The Numbers Are Staggering

The Palisades and Eaton fires that tore through Los Angeles in January 2025 caused $61.2 billion in damages. That's according to Climate Central, a nonprofit research group that has stepped in to fill a gap left by the federal government.

The previous record for wildfire damage was roughly half that. These fires nearly doubled it in a single month.

According to USA Today, the LA fires burned over 40,000 acres, damaged nearly 20,000 properties, and killed at least 27 people directly. The Guardian puts the indirect death toll at around 400 people and the number of destroyed buildings at roughly 16,000.

The First Half of 2025 Was a Disaster — Literally

The picture expands considerably when examining the broader six-month window. Climate Central documented 14 separate weather disasters between January and June 2025, each causing at least $1 billion in damage.

Combined total: $101.4 billion in losses. That is the most expensive first half of any year since tracking began in 1980, according to Climate Central's analysis reported by USA Today and The Guardian.

The LA fires alone accounted for more than 60% of that total. The remaining $40 billion came from 13 severe storm events — tornadoes, floods, and other weather disasters spread across the country.

For context, The Guardian notes the entire cost of all major disasters between 1985 and 1995 was $299 billion. The past decade — 2014 through last year — racked up $1.4 trillion. The upward trend is clear.

The Government Stopped Counting

For over 45 years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) tracked major U.S. weather disasters — every billion-dollar event, the human death toll, the economic damage. The dataset covered over 400 events totaling nearly $3 trillion in losses and more than 16,000 deaths since 1980, according to USA Today.

The Trump administration killed that program in May 2025, citing, in the agency's words, "evolving priorities, statutory mandates and staffing changes." The data is frozen on NOAA's website through the end of 2024 — and that's where it stops.

NOAA's staffing was cut by an estimated 18% to 20%, according to former officials cited by USA Today.

Adam Smith — the NOAA scientist who ran the disaster tracking program for over a decade — left the agency and took the methodology with him to Climate Central. He is now the one publishing this data. The federal government isn't.

What Mainstream Coverage Is Getting Wrong

Left-leaning outlets like The Guardian and NYT are covering this story primarily as a climate change narrative. That framing isn't wrong — but it's incomplete.

Smith himself told USA Today: "Either way you look at it, the rise in damages relates to human activities." That's broader than just carbon emissions. More people living in fire-prone and flood-prone areas is a massive driver of rising disaster costs. Building more homes near forests and coastlines means losing more homes when disasters hit. That's land use policy, insurance regulation, and local zoning.

Right-leaning outlets have largely ignored this story altogether. That's also a failure. $101 billion in disaster losses in six months is not a partisan talking point. It's a taxpayer problem.

The administration hasn't given a substantive public explanation for cutting the one federal program that tracked this data — only bureaucratic boilerplate. Taxpayers fund NOAA. Taxpayers bear the costs of these disasters. That transparency gap deserves scrutiny regardless of politics.

The Data Gap Is a Real Problem

FEMA uses disaster cost data for disaster declarations. Insurance regulators use it to set rates. State and local governments use it for emergency planning. When the federal government stops publishing it, decisions get made in the dark.

Climate Central is doing credible work — Smith used the same NOAA methodology he built over a decade. But a nonprofit funded by donors is not a substitute for a permanent, funded federal program. If the data is wrong or the nonprofit loses funding, there is no backup.

Cutting this program while disaster costs are at record highs is, at minimum, poor timing. At worst, it amounts to burying inconvenient information during a crisis.

What This Means for Regular People

If you own a home in a fire corridor, flood zone, or tornado alley — your insurance premiums are going up. They already are. Insurers are pulling out of California, Florida, and other high-risk states because the math no longer works.

Federal disaster relief dollars are finite. When one fire costs $61 billion, that crowds out recovery funding for every other disaster that year.

And now the government has stopped tracking the problem officially. The data still exists — because one former federal employee took his spreadsheets to a nonprofit. But that is a fragile, temporary fix for a permanent national need.