Trump’s Cabinet remarks prompted multiple fact-checks
President Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting of 2026 drew remarks on the economy, housing, energy, health initiatives and drug prices, and included a series of claims the Associated Press found to be false or misleading. The review, published as an AP Fact Check, examined statements made by Trump and other administration officials during the Thursday meeting, including claims intended to portray progress on investment, home sales, and wildfire rebuilding. The AP also challenged statements about how disaster response authorities manage rebuilding permits and about water availability during the 2025 Los Angeles-area wildfires.
A key economic claim focused on investment totals. Trump said, “$18 trillion is being invested now,” but the AP reported that he presented no evidence backing that figure as secured investment in the United States. The AP said the $18 trillion number appears exaggerated and speculative when compared with statements attributed to companies, foreign governments and the White House, and it noted that the White House website lists a much lower figure of $9.6 trillion, which the AP said appears to include commitments made during the Biden administration.
The AP also pointed to a study published Tuesday that, it said, raised doubts about whether more than $5 trillion in investment commitments made last year by many of America’s biggest trading partners would actually materialize and about how such investment would be spent if it did. In a separate AP Fact Check context, those investment pledges were similarly treated as uncertain, including skepticism tied to whether commitments become realized deals. MSI previously reported that foreign investment pledges of about $5 trillion faced skepticism over whether they would turn into actual investments.
Housing sales figures called overstated
For housing, the AP said Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner overstated the state of the market when he linked administration “policy” to home sales in December. Turner said, “Because of your policy sir, home sales in December, they rose sharply to their strongest pace in three years.” The AP reported that the National Association of Realtors did report that the seasonally adjusted annual rate of home sales in December rose to 4.35 million units, “nearly” the highest in three years.
However, the AP said the year-over-year increase was only 1.4%, and it also highlighted a potential inconsistency in the broader direction of the market. The AP reported that the Realtors separately said that pending home sales in December fell 3% from a year earlier, suggesting a weaker pipeline for future sales. It further noted that Turner’s presentation could be interpreted as a short-term monthly blip rather than a sustained shift.
The AP also said Trump has argued that keeping home prices high supports people’s net worth, but it reported that holding prices up could keep construction levels low and price out first-time buyers.
Wildfire permitting dispute and the numbers behind it
On the 2025 Los Angeles-area wildfires, Trump discussed state and local permitting for rebuilding and said: “They have been unable to give permits. There are like three houses being built out of thousands and thousands. They have no permits.” The AP said that claim does not match what local records show.
The AP reported that on Friday Trump signed an executive order directing the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Small Business Administration to find a way to issue regulations that would preempt state and local permitting rules and allow builders to “self-certify” compliance with “substantive health, safety, and building standards.” The AP then contrasted that policy aim with figures on the ground: it said that about 3,100 permits had been issued within the Palisades and Eaton fire zones as of Thursday, while fewer than a dozen residences had been rebuilt and about 900 homes were under construction.
The AP said California Gov. Gavin Newsom responded to Trump on social media by saying local officials were moving quickly. Newsom also called for the Trump administration to approve California’s $33.9 billion disaster aid request. Survivor advocates told the AP that permits may not be the primary obstacle for affected households right now, and they pointed to continuing problems securing full insurance payouts or gaps of hundreds of thousands of dollars between what residents received and the cost to fully rebuild.
The AP also provided context for permitting timelines, citing Andrew Rumbach, co-lead of the Climate and Communities Program at the Urban Institute, who said it typically takes about 18 months after a major wildfire for permitting to gain steam. Rumbach pointed to the recovery pattern from a December 2021 blaze south of Boulder, Colorado, which destroyed more than 1,000 homes: the AP reported that after a year, cleanup was mostly complete and most permit applications were in, but it took about six more months for permits to be issued.
The AP said the two California fires killed 31 people and destroyed about 13,000 residential properties.
Disputed water supply claim
The AP also challenged a separate Trump statement about how officials respond to fires. Trump said: “They should have allowed the water to come down from the Pacific Northwest, which was very plentiful. But they didn’t do that.”
The AP reported that there is no water supply from the Pacific Northwest that connects to California’s system. It said most of California’s water comes from the northern part of the state, where it melts from mountain snow and runs into rivers that connect to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta before much of it is sent south to farmers and cities like Los Angeles through two large pumping and canal systems—one run by the federal government and one by the state.
The AP said some Los Angeles fire hydrants ran dry during last year’s wildfires, but local officials attributed that to municipal infrastructure not being designed to handle a disaster of that scale. It also disputed a related claim by Kelly Loeffler, administrator of the Small Business Administration, who told the AP that an executive order had gotten “water to the scene in your earliest days of your presidency.” The AP said the executive order dated Jan. 24, 2025 resulted in water going to a dry lake basin more than 100 miles from Los Angeles.
Other remarks described as exaggerated or incorrect
In addition to the housing and wildfire claims, the AP said Trump repeated other statements that it found to be exaggerated or wrong. The AP reported that Trump claimed: “There’s never been a first year like this, including the fact that we put out — extinguished — eight wars,” but said the statistic was highly exaggerated, noting that while Trump has helped mediate relations among multiple nations, its impact was not as clear-cut as presented.
The AP also said Trump urged audiences: “You’re not allowed to say the word coal without preceding by saying clean, beautiful coal,” and it reported that coal production is cleaner than historically but that does not mean it is clean. And on China and wind power, the AP said Trump claimed: “They make the windmills, but they don’t have a lot of wind farms… How many wind farms do they have? Very, very few,” and the AP reported that China is the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines, producing more than half the supply and installing them at a record pace.