On Thursday, U.S. Senators Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff (both D-Calif.), members of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, joined the Washington state Senate delegation for a press conference calling out what they said is President Trump’s “outrageous” and “overtly political” decision to zero out critical funding for Army Corps of Engineers construction projects in blue states like California and Washington while steering hundreds of millions more to red states.

Senators Padilla, Schiff, Patty Murray (D-Wash.), and Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) criticized the Army Corps’ plan released late last week that announced their intention to zero out all Army Corps construction funding for California ($126 million), as well as cut $500 million for the Howard Hanson Dam in Washington state.

This funding was included in the Corps’ fiscal year 2025 budget request, in the Senate’s bipartisan draft fiscal year 2025 funding bill, and even in House Republicans’ draft fiscal year 2025 funding bill.

However, the Trump Administration — using the new discretion afforded by the yearlong continuing resolution House Republicans drafted that was signed into law — ignored the draft bills and instead apportioned funding on what the senators said is a brazenly political basis.

The four California flood control projects losing Army Corps funding include the American River Common Features Levee Improvement Project, the Pajaro River Flood Risk Management Project, the Lower San Joaquin River Project, and the West Sacramento Project.

These projects will protect some of the most at-risk areas in the nation, including Sacramento County, which the Corps considers the most at-risk region for catastrophic flooding in the United States.

“When anyone takes the oath of office, even Donald Trump as President of the United States, you become the president for all Americans — not just for red states or for blue states, but for every state and every community equally,” said Sen. Padilla. “Yet, since the minute Donald Trump returned to office, he’s set out to politicize the office he holds, now trying to take hundreds of millions of dollars in flood prevention funding away from the states that happened to not vote for him and redirect them to projects in states that supported his election. It’s absolutely wrong. In California, that means cutting every last dollar of funding that was allocated for certain flood control projects. For a president so obsessed with fighting waste, fraud, and abuse, I know where he can find it. He just has to look in the mirror. Communities up and down California — including farmers and farm workers in the Central Valley and Pajaro — will now be at a higher risk of flooding because Donald Trump’s playing politics with federal funding.”

“Natural disasters don’t discriminate based on whether a state is red or blue, and the administration and Congress shouldn’t either when it comes to protecting communities from natural disasters. This puts us on a very dangerous path, a path where anything can be on the chopping block for a partisan reason. Today, it’s funding for these projects. Tomorrow, it could be another form of funding meant to save lives. There will be a domino effect of threats aimed at blue states. When you’re elected to be president of the United States. You’re not a half president. You’re not president for only half of the country, not if you do the job right. These baseless attacks threaten millions of people from both parties whose lives are endangered by floods,” said Sen. Schiff.

Overall, the Army Corps’ plans would steer roughly $258 million more in construction funding to red states while ripping away roughly $437 million in construction funding for blue states, relative to the Corps’ FY 2025 request, which was fully funded in the draft FY 2025 bills that were produced on a bipartisan basis in the Senate and by Republicans in the House. These requests have historically been fully funded.

Trump’s work plan steers two thirds of all Army Corps construction funding to red states while the budget request and House and Senate bills would have split that funding evenly to red and blue states.

Padilla and Schiff voted against the continuing resolution earlier this year, which cut the Army Corps’ construction account by 44 percent.