Trump suggests eliminating FEMA during North Carolina visit as he attacks disaster response

CNN
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President Donald Trump suggested he might eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Friday during a trip to tour damage from Hurricane Helene flooding in North Carolina, a state he’s said “has been abandoned by the Democrats.”

Trump’s comments came as he’s also traveling to California, where wildfires have ravaged the Los Angeles area, and as Republicans on Capitol Hill begin to navigate between conservatives’ desire for spending cuts and Trump’s pledges to help both places rebuild. The trip is Trump’s first outside Washington since his inauguration on Monday.

“This is probably one of the best examples of it not working,” he told reporters of FEMA’s efforts in North Carolina — a swing state he won three times, where he sought to contrast his leadership with what he’s said was Democrats’ mismanagement.

He then said he may soon abolish the agency and instead send money directly to states to manage their own disaster relief efforts.

And he said he was tapping a political ally — Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Whatley, who is from North Carolina — to lead the state’s recovery effort along with Democratic Gov. Josh Stein.

Asked how he would solve North Carolina’s challenges, Trump said he is “not really thinking about FEMA right now.” Instead, he pointed to Whatley and three Republican members of Congress.

“When there’s a problem with a state, I think that that problem should be taken care of by the state. That’s what we have states for — they take care of problems, and a governor can handle something very quickly,” the president said.

He said FEMA “has been a very big disappointment,” and described it as slow, overly bureaucratic and expensive for the federal government.

“FEMA’s turned out to be a disaster,” he said. “I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away and we pay directly, we pay a percentage, to the state, and the state should fix it.”

Officials with FEMA scrambled to understand his comments in North Carolina Friday, with personnel nationwide calling and texting one another, trying to figure out what his statements meant for the agency’s future and work on the ground, according to a source familiar.

Trump’s desire to eliminate or curtail FEMA could have chilling effects on emergency response even at state levels, former FEMA Chief Deanne Criswell told CNN.

“We need to take him at his word, and I think state emergency management directors should be concerned about what this means for spring tornado season” and the coming hurricane season, said Criswell, who served under former President Joe Biden. “Do they have the resources to protect their residents?”

FEMA assigns certain tasks like cleaning up debris to other federal agencies like the US Army Corps of Engineers, which cleaned up debris in recent disasters including Helene and the Maui wildfires. States can’t activate those resources on their own.

“This coordination piece that FEMA leads is one of the most critical (roles) that we play in the stabilization of these incidents,” Criswell said. In addition to helping pay for recovery and rebuilding after a disaster, FEMA also reimburses states and municipalities for search and rescue in the immediate response to a disaster.

If states lost this funding from FEMA, they’d have to come up with the money elsewhere, she said.

Trump’s comments also left many unanswered questions about what those plans would mean for displaced residents of western North Carolina who told CNN they are worried about their housing in the coming days and weeks.

FEMA says about 13,000 western North Carolina households have used its transitional shelter assistance program — and an agency official said in a letter to Stein last Sunday it is extending the program until May 26. However, some displaced residents who spoke to CNN said they are uncertain about their futures and frustrated by struggles to get timely answers about what kinds of assistance they are eligible for and when that assistance ends.

In the immediate aftermath of the hurricane’s flooding, an unprecedented amount of misinformation circulated about the storm and the federal government’s response — including claims that FEMA funds were being directed to migrant services instead of recovery efforts and claims that survivors were only eligible for $750 in assistance. Trump amplified many of those false claims.

Trump’s trip comes after he spoke extensively about both aid for California and North Carolina, and how and whether to fund it, in his meeting earlier this week with House and Senate Republican leadership, a person in the room said.

With Republicans now controlling both chambers of Congress, and conservatives demanding that spending be reined in, Trump and congressional leaders will also have to find ways to offset any disaster relief spending.

Multiple GOP leaders stressed in Tuesday’s meeting that they needed to be “cognizant of how we pay for the bills,” the person in the room said.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, according to the attendee, said of the next Congress: “We have got to get our spending under control.”

Both Trump and Johnson have criticized California’s water management, and Johnson said lawmakers could put conditions on disaster relief for the state. Several Republicans who won close House races in California have pushed back, including Rep. Young Kim, who represents a battleground district in Orange County.

“We cannot play politics with Americans’ livelihoods,” Kim said Thursday on X. “If more federal aid is needed to support first responders combatting wildfires, we must deliver.”

Still, on Friday, Trump laid out what he said will be conditions for aid to California, saying he wants the state to require voter identification and for “water to be released.”

“You want to have proof of citizenship. Ideally, you have one day voting. But I just want voter ID as a start. And I want the water to be released, and they’re going to get a lot of help from the US,” Trump told reporters upon landing in North Carolina.

Trump is seeking to have much of his agenda win passage on Capitol Hill as part of a reconciliation spending bill. He told reporters on Tuesday he believes requests from Democrats for fire aid for the Los Angeles area will make passing that major bill “simpler.”

“They’re going to need a lot of money, and generally speaking, I think you find that a lot of Democrats are going to be asking for help,” Trump said.

In the interview with Hannity, he claimed that while Democrats will seek federal aid for California, Democrats also “don’t care” about North Carolina.

CNN’s Ella Nilsen, Alayna Treene, Hannah Park and Priscilla Alvarez contributed to this report.

This story has been updated with additional reporting.