Donald Trump said Wednesday that he wants to completely upend the Federal Emergency Management Agency, encouraging states to handle their own disaster responses.
“FEMA is a whole ‘nother discussion, because all it does is complicate everything. FEMA has not done their job for the last four years,” he said during a batshit crazy interview with sycophantic Fox News host Sean Hannity. “But unless you have certain types of leadership, it’s really, it gets in the way. And FEMA is going to be a whole big discussion very shortly, because I’d rather see the states take care of their own problems.”
Trump: “FEMA is gonna be a whole big discussion very shortly, because I’d rather see the states takes care of their own problems.”— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-01-23T02:12:01.210Z
As an example, Trump said that if a tornado were to hit Oklahoma, he’d want the state to respond and for FEMA not to have any role in disaster aid.
Sending FEMA back to the states is an idea ripped straight from the pages of Project 2025, the unpopular right-wing policy roadmap of which Trump lied about his involvement during his 2024 campaign.
“Reform of FEMA requires a greater emphasis on federalism and state and local preparedness, leaving FEMA to focus on large, widespread disasters,” the nearly 1,000-page screed says.
Of course, leaving disaster recovery to states would hurt Trump supporters the most.
Florida, Louisiana, and Texas—three states Trump won handily in 2024—have “received the lion’s share of FEMA direct assistance since 2015,” Axios reported.
NBC News reported ahead of the November election on the negative impacts that the FEMA plans in Project 2025—which Trump now seems to have adopted—would have on states like Florida where hurricanes cause billions of dollars worth of damage on an annual basis.
The NBC News report says:
Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., who served as Florida’s Director of Emergency Management under Gov. Ron DeSantis from 2019 to 2021, said that limiting relief aid could turn some communities into ghost towns. He pointed to Hurricane Michael, which hit Florida in 2018 as a Category 5 storm.
“Those areas would not have recovered but for the fact that the federal government came in and paid for the response and for the recovery efforts,” Moskowitz said.
The hardest-hit areas that benefited most from the federal aid, he added, “voted for Donald Trump, voted for Rick Scott, voted for Ron DeSantis.”
What’s more, decentralizing FEMA and making states responsible for disaster relief at a time when climate change causes unpredictable and costly weather-related disasters—including in places that don’t typically experience those types of weather events—could lead to chaotic recoveries, with states unprepared to quickly mobilize disaster responses.
“It almost becomes unthinkable that states would ever be able to recover without long, costly recovery periods that would come out of state and local budgets,” Craig Fugate, the FEMA administrator under President Barack Obama, told NBC News.
Trump’s call to upend FEMA comes after he wrongly blamed California leaders for the devastating fires that are ripping through the southern portion of the state.
Trump and other Republicans have lied about why the fires were so brutal, claiming that it’s because of California’s water management despite firefighters saying that no municipal water system on earth could have provided enough water to combat these fires.
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Trump and his GOP pals in Congress are now threatening to withhold disaster funding for California to punish Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who Trump wrongly blamed for the fires. In fact, Trump’s whole FEMA plan seems to be a way to punish California for the fires.
Still, California’s wildfires aren’t the only natural disasters that Trump and the GOP have been politicizing.
Following Hurricane Helene, which devastated parts of North Carolina with unprecedented flooding, Trump and the GOP spewed a torrent of lies about the FEMA response in an effort to try to weaken support for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. The lies were so pervasive that FEMA had to create a fact-checking webpage to combat them.
But now it appears that the ultimate outcome of the lies could be the decimation of FEMA, which will not only hurt California, but also millions of Trump’s own supporters.
Trump voters fucked around—now they’re about to find out.
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