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President Donald Trump threatened to unleash the Environmental Protection Agency on San Francisco Wednesday after a California visit during which he blamed the homelessness crisis on "liberal" policies. Trump accused the city of allowing a tremendous amount of waste, including needles, to go through storm drains into the ocean. (9/18)

It was not immediately clear which environmental laws Trump was referring to, or on what authority the Environmental Protection Agency would act. Trump, who was traveling in California on Tuesday and Wednesday for campaign fundraisers, said pollution was flowing into the ocean because of waste in storm sewers and he cited used needles. (Fritze and Subramanian, 9/18)

San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, called Mr. Trump’s comments “ridiculous.” “To be clear, San Francisco has a combined sewer system, one of the best and most effective in the country, that ensures that all debris that flow into storm drains are filtered out at the city’s wastewater treatment plants,” Ms. Breed said in a statement Wednesday night. “No debris flow out into the bay or the ocean.” (Shear, Fuller and Baker, 9/18)

Mr. Trump traveled to the Bay Area on Tuesday for the first time since his election, attending a roundtable and a fundraiser near Palo Alto. He has repeatedly attacked San Francisco—a largely liberal city whose congresswoman, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) routinely clashes with the president—over its homelessness problem. (Ballhaus, 9/19)

President Trump’s big idea for fixing California’s homelessness crisis should look familiar to many prominent Democrats: Eliminate layers of regulation to make it easier and cheaper to build more housing. On the eve of a two-day swing through the state this week, Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers released a report blaming “decades of misguided and faulty policies” for putting too many restrictions on development and causing home prices to rise to unaffordable levels. It’s a continuation of a strategy that the president began in June, when he signed an executive order to establish a White House council to “confront the regulatory barriers to affordable housing development.” (Dillon and Oreskes, 9/18)