Trump’s FEMA Response is a Disaster

Project 2025’s FEMA makeover is a man made disaster.

Politico:

Brandon Rogers fielded calls from as far away as Australia as his community strained to recover from the worst natural disaster ever to hit his slice of western North Carolina. Texts poured in by the hundreds. The influx kept the Haywood County commissioner and his staff busy as they coordinated an unimaginable humanitarian recovery.

The messages were distractions. Worse, actually: They were the budding flowers of misinformation, seeds that were planted just days after Hurricane Helene killed scores of people, destroyed entire towns and set western North Carolina on an uncertain, unwieldy path to rebuilding.

The hollers of western North Carolina are rather insular, with strong community ties owed in some equal measures to its mountainous geography, poor infrastructure and deep well of history. The storm hitting a place like that produced a greatest hits list of conspiracies: The Federal Emergency Management Agency wanted to push people off their land to access lithium deposits; then-President Joe Biden directed the storm to the Republican-heavy area; FEMA assistance was a loan that needed to be repaid at usurious rates.

Rogers received a death threat over the county’s recovery efforts. An email chain letter claiming 28 babies froze to death in FEMA tents appeared in his inbox. Angry citizens from outside the county poured into a commission meeting demanding answers for tragedies that never occurred.

“It was just people watching this stuff that believed it,” said Rogers, who is a Republican. “I’d be upset, too, if it’s true. But it wasn’t true.”

The misinformation deterred countless people from seeking federal assistance, according to Rogers and other local officials, legal aid groups and community nonprofits interviewed by POLITICO over the nearly eight months since Helene ravaged a slice of Appalachia that had never before given a Category 4 hurricane any thought.

At one point this winter, just 15 percent of eligible North Carolina households had applied for FEMA assistance. While the North Carolina Office of the State Auditor data shows those numbers have improved, major gaps remain: Of the 6,930 people who are eligible for housing assistance because insurance or charities did not cover costs, more than 3,700 people — 53 percent — are not pursuing available federal aid.

Disaster experts cautioned against comparing recoveries because they are all unique, but noted that people who refuse federal help often undermine a region’s rebound. That is playing out in North Carolina, where thousands of people have foregone assistance that could pay for basic needs, rebuild nearly 1,000 destroyed and 74,000 damaged homes, and put communities mourning the 107 lives lost across the state back together.

There was one prominent person seizing on the misinformation for his own purposes: Donald Trump. As a candidate, Trump leveled the baseless accusation that the Biden administration was diverting FEMA assistance from North Carolina to house illegal immigrants. He claimed $1 billion of FEMA spending was “stolen” for migrants. He said all FEMA had to offer people in North Carolina was $750, which was not true.

The allegations spurred anger toward Biden, but FEMA’s statistics show no significant uptick in aid since Trump’s inauguration. As of April 22, the agency had given nearly $432 million of assistance to 158,600 households in North Carolina, $100 million of which came under Trump, FEMA said in a statement. FEMA also obligated nearly $459 million in public assistance to repair infrastructure in North Carolina, including $138 million under Trump.

Meanwhile, Trump’s FEMA has halted $10 billion in disaster relief funds intended to help people across the country, cut off housing assistance for thousands of Helene survivors and ended a policy of fully reimbursing the state of North Carolina for debris removal.

Now, in further evidence of how political attacks can create a reality of their own, Trump officials are using FEMA’s struggles in western North Carolina as a rationale to dismantle the agency.

“I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away,” Trump said during a January visit to Asheville to survey the damage shortly after taking office.

Three key takeaways: 

1. Trump amplified misinformation about FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene that sowed distrust in the agency, paving the way for his administration to dismantle it.
2. The recovery effort in western North Carolina is lagging during Trump’s first three months.
3. The Trump administration has frozen disaster relief funds, canceled grants to help communities prepare for disasters and signaled it will pull back federal help for long-term disaster recovery.

At a congressional hearing on May 6, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversees FEMA, called the agency a failure and reiterated that Trump believes “FEMA as it exists today should be eliminated.” Trump fired then-acting FEMA chief Cameron Hamilton on May 8, just one day after Hamilton told a House committee the agency should not be abolished. His replacement, David Richardson, warned staff: “I will run right over you.”
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Travis Gresham of Canton, a town 20 miles west of Asheville, accuses Trump of setting FEMA up to fail. The president’s conspiracy-laced campaign attacks convinced her neighbors to shun the agency, which has delayed reconstruction of a private road and bridge, Gresham said. The surrounding community fell into the false claims like Biden pushed a button to send the hurricane to western North Carolina, that FEMA is merely a tool of the Democratic Party, and that the agency wanted to clear the land for lithium mining. Her neighbors believe everything Trump says because they view him as a “golden god,” Gresham said.

“He knew what he was doing,” said Gresham, who often votes for Democratic candidates. “He was setting the stage for what his agenda was: That FEMA is a joke. It’s not a good system, but I don’t think there’s a plan to fix it or overhaul it and make it better. I think it’s a plan to eliminate it.”

“If you take the boots off the ground here the people are not going to try to get the help. The help will be over,” Gresham added. “I don’t think we will ever recover here. Not fully.”