Disaster at FEMA

The Atlantic

15-07-2025

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One thing that's helpful in a crisis is steady leadership. Unfortunately, disaster-stricken Americans are stuck with Kristi Noem instead.
Noem, the secretary of homeland security, was unequivocal at a March Cabinet meeting: 'We are eliminating FEMA.' (She was echoing President Donald Trump, who'd suggested getting rid of the agency.) This weekend, when asked point-blank whether that was still the plan, she had a different claim. 'No, I think the president recognizes that FEMA should not exist the way that it always has been,' she said. 'It needs to be redeployed in a new way.'
Noem is right that FEMA's current deployment seems to not be working all that well. But no matter how officials describe their plans, the Trump administration is dismantling the federal government's ability to prepare for, warn about, and help Americans recover from disasters.
My colleague Zoë Schlanger writes today about some of the many ways FEMA was not prepared to respond to major flooding in Texas. The agency took days to get search-and-rescue teams to the state and did not immediately tap responders from adjacent states who were ready and waiting. FEMA's delay in renewing contracts for a call center meant that thousands of flood victims' calls went unanswered (which Noem deemed 'fake news,' without explanation); the contracts have since been renewed. FEMA's acting chief, David Richardson, finally showed up in Texas more than a week after the floods, sporting, for some reason, cowboy boots and a straw planter hat. Maybe his absence didn't matter much, because his expertise is in weapons of mass destruction, not weather disasters, and he has reportedly been taken aback by the scope of duties in the agency he now ostensibly leads.
At least Texas is getting some federal help, however belatedly. By contrast, California Governor Gavin Newsom complained last week that his state has still not received the federal assistance it requested to help recover from major wildfires in January. (DHS noted that it had allocated other funding to California.) This is part of a pattern going back to the first Trump administration in which states with Republican leaders who flatter Trump get help, while Democrat-led states or those that voted against the president are shut out. Americans' ability to recover from a disaster shouldn't be conditioned on the officials they choose to represent them.
Trump's attacks on FEMA have never been particularly coherent: He attacked the agency last year for doing too little after Hurricane Helene, and then said he wanted it to do less. But the basic premise that FEMA needs rethinking is not unreasonable, nor is it partisan. Professional emergency managers, including top FEMA leaders who have served under both parties, have suggested that states should do more to handle smaller disasters, making the federal government more of a coordinator and funder for major-disaster relief. (FEMA is also somewhat awkwardly wedged in the Department of Homeland Security, which the Trump administration narrowly views as a border-and-immigration authority, more or less.)
But moving to a more state-reliant paradigm would take real investment in federal policy beyond just FEMA—both financial and administrative, neither of which Trump is interested in making.
Such a shift would require research that readies the country for changes in climate and increases in extreme weather. Instead, the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate research into climate change, which the president has described as a 'hoax.'
It would require rebuilding and upgrading local infrastructure so that communities can weather storms, floods, and fires better, and thus don't have to spend so much money rebuilding (frequently, in the same high-risk locations). Instead, in April, FEMA canceled a grant program established during the first Trump administration that was designed to help fund projects that do just that, saying it was not part of the agency's mission.
It would require ensuring that people have timely and accurate forecasts that can allow them to get to safety before disasters strike. Instead, the Trump administration is gutting the organizations that perform those duties. Some National Weather Service offices no longer have 24-hour staffing. The Defense Department is cutting off the National Hurricane Center's access to satellite images that are crucial for good hurricane forecasting, Zoë recently reported. The administration is seeking to shrink NOAA, and some administration officials have previously suggested privatizing some of the agency's functions.
And it would require making sure that states have the funds they need to handle disaster relief without help from the federal government. Instead, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act's cuts to health care and food assistance have pushed funding burdens onto state governments, meaning they will be less able to cover unexpected costs.
Scholars like to say that there are no natural disasters. Fires, floods, hurricanes, and other phenomena are natural, 'but what makes them a disaster is how they intersect with individual and community vulnerability, which is socially constructed,' the historian Jacob Remes told Pacific Standard in 2017. 'Once we understand this fundamental paradigm, we can understand how disasters are political events with political causes and solutions.' This may sound theoretical and academic, but the Trump administration's decision to destroy the federal capacity for disaster relief will create far too many chances to see exactly what it means in practice.
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