AI systems can be biased due to the content of their training data, for example, the ways in which AI facial recognition or job application systems might perpetuate existing societal biases. They are also concerned with how AI could be used to exploit workers and to enable mass surveillance, as well as about the environmental costs of data centers, autonomous weapons and the concentration of power among technology companies.

A notable voice of the AI ethics faction is Timnit Gebru, a computer scientist and former co-lead of Google's Ethical AI team. Gebru left the company in 2020 because of a dispute with the company over a research paper she wrote exposing problems with large language models (LLMs), including their tendency to generate harmful or misleading language.

AI as a normal technology

People belonging to the "AI as a Normal Technology" group reject both the utopian and dystopian narratives about AI. Instead, this faction sees AI as a powerful but ultimately normal technology, comparable to the internet or electricity. They believe the focus should be on understanding and regulating specific applications and harms instead of treating AI as an unprecedented threat or as a path to inevitable superintelligence.

Fei-Fei Li is a computer scientist and co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. She and others in her faction argue that AI is more like a typical technology than others in the field believe.

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Notable people associated with this worldview include Fei-Fei Li, a computer scientist and co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. Li is famous for creating ImageNet, a vastly large dataset of images which provided the training data for large neural networks, which led to several major developments in AI.

Katie McQue's reporting is supported by the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, which is a grantee of Coefficient Giving. Neither Tarbell nor Coefficient have any editorial input into her work.
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