President Donald Trump has been talking for months about his desire to eliminate FEMA, the federal agency tasked with responding to natural disasters. But until now, we didn’t really know when he planned to pull the trigger on such a ridiculous plan. Well, now it looks like Trump wants to make it happen after the current hurricane season, which started this month and ends in November.
“We want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump said from the Oval Office. “The FEMA thing has not been a very successful experiment. Very, very expensive and it doesn’t get the job done.”
Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said, “We all know from the past that FEMA has failed thousands, if not millions, of people. And President Trump does not want to see that continue into the future. So this agency fundamentally needs to go away as it exists.”
Noem went on to say that she expects there to be “high activity” in the next “several months” when it comes to emergencies, referring to hurricanes, though the press conference at the White House was ostensibly about wildfires and forest management.
Trump has been criticizing FEMA since his 2024 presidential campaign and putting those ideas into action since at least Jan. 22, just two days into his second term. The president said, “I think FEMA is not good,” and promised to wind down the agency. Trump insists that it’s all about local control, and this will allow him to allocate money to states individually, but that’s obviously a huge problem.
Presidents shouldn’t be allowed to pick and choose which states get money on a whim, doling out more money to Republican governors who support them while holding back money from Democratic governors who may oppose their policies. Now is a perfect time to see how that weaponization of aid money can have devastating consequences, as Trump goes to war with the city of Los Angeles and California Governor Gavin Newsom over anti-ICE protests.
FEMA has never been considered the agency that should be first on the ground during a disaster, but federal help has always been considered crucial for recovery. And Trump has already shifted a lot of financial responsibility to the states as he winds down the agency. As Bloomberg notes, the White House has already frozen more than $1 billion in grants to fund FEMA disaster mitigation strategies and attempted to freeze $2.2 billion more.
Trump explained on Tuesday how he recently gave $71 million “to a certain state” despite the fact that they wanted $120 million. Trump appeared to be talking about the $71 million sent to Missouri after the recent severe storms and tornadoes there in April and May. Missouri’s governor, Mike Kehoe, is a Republican, and he released a statement Monday saying the state appreciated Trump and was “grateful for the President’s leadership.”
It’s obvious where this is all headed. Trump wants to set up a system where those who show fealty get money, and those who don’t will have funds withheld. That’s not how the U.S. system is supposed to operate, but it’s clearly where we’re headed.
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