SWANNANOA: U.S. President Donald Trump vowed on Friday to sign an executive order to overhaul or eliminate the main federal agency that responds to natural disasters, saying he preferred that states be given federal money to handle disasters themselves.
Trump, on his first trip since reclaiming the presidency on Monday, accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of bungling emergency relief efforts in North Carolina, which was devastated by flooding from Hurricane Helene in September.
“FEMA has turned out to be a disaster,“ he said during a tour of a neighborhood destroyed by Helene where trees were downed and homes had boarded-up windows. “I think we recommend that FEMA go away.”
Experts doubt that Trump alone can shut down FEMA.
Rob Verchick, a former Obama administration official at the Environmental Protection Agency and now a professor at Loyola University New Orleans College of Law, said eliminating FEMA most likely requires Congressional action.
He said FEMA was created by former President Jimmy Carter by executive order but has been assigned roles and funding by Congress for the country’s emergency response programs.
FEMA brings in emergency personnel, supplies and equipment to help areas begin to recover from natural disasters, and funding for the agency has soared in recent years as extreme weather events increase the demand for its services.
The agency, which has 10 regional offices and employs more than 20,000 people across the country, was run for the last four years by Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration.
FEMA was a target of Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term prepared by his allies that the president distanced himself from during the election. The plan called for dismantling the Department of Homeland Security and relocating FEMA to the Department of Interior or the Department of Transportation.
In addition, it suggested changing the formula that the agency uses to determine when federal disaster assistance is warranted, shifting the costs of preventing and responding to disasters to states.
Trump complained that Biden did not do enough to help western North Carolina recover from the hurricane, an accusation the Biden administration rejected as misinformation.
In an X post on Friday, Democratic U.S. Representative Deborah Ross of North Carolina said FEMA had been a crucial partner in the state’s recovery from Helene.
“I appreciate President Trump’s concern about Western NC, but eliminating FEMA would be a disaster for our state,“ she said.
Trump was headed next to visit Los Angeles, where wildfires this month have caused widespread destruction and three massive blazes still threaten the region.
The trip to North Carolina and California culminates a week during which Trump moved with stunning speed to meet campaign promises on illegal immigration, the size of the federal workforce, energy and the environment, gender and diversity policies, and pardons for supporters jailed for the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
U.S. military C-17 aircraft began flying detained migrants out of the country on Friday as part of what the White House called “the largest massive deportation operation in history.”
NEWSOM TO GREET TRUMP IN LOS ANGELES
The president has also sharply criticized Democratic officials’ response to the fires in California, and Republican colleagues in Congress have threatened to withhold disaster aid.
Trump has also threatened to withhold aid to California and repeated in North Carolina a false claim that the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and other officials have refused to provide water from the northern part of the state to fight the fires.
The governor told reporters on Thursday that he planned to be on hand at Los Angeles International Airport to greet Trump.
Trump has accused Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass of “gross incompetence,“ pointing to what he called a lack of preparation and ineffective or harmful water management policies.
Water shortages caused some hydrants to run dry in affluent Pacific Palisades, hindering the early response. When the fires broke out, one of the reservoirs that could have supplied more water to the area was empty for a year. Officials have promised an investigation into why it was dry.
Bass and fire officials have said the hydrants were not designed to deal with such a massive disaster, and stressed the unprecedented nature of the fires.
Trump has focused some of his criticism on California’s complicated policies for sharing the plentiful water supply found in the northern part of the state with the parched south. The diversion results in the discharge of some water into the ocean, something Trump has depicted as a callous waste.
Newsom has dismissed those attacks as groundless.
