President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he plans to phase out the Federal Emergency Management Agency after this year’s hurricane season, offering the clearest timeline yet for his administration’s long-term plans to dismantle the disaster relief agency and shift responsibility for response and recovery onto states.
“We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump told reporters during a briefing in the Oval Office, later saying, “A governor should be able to handle it, and frankly, if they can’t handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn’t be governor.”
Trump added that the federal government will start distributing less federal aid for disaster recovery and that the funding will come directly from the president’s office. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects this year’s hurricane season, which officially ends on November 30, to be particularly intense and potentially deadly.
For months, Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department oversees FEMA, have vowed to eliminate the agency, repeatedly criticizing it as ineffective and unnecessary. Noem reiterated those plans Tuesday in the Oval Office, saying FEMA “fundamentally needs to go away as it exists.”
“We all know from the past that FEMA has failed thousand if not millions of people, and President Trump does not want to see that continue into the future,” Noem said.
“While we are running this hurricane season, making sure that we have pre-staged and worked with the regions that are traditionally hit in these areas, we’re also building communication and mutual aid agreements among states to respond to each other so that they can stand on their own two feet with the federal government coming in in catastrophic circumstances with funding,” she said.
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Author: Faith Novak
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