We have a federal government to handle problems too big to be managed locally
Trump tells campaign crowd no FEMA support unless they elect Republicans.
Stephen Prager for Common Dreams
Politico reported that Cameron Hamilton, the administrator of the US
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), told state officials at
the National Emergency Management Association’s annual meeting in Little Rock,
Arkansas, that they would need to allocate resources to respond to most
disasters without help from the federal government.
“Every state must have the appropriate financial reserves”
and other abilities “to ensure that recovery efforts can start immediately and
not necessarily be held up simply because of the federal [disaster] declaration
process,” Hamilton said, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by
the outlet.
“A future that I hope we would shoot for is one where we
wouldn’t require as many disasters because the capability of states is so high
and so substantial,” Hamilton added, referring to presidential authorizations
of federal disaster aid.
Trump has instituted dramatic cuts to FEMA that have hampered its response to
disasters. When Texas faced
floods last year that killed at least 138 people, for example, the
administration’s spending restrictions delayed FEMA’s deployment of search-and-rescue teams for
more than 72 hours, while lapsed call-center contracts left thousands of
survivors’ calls for assistance unanswered.
While cutting its workforce, Trump has suggested FEMA is “very bureaucratic” and “very slow” and has floated shutting the agency down entirely, shifting its responsibilities to the states. Yet a FEMA report released Friday found that state disaster agencies are “typically understaffed and underfunded, and many depend heavily on federal assistance.”
Hamilton’s speech comes days after the publication of an
internal memo stating that FEMA would “strengthen state and local emergency
management capacity.” The memo, also obtained by Politico, said that “reducing federal
dependency requires partners to build, maintain, and exercise the capabilities
needed to manage incidents effectively.”
“This is just the latest step in Trump’s agenda to push the
cost of disasters onto states who are already stretched thin,” said Mia Logan, a senior adviser to Climate Power. “States
rely on federal disaster aid to rebuild roads, bridges, and the communities
where people live and work. From his first days in office to now, Trump’s
message to Americans has been consistent: If extreme weather hits, you’re on
your own, because help is probably not coming.”
Dana Fisher, an American University professor who studies
climate politics, has stressed that Trump is pulling back disaster aid “even
though the United
States is experiencing more disasters as the climate changes.”
“The hottest
US summer on record left millions of Americans facing life-threatening heatwaves,” she wrote for The Conversation. “Extreme heat and drought set the stage for wildfires. Flooding from powerful storms and days of heavy rainfall inundated
communities in several states. And now a ‘Super
El Niño,’ on top of already rising temperatures and sea levels, is expected to make extreme events worse, at
least into spring 2027.”
Dan Koh, a former Biden White House official
who helped coordinate federal disaster responses, called
placing the recovery burden on states “batshit insane.”
“I worked with FEMA in the White House,” he wrote on social media. “States
don’t have the budget for
this.”
He pointed to Hurricane Katrina
as an example: The storm caused about $108 billion in damage, nearly six times
Louisiana’s entire 2005 operating budget of about $18.7 billion.
“There are many states with minuscule emergency management
offices and budgets,” wrote Eric Holdeman, the former emergency management
director for King County, Washington,
in a blog post. “There are states with slim rainy-day funds and no capacity to
make up for a lack of federal disaster recovery funds—without RAISING TAXES.”
He suggested that the scarce federal funds that remain could
be wielded by presidents as a political tool—something Trump has already done
many times during his second term. An Associated Press investigation in July found that Trump had approved
three-quarters of disaster aid requests from states he won in 2024, compared
with less than half from states he lost.
On the campaign trail last month, Trump told North Carolina voters the state would not receive
disaster recovery funds for Hurricane Helene unless Republican Michael Whatley
won his competitive Senate race, though he later said he was “only kidding.”
Trump has also used disaster recovery to coerce states into
adopting specific policies. In California, he threatened to withhold assistance for recovery from last
year’s devastating wildfires
unless the state adopted voter identification requirements and changed its water policies.
Hamilton told state officials on Tuesday that changes to
federal disaster assistance could begin “in the next six months”—just as the developing
El Niño is expected to intensify extreme weather through next spring.
In response, Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom—who is
expected to run for president in 2028—wrote
that “Donald Trump’s FEMA has a message to Americans during hurricane season
and ahead of a historic El Niño: DROP DEAD.”
