President Trump Tuesday called for the “termination” of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and said disaster relief should be handled by states.
Repeating false claims about the relief effort for Hurricane Helene in North Carolina, Trump said FEMA is riddled with corruption and partisan bias and must be abolished.
“FEMA should be terminated. It has been slow and totally ineffective,” Individual states should handle storms, etc., as they come,” Trump wrote on his social media site. “Big savings, far more efficient.”
Trump has been signaling for some time that he was considering big changes involving FEMA.
He made political hay out of the shocking devastation when Hurricane Helene barreled into western North Carolina last fall. He has repeatedly floated unsubstantiated claims that former President Biden’s administration directed disproportionate amounts of disaster funding to Democratic-leaning areas.
“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 said in an interview after his inauguration on Jan. 20.
Newly confirmed Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem, whose agency oversees FEMA, said last weekend that the feds should “get rid of FEMA the way it exists today.”
“We still need the resources and the funds and the finances to go to people that have these types of disasters,” Noem said. “But you need to let the local officials make the decisions on how that is deployed,” she said.
Like other federal agency, FEMA is funded by Congress, which is given power of the purse in the Constitution. But Trump has directed his ally Elon Musk to dismantle agencies including USAID and the Department of Education in his first days in office, raising serious constitutional questions.