LOS ANGELES – When catastrophic fires still burned across this vast metropolis, local leaders pledged they would respond with one voice, sharing a mission as they steered the region through a complex recovery process.

But a much messier reality has emerged since the Jan. 7 firestorms: one of colliding egos, differing political agendas and a tangle of task forces all jockeying to lead Los Angeles at a moment of deep crisis.

Instead of one united voice, there have been many dissonant ones.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass appointed a “chief recovery officer,” then hired an outside consulting firm. The city council created an ad-hoc recovery committee. Two members of the county Board of Supervisors launched separate commissions. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a state investigation of the local response, as well as a private-sector fundraising effort. Other civic leaders, some of them publicly critical of Bass, also declared that they would raise money.

And President Donald Trump, after a brief visit to the burn zone, named his own rebuilding czar, who has sniped repeatedly at state and local leaders.

In all, there are at least nine separate recovery groups, some of which do not appear to be coordinating with one another as others devolve into open hostility, complicating the response and undercutting the message of unity that officials had initially hoped to project.

Caught in the middle are tens of thousands of Angelenos, displaced from their homes and desperate for answers about when they can return or rebuild. Officials have responded by setting up “one-stop” recovery centers, but residents must still navigate a maze of more than a dozen local, state and federal agencies for housing assistance, planning, permitting and utility services.

Rebuilding will take years, and while Newsom has requested nearly $40 billion in federal disaster aid, there are no guarantees about what the Republican-controlled Congress will provide. The early chaos has raised fears among victims and officials that dysfunction and infighting will slow the recovery effort across giant swaths of the region.

“At times it feels like there’s too many people in charge,” said Traci Park, a Los Angeles city council member who represents Pacific Palisades. “And other times it feels like nobody is in charge.”

‘We’re so siloed’

Despite the muddle, hundreds of workers from the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers have descended on the two separate burn scars, part of a cleanup effort that has moved at a brisk pace.

But this first stage of recovery is under federal, not local, purview and part of a highly organized process honed by major disasters across the country. The debris removal so far appears to be progressing faster than after other fires, as Trump and Newsom have prodded officials to move more quickly.

But there are warning signs for future collaboration. Trump has offered mixed predictions about whether he would withhold federal disaster aid – first threatening to do so, then pledging to “give you everything you want” after surveying the wreckage in person. Trump, his appointed rebuilding czar and GOP lawmakers have floated attaching conditions to recovery funds.

Residents say they also are terrified that the Trump administration’s deep cuts to the federal bureaucracy will reduce the amount of local and federal government help they’re able to receive.

The fractured fire response is partly a reflection of the region’s unusually diffuse system of governance, which purposefully decentralizes power and authority. Unlike big cities to the east where mayors dominate, L.A.’s governance is more complicated.

Nearly 4 million people live in the city, its craggy borders running from the San Fernando Valley to the San Pedro Bay. Los Angeles County includes not only the city, but also 87 other municipalities and a patchwork of unincorporated communities. All told, the county’s 9.6 million residents make it the most populous in the country.

Each of the county’s five supervisors represents about 2 million people, more constituents than some U.S. senators, and their districts cut across city lines.

The byzantine system, which has evolved over decades, was meant to empower private interests like local real estate magnates instead of political machines, said Joe Mathews, a fellow at the Berggruen Institute, a Los Angeles-based think tank. A large-scale disaster, he said, highlights the system’s flaws.

“It’s very like us: We’re so siloed and cut off,” said Mathews, co-author of “California Crackup,” a critique of the state’s governance issues. “Everyone’s doing their own thing and we don’t work together.”

The January blazes spread with little regard to political boundaries. Both fires are believed to have started on federal land. The Palisades Fire burned largely within Los Angeles city limits. But the Eaton Fire dealt its most devastating blow to the town of Altadena, in unincorporated county territory. Aside from limited joint briefings in the fires’ early days, local officials have largely responded to the fires separately.

Newsom, meanwhile, has become a familiar presence here. He was on the ground hours after the fires started and was among the first officials to survey the destruction, arriving before Bass had returned from a trip to Ghana. Weeks later, he was waiting on the tarmac when Trump landed in Los Angeles. He has issued order after order targeting fire recovery but it is unclear if he can wrangle the sprawling response into one cohesive effort.

“L.A. is a diffuse place, atomized in a lot of ways, and this is an interesting and unexpected opportunity for people to work together in ways that haven’t historically happened,” said Dee Dee Myers, one of Newsom’s top advisers.

She said the many existing entities and new organizations that have cropped up have so far been trying “to make sure that our work is aligned early.”

Still, Newsom has at times contributed to the discord; his early call for an investigation into the fire response was broadly seen as an effort to distance himself from the embattled Bass. And when he said that he and lawmakers had agreed on $2.5 billion to cover initial fire response costs, some Los Angeles city council members said they were blindsided to learn the funds would not flow directly to the city – but rather would reimburse the state’s spending.

“It was presented as if it was relief or resources in actual dollars that was coming to the region, and that’s not the case,” said council member Monica Rodriguez, who is worried about the city – already in dire financial straits – spending money without guarantee of federal reimbursement.

“Everybody is coming in with their photo ops and committing resources to help aid in the recovery,” she said of the many public and private fundraising efforts. “But I don’t know where that money is going or who it helps.”

In addition to the $2.5 billion that the state has set aside for the response, county officials indicate their costs will be at least $1.5 billion. City officials say they have spent $282 million.

Philanthropic organizations are raising hundreds of millions of dollars. FireAid, the group that organized a star-studded benefit concert, has sent $50 million in grants to community organizations providing housing and food assistance, child care, legal support and help to displaced victims. The California Community Foundation has donated a third of the $75 million it has raised using its already-vetted list of community organizations.

“Some of it is not coordinated,” Miguel Santana, the foundation’s president and chief executive, said when asked about the maze of agencies and groups that are involved in the recovery. “But it’s a reflection of the acuity of the event and the fact that it happened in distinct communities, each with their own networks and structures and even overlapping forms of government.”

Political timing has further complicated the dynamic.

Newsom, who is serving his second and final term, may run for president in 2028. Bass is facing reelection next year in an era that has been notoriously hard on incumbents. Both will be judged by the fire response and recovery.

Los Angeles is also racing to prepare to host international events, starting with matches in the men’s soccer World Cup next year, the Super Bowl the year after and, in 2028, the Summer Olympics – the region’s biggest and most high-profile test.

Alissa Walker, editor of the Olympics-focused Torched newsletter, said the haphazard response to the fires has lent uncertainty to the challenges ahead.

“It has become such a scattered and fraught process,” Walker said. “So how are we going to, in a few short years, communicate over this broad region? I don’t know why we aren’t practicing for that right now. It’s just wild to me.”

Newsom has leaned into the coming Olympics in recent weeks, asking Casey Wasserman, the chair of LA 2028, Los Angeles Dodgers chair Mark Walter and Lakers legend Magic Johnson to help lead a philanthropic initiative to raise money for fire recovery.

When Los Angeles lights the Olympic torch in roughly three years, it will symbolize “rebirth and reimagination of what L.A. will be,” Wasserman said at a January news conference, flanked by Walter, Johnson and Newsom.

No local officials were present. Bass was at a meeting on the opposite side of the city.

Rivalries inside the city fuel rancor

Bass has been a lightning rod for controversy since the fire exploded.

A long-simmering, high-profile feud boiled over on Feb. 21, when Bass ousted the city’s fire chief, Kristin Crowley, blaming her for not adequately preparing Los Angeles ahead of the Palisades blaze and saying she refused to participate in an examination of the response’s failings. Crowley had earlier accused the Bass administration of underfunding her department.

Some endorsed Bass’s move, while others saw the mayor shifting blame from herself.

Rick Caruso, the prominent local developer who spent more than $100 million unsuccessfully running against Bass in 2022, has been one of her loudest local critics. He launched his own recovery-focused nonprofit and is weighing whether to challenge Bass again in 2026.

“The need is apparent,” he said. “It’s so glaringly obvious that the city is not moving at the speed it needs to be moving at to get people back in their homes.”

Bass’s relationships with other local leaders are similarly frayed, a striking shift after her prefire vows to “lock arms” across governments to tackle issues like homelessness.

In mid-February, the Los Angeles Times published excerpts from text messages between Bass and Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath that revealed an increasingly strained bond.

“Coordination is missing, but it’s what people want and deserve,” Horvath, whose district includes Pacific Palisades, wrote to Bass in one of the messages obtained by the Times. She said Bass’s office wasn’t communicating with hers ahead of key policy moves.

“Doesn’t feel very ‘locked arms’ to me,” Horvath wrote.

In a statement after the texts became public, Horvath said that given the size of the crisis, “frustrations are inevitable.” She said she would continue to work with Bass and others to ensure the county’s support for all communities.

Bass said she and Horvath have worked closely and that the text exchange was a miscommunication amid “incredible collaboration between every level of government.” She is in frequent touch with other leaders and residents, Bass said, holding twice-weekly webinars attended by hundreds from the Palisades.

“It’s my job to do everything I can to literally over communicate,” she said.

The mayor’s chief recovery officer, longtime civic leader Steve Soboroff, was supposed to smooth the knotty process. Instead, his appointment sparked more scrutiny – and confusion.

After initially agreeing to pay Soboroff $500,000 for 90 days of service, a fee that would have been funded by charities, Bass reversed course, saying after a public outcry that he would work free.

She then suggested that his role would be more limited than originally planned, focused only on the Palisades’ historic business core, rather than the city’s overall recovery. On the same day, Bass also said that she had hired an Illinois-based consulting firm to coordinate “all of the different private and public entities.” Some city council members said they had little input about that decision or clarity from the mayor as to the firm’s scope of work.

Soboroff declined to discuss his compensation or conversations with the mayor. His goal, he said, is to take “the biggest financial disaster in American history and break it into simple tasks and make people feel like they are being cared for – that they are not being ignored.”

More than most cities, Los Angeles knows disaster. But even big ones, like the 1994 Northridge earthquake that killed at least 57 people, have given way to successful recoveries driven by a single unifying figure.

That is what has been missing so far in the current recovery, those involved in it and longtime California observers say. Some say there’s still time for Los Angeles’s response to gel. Recovery will be measured in years, not months, and some of the early friction could ease, they say. Or it might not.

“What you’re seeing right now is a lot of cooks in the kitchen at the elite level,” said Raphael Sonenshein, an expert on the region’s government and the executive director of the Haynes Foundation, which supports social science research in L.A. He said that may simplify as time goes on.

“Any disaster challenges a diffuse governing system,” he said. “But this one really exposed some problems.”