The administration is following the Project 2025 blueprint for a criminal theocracy. One of the directives is to do away with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA.
Some insiders, including, reportedly, puppy-killer Kristi Noem, former Governor of South Dakota and now Director of Homeland Security, are, rightfully, feeling a little hinky about totally doing away with something that does fill an irreplaceable function in event of disaster.
Publicly, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has said the Federal Emergency Management Agency needs to be reoriented or even done away with altogether.
“We are eliminating FEMA,” Noem said at a televised meeting of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet in March.
But with hurricane season about to start, Noem has been quietly pushing behind the scenes to keep key employees in place and to approve reimbursements to states previously hit by disaster, sources familiar with the situation told NBC News.
Trump himself talked about possibly “getting rid of” FEMA shortly after he was inaugurated for his second term, while he was touring North Carolina to see areas of the state damaged by Hurricane Helene. There has been no public indication that his administration, including Noem, is reconsidering that stance — indeed, the administration’s original acting FEMA administrator, Cameron Hamilton, was removed from the job one day after he testified at a congressional hearing that he does not think “it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate” FEMA. Tricia McLaughlin, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, has told NBC News that the move was not a response to his testimony.
There does, however, appear to be some internal recognition that, absent a plan ready for how the country would move forward without FEMA, important elements of the agency and its work have to remain in place for now.
According to internal documents reviewed by NBC News, on May 19, Noem approved a request from newly installed acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson to retain 2,652 employees whose terms had been set to expire between April and December. The employees are part of FEMA’s Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees (CORE) group, for which people are always hired for specific periods of two to four years; their departures this year would have left FEMA without a large number of key employees during hurricane season. According to a report by the Government Accountability Office, FEMA had 8,802 total CORE employees as of fiscal year 2022.
A FEMA employee told NBC News that the workforce seemed surprised and pleased that Noem decided to keep the CORE employees on during hurricane season after the administration had moved to cut them.
The same week FEMA was moving to keep those key employees in place, the White House was suddenly approving disaster recovery reimbursement requests from 10 states, including some that had been stalled for months, accounting for 20% of all such approvals in Trump’s second term, according to FEMA disaster approval data online.
Three sources familiar with Noem’s recent actions say she has taken an outsized role compared with previous secretaries in pushing the White House to support FEMA and reimburse states.