Yahoo News Trump Questions FEMA’s Future Just When LA Needs It Most
(Bloomberg) -- Fire-wracked Los Angeles, facing its worst natural disaster in decades, has never needed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) more.
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As new fires threaten homes across America’s second-largest city, FEMA has deployed roughly 550 experts to help displaced residents find shelter, access aid and coordinate debris removal in neighborhoods reduced to ash. They’re staffing help centers and working with fire survivors, while more than 2,600 of their colleagues are still aiding in recovery efforts from last year’s hurricanes in North Carolina and Florida.
Now, President Donald Trump has questioned whether the agency the US turns to whenever major disasters strike should continue to play that role while also installing a former Navy SEAL without prior FEMA experience as interim chief.
“FEMA has not done their job for the last four years,” Trump told Fox News Wednesday, criticizing its performance in North Carolina in particular. “FEMA is going to be a whole big discussion very shortly, because I’d rather see the states take care of their own problems.”
Visiting Asheville, North Carolina, on Friday, Trump said he would sign an executive order to overhaul or possibly eliminate the agency. “I think, frankly, FEMA is not good,” Trump said.
The president is set to travel on to Los Angeles, after repeatedly criticizing California’s fire response and clashing with Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom. He has suggested making federal aid dependent on the state changing its water management policies.
While not a detailed proposal, Trump’s comments echoed the vision for the agency in Project 2025, the conservative roadmap for reimagining the federal government that called for shifting more disaster recovery costs to states and cities. This means “we need to take what is written in Project 2025 even more seriously,” since its proposed changes would “hobble the US emergency management system — not just at the federal level, but also at the state and local level because of how our system is currently intertwined,” said Samantha Montano, a disaster researcher at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy. (Trump repeatedly distanced himself from Project 2025 during the election campaign, and a White House spokesman reiterated Thursday that the president “had nothing to do” with it.)
It’s still unknown who Trump will task with running and possibly reshaping FEMA. For now, the president has tapped Cameron Hamilton, a former Navy Seal, to temporarily lead the agency, alongside Mary Comans, who has held several key FEMA jobs. Hamilton has some emergency management experience, but he has never overseen the response to large-scale disasters like the wildfires that have ravaged Los Angeles for weeks, destroying more than 15,000 structures and killing at least 28 people.
Contrary to popular belief, FEMA does not automatically take charge of disaster response when wildfires, earthquakes or storms strike. Local and state governments swing into action first, then turn to FEMA to help with federal aid and tap its expertise.
“All disasters start and end locally,” said emergency management consultant Zach Stanford. “However, in disasters of the scale of the LA fires, it rapidly requires state and federal support to respond to and support recovery — both short and long term — to get communities back on their feet.”
Trump is inheriting an agency stretched thin by an increasing number of overlapping calamities. By FEMA’s own count, its people are currently responding to more than 100 major disasters, because the agency’s work typically continues long after the initial emergency has passed.
“There’s always something that we’re working on, and they seem to be more devastating,” said Carrie Speranza, chair emeritus of FEMA’s National Advisory Council, a brain trust for the agency. The council’s status remains unclear under the new administration. Speranza’s first emergency management deployment was the response to Hurricane Charley in 2004. “I can tell you since then, I don’t feel like it’s every really let up,” she said. “In fact, it’s gotten worse.”
The number of disaster declarations under the federal Stafford Act has increased from an average of 39 per fiscal year in the first 10 years after the law’s 1988 passage to an average of 63 in the most recent decade — a 62% jump, according to a report released this month by the Congressional Research Service.
Climate change has added to the agency’s workload, causing more frequent and intense disasters. Trump has at times denied the reality of global warming, but he can’t escape that “FEMA is on the front lines of dealing with the impacts of climate change,” Montano said.
Although the fires that erupted across Los Angeles County on Jan. 7 struck soon after last year's devastating hurricanes, FEMA insisted in a statement this month that it has the resources to handle all of them without shortchanging any of the communities involved. Congress recently approved $29 billion for the Disaster Relief Fund, the agency noted, adding that its staff would “continue to support the recovery in these communities for as long as it takes.”
Through Wednesday, FEMA has provided more than $36 million in aid to California fire survivors, said Robert Fenton Jr., the agency’s Region 9 administrator, at a press conference. With almost 10,000 people registered to receive help, about $12.7 million of the funding has gone to “serious needs assistance,” he said, while the rest covered personal property and displacement assistance.
Staffing has been a long-term concern. At the start of fiscal year 2022, “FEMA had approximately 11,400 disaster employees on board and a staffing goal of 17,670, creating an overall staffing gap of approximately 6,200 staff (35 percent) across different positions,” according to a US Government Accountability Office report published in May 2023. FEMA officials attributed some of the staffing gaps to “managing the rising disaster activity during the year, which increased burnout and employee attrition,” per the report.
Speranza said reported staffing levels are generally not troubling — with one exception. There are currently no available backup federal coordinating officers, who lead federal efforts at each particular incident site. That means any new disaster would require the agency to reassign a coordinating officer from an ongoing operation, said Craig Fugate, who led FEMA under former President Barack Obama. But “reassigning an experienced FCO from an older disaster to a new incident ensures FEMA can utilize their expertise where it’s most needed,” he said.
Trump has taken a dim view of the agency’s recent work, at least in his public comments. “Our country can no longer give basic services in times of emergency, as recently shown by the wonderful people of North Carolina,” he said in his inauguration speech, alluding to Hurricane Helene. “Or more recently, Los Angeles, where we are watching fires still tragically burn.”
Speranza said the agency is fully capable of doing its work. But she wants the country to do a better job preparing for emergencies such as flooding and fires in the first place, rather than focusing largely on response. Racing from one crisis to the next, she said, leads to burnout, no matter how dedicated FEMA’s staff may be. “A large portion of their workforce,” she said, “is literally working disaster after disaster.”
--With assistance from Ari Natter and Michelle Ma.
(Updates with Trump’s comments on overhauling or eliminating FEMA in fifth paragraph.)
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