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| The Trump administration wants to get rid of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, with no plan to replace it. So I guess disaster victims will be entirely on their own going forward. |
Even more so now that President Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Ice Barbie Kristi Noem and other administration officials are getting more and more hooked on the idea of ending the Federal Emergency Management Agency's role in disaster recovery by October 1.
Like everything else in the Trump administration, we don't know exactly what that means. I doubt they do, either.
The Washington Post suggests that top on the chopping block are efforts to help rebuild after disasters strike, and funding resilience efforts to help communities get ready for the next inevitable calamity.
I don't know what all this means for the help FEMA provides in the immediate aftermath of a disaster.
That immediate aid includes helping evacuate people, shelter people who've lost homes, provide food to victims that need it, and other services that come in the hours and days after a tornado destroys a town like Cave City, Arkansas, or a flood roars out of the mountains and trashes a town like Montpelier, Vermont.
Without FEMA, I don't know where the money to help disaster victims will come from. Per WaPo:
"Without that federal money, government may need to raid their budgets for education, health car and other areas in order to pay for emergency response - and even then might struggle to cope with mounting disasters,' said (Rep. Jared Moskowitz D-Fla)."
A couple examples of what we might be facing:
North Carolina is estimated to have suffered just under $60 billion in damage from Hurricane Helene.
The state's general fund budget for fiscal year 2024 was $29.7 billon. North Carolina has so far allocated $1.3 billion for Helene relief in the state. Imagine if North Carolina had to foot the entire bill for Helene recovery, which seems to be what at least some people in the Trump administration would have liked.
Another more local example for us Vermonters. The July, 2023 floods caused more than $600 million in damage across the Green Mountain State. Vermont's 2024 general fund budget was $2.3 billion....
It appears FEMA/Trump want states to pull money out of thin air for disaster relief. As the Washington Post reports:
"FEMA's acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, spoke for about 45 minutes on Saturday to a gathering of state emergency managers about the difficulty of change and how stats need to be more resilient and responsible in their disaster response efforts, according to one state-level official who attended.
Hamilton repeatedly used the phrase that states need to work with private partners as the 'performance enhancing drugs of emergency response,' the official said."
It's unclear how the "private partners" would help, and how they might be compelled to help.
The only thing standing in the way of Trump are laws regarding FEMA, and since he thinks laws are just stupid suggestions, I'm not sure how that will help.
"'Eliminating FEMA wiki dramatically hurt red states. It will hurt rural areas It will hurt cities. Places will not recover,' Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Florida) said in an interview, adding that FEMA should be reformed but not eliminated,.
REFORM NEEDED
FEMA indeed needs to be reformed. Reform, though, does not mean screwing disaster victims and the states were calamities occur even more
Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vermont) has been pushing for FEMA reform for months if not years. His goal was to make things easier for disaster victims dealing with FEMA. Basically cut through the red tape. Welch said the plan to get rid of FEMA does exactly the opposite.
“The Trump Administration’s grand plan for victims of natural disasters is to abandon them—and it’s a complete non-starter," Welch said.
After the immediate crisis, disaster victims get ensnarled in a bureaucratic mess, and Welch has long railed against what he rightly calls "FEMA's plodding bureaucracy."
Last year, all three members of Vermont's congressional delegation sent a formal letter to then-FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell calling for "long-term and structural reform:" at the agency.
The situation even created some strange Congressional bedfellows.
Last fall, Welch and Sen Gary Peters (D-MI) joined, of all people Sen. Them Tillis (R-NC) and James Lankford (R-OK) on bipartisan legislation to reform FEMA individual assistance to help people escape FEMA's red tape.
Tillis and Lankford are pretty MAGA. Welch and Peters are decidedly not MAGA, so this was quite a partnership.
Had things worked out differently. this rare moment of bipartisanship maybe would have led to real reform.
But of course once Trump was in office, he blew it all up, like he tends to do.
Here's an allegory of what went on here.
Not long after I bought my house, I discovered carpenter ants had caused a lot of damage on one corner of the house. The rest of the house was fine.
So, we hired experts, who tore out the damaged wood, made sure the carpenter ants were gone, and fixed that corner of the house. I was able to live in the house comfortably while the workers fixed the exterior and living room wall in the southwest corner of the house. Obviously, there was no need to tear down the entire house to start over, right?
The solution Welch, Peters, Tillis and Lankford were working toward was getting rid of the "carpenter ants" in one corner of FEMA.
Trump's solution was to tear down the entire house, i.e. FEMA.
We just had yet another wide ranging disaster across multiple states. The destruction is immense from tornadoes, flooding and other severe weather stretching from Texas to Ohio.
Many of these storm victims will need help for months or even years. People whose house floated away or disintegrated in a tornado don't need bureaucracy, which was Senator Welch's point.
But they also need federal help. Since there doesn't seem to be a plan in place to provide the necessary aid once FEMA evaporates later this year. I guess they're on their own.
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