Because he can
June 1 marked the beginning of hurricane season, a period
whose existence was news to Trump’s head of FEMA, David Richardson, who had
no prior experience managing disaster relief. Richardson was appointed to
replace FEMA acting chief Cameron Hamilton, who was fired summarily after telling a congressional subcommittee that
he didn’t think FEMA should be shut down.
Trump’s attack on FEMA goes beyond even the Project 2025 design, which proposed to cut FEMA and
turn some of its functions over to the states. Homeland Security Secretary
Kristi Noem said in March that she wanted FEMA shut down entirely (she later backpedaled and spoke of shrinking and
reforming it). But most states have nothing like FEMA’s capacity or experience,
and don’t want FEMA reduced or closed.
Due to actions early in Trump’s term, FEMA has lost an estimated 2,000 employees out of about 6,100, according to The Wall Street Journal. Many of these were nominally probationary employees, but due to the agency’s need to quickly staff up in an emergency, these tended to be experienced staffers who work for FEMA part of every year.
This is occurring as FEMA’s much-depleted sister agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is predicting as many as 19 hurricanes this summer and fall, including three to five major ones likely to cause massive damage.
To add injury to insult, Trump has rejected
bipartisan requests to continue the Biden policy of covering 100 percent of the
costs of relief and recovery operations after major disasters. The usual split
is 75 percent federal, matched by 25 percent state.
In April, FEMA refused to declare a major disaster in
Washington state to provide funding for recovery from a bomb cyclone in
November 2024; and denied North Carolina more funding for cleanup after
Hurricane Helene. In September 2024, Helene caused massive damage in six
Southeastern states. The agency was generally praised for its response, including by North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis,
but its resources were spread very thin. This season, they will be even
thinner.
Meanwhile, NOAA has suffered the loss of about 20 percent of its personnel, due to Trump’s dismissal of several hundred probationary employees, plus early retirements of demoralized staff. The agency is frantically recruiting to fill key vacancies in the National Weather Service. According to The Washington Post, these include 76 meteorologists, including forecasters as well as the managers who run each of the service’s 122 forecast offices. Other vacancies are for technicians who operate radar and computer systems.
You don’t need a crystal ball to predict that sometime this
summer or fall, there will be a catastrophic hurricane, or perhaps two
back-to-back. There will be loss of life, and property damage into the
billions. And the newly gutted FEMA will not be equal to the challenge.
The worsening hurricanes are of course the result of climate
change. Further cuts to research on climate are included in the budget
reconciliation bill.
Cutting funding for NOAA’s forecasting and research is
perverse policy, but at least it has ideological logic. Having private
companies sponge off of public expertise financed by taxpayers and claim
superior “efficiency” is the standard Republican playbook.
As our colleague Gabrielle Gurley points out in
this piece, companies like AccuWeather have nothing like NOAA’s in-depth
expertise, and profit by packaging and selling what NOAA provides for free. At
one point, AccuWeather was lobbying to prohibit NOAA from providing weather
forecasts at no charge. And in Trump’s first term, he appointed the CEO of
AccuWeather, Barry Myers, to head NOAA. But NOAA is such a valuable public good
that it has survived basically intact—until Trump II.
FEMA is a whole other story. When the first major hurricane
hits, and a depleted FEMA is not equal to the task, Trump will get the
political blame—and most hurricane-prone areas are in red states. So the
gutting of FEMA makes no political sense. But then, that describes most of
Trump’s savaging of government’s valuable services.
Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School
