Bryan talks about the Department of Education, FEMA, the economy, climate, how California elected officials are protecting the state, and the difference between Trump and Biden’s presidential administrations.
By Jason Lewis
President Donald Trump had a tumultuous first term, but after just the first two month of his second term he has the bulk of the world twisting and turning. Fortunately for California residents, this is a liberal state with Democrat elected officials who are working to shield the state from policies that compromise California residents.
California State Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, whose district encompasses portions of South Los Angeles and Mid City Los Angeles, spoke about how important California is to the nation, how the federal government impacts this state, the differences between working with Trump’s administration and former President Joe Biden’s administration, and how California state legislators are protecting the residents of the state from Trump’s policies.
“The last time that Trump was in office, California filed nearly 150 lawsuits to protect our rights and protect our people,” Bryan said. “We’re going to make sure that our Department of Justice has the resources to file whatever lawsuits are necessary to protect California this go around. We know that this president has a disdain for all of the values that we hold dear. Values that promote diversity and inclusivity. The recognition of past harms and the committment to do better. These are values that define California. That make places like Los Angeles a global city. These are values that have been rejected by the president.”
California is the biggest donor state in the nation. In 2022, the residents and businesses of the state paid $692 billion in taxes to the federal government and received $609 billion in federal funding. Texas paid the second most in taxes at $370 billion and New York was third at $358 billion. In 2024, California was one of only 10 states that sent the federal government more money than it received back, and California has the largest deficit by a wide margin. Each of the 10 states that have a deficit voted for Kamala Harris in the presidential election.
“The federal government is critically important to what happens in the state of California,” Bryan said. “California pays more in federal taxes than it takes back. So we support the rest of the country in many ways. Especially poorer red states (which voted for Trump) in many cases. If the funding that California does receive back in support is hindered or cut back, it would have a real impact on the people of California.
“We have one-eighth of all Americans here in California. We have the fifth largest economy in the world. Our agriculture feeds the world, literally. There’s a lot that we bring to the table for our country, and if the federal government chooses to abandon California, it will trickle-down and impact every single community.”
Like every state, California has climate issues and natural disasters which require federal funding to recover from.
“We experience a number of climate emergencies that are unique to California, like our wildfire season,” Bryan said. “It is hard to plan for and can be extremely devastating and costly to parts of our state. We need FEMA (which Trump is downsizing and cutting funds to). We need federal emergency dollars to step in. We’ve seen collaboration with the Biden administration through the years that has been incredibly helpful. During wildfire season and also things here locally in my district in Los Angeles when the 10 Freeway went down. We got that thing up in like 18 days. They were predicting six months or longer. Mayor Karen Bass put a call in to the president (Biden), who put a call in to the different departments in the federal government to show up and step up, and the 10 has been running ever since. When we had the hurricane in Los Angeles, which wasn’t really a hurricane, but we had to prepare like it was because we were seeing winds and rainfall that we weren’t built for. I remember Mayor Bass being on the phone call with the president. He called her while she was at a press conference to make sure that she had everything that she needed. That kind of collaboration with the country’s largest and most populated state is important."
One of Trump’s several goals is to dismantle the Department of Education, which would hurt several million public school students in California.
“The Trump administration is concerning, starting with the cabinet picks,” Bryan said. “In the Department of Education, we’ve had underperforming and underfunded schools that go back to days of divestment here in California when we had superintendents in our state who were setting up the financial structures in a way that it deprived certain communities and certain schools while empowering others. That legacy carries over to today. California has started to right those wrongs. The federal government has stepped in to do the same with the Department of Education. We now have a president who wants to abolish the Department of Education, and he’s proving it by putting a WWE (professional wrestling) spectacle of an appointee, a billionaire who has never taught in the classroom, in charge of it. It would be comedy if it wasn’t real life. That’s dangerous.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon has said that she’s following Trump’s directive to eliminate the Department of Education. The Department of Education handles civil rights issues and racial discrimination against Black people and people of color in schools. Without this department, a system of separate but unequal could return. Trump has also proposed fining schools that teach African American studies and giving that money to people who he claims have been hurt by equity policies. It was clear that the people who Trump was referring to was White people.
“He has suggested reparations for White folks, which is unconscionable,” Bryan said. “Black, and Black men in particular, have been underrepresented in our universities since their inception. In many cases across this country Black folks were not allowed to participate in institutions of higher learning. Our HBCUs arose out of those conditions. For 13 generations we were not allowed to read or write without the threat of the whip or losing our lives. That legacy lives today, and the current president is talking about extending the afterlife of that legacy by penalizing universities that want to teach that legacy and repair harms that they participated in. White folks have never been disenfranchised by our institutions of higher learning. Communities of color and Black folks have and still do.”
Bryan said that he and California elected officials will “fight tooth and nail” to ensure that California schools are still able to teach African American studies.
“Learning about Black people is a threat to the ideology that the president is pushing,” Bryan said. “Anybody who advances critical race theory, ethnic studies, deep historical analysis, contextualizing it for today and setting the blueprint for how we can do better, for some reason that has been demonized. We can’t stop teaching our history.”
Many Trump supporters say that they voted for him because of the economy, but it appears that Trump’s policies benefit rich people and corporations while hurting middle income and lower income people, which account for the majority of the U.S. population.
“When Donald Trump thinks about the economy, he thinks about the stock market,” Bryan said. “He thinks about share holders. He thinks about growing the pie for the folks who are already eating. Not the folks who have been starving for generations. The work that my office tries to do is raise from the bottom so that we all rise. Trickle down thinking has been failing ever since President Ronald Reagan first proposed it. The Trump administration is proposing a regressive system that penalizes poor folks. We need a progressive tax system where you earn more, you do well, then you have a greater responsibility to give back to this country that has opened up the doors for wealth opportunities for you. I think that the Trump administration is going to fundamentally shift the ability for folks who have been boxed out of economic opportunities to gain their footing.”
With the largest population in the nation and many congested highways in big cities, California politicians have been pushing for electric vehicles to solve the pollution problem. But Trump’s administration is looking to pull federal funding from those efforts.
“There are threats to pull us out of some of our climate commitments,” Bryan said. “The federal government funds electric vehicles with tax rebates and other infrastructure to help us change from our fossil fuel dependency into an electrified form of transportation. That would help our folks who have long commutes and pay gas prices that are way too high. That’s Black folks, Brown folks, and poor folks. We have to make electric vehicles more affordable. We have to change our market, not just for our planet, but for our economy as well, and the federal government has been playing a role in that. If the federal government pulls out, California has to step back in. The governor (Gavin Newsom) has already announced that California will fund its own EV program if the federal government pulls out.”
Stay updated on Bryan by visiting his website at a55.asmdc.org and by following his social media pages.
