Trump Created FEMA's Crisis — Now He's Using It to Justify Dismantling Disaster Response
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Yesterday, President Donald Trump stated he has "never been a big fan of FEMA,” claiming that it would be better to let states handle disaster response on their own that properly make use of the life-saving agency. His attacks against FEMA speak to an ongoing crisis manufactured by Trump's own political views. He has spent months gutting FEMA's workforce, withholding hundreds of millions in relief funds, and cycling through acting leaders. Now, as communities face a new hurricane season, he's using the chaos he created as justification to dismantle federal disaster response.
In the same statement, Trump claimed he would prefer to reduce the federal role to simply providing financial assistance during disasters—ignoring the critical coordination, logistics, and technical expertise FEMA provides. This is despite billions in delayed recovery and investment grants already sitting undistributed under his administration.
"Trump's attacks on FEMA are an attempt to abandon the federal government's responsibility to protect Americans from disasters," said Sabotaging Our Safety Advisory Council Member Davante Lewis. "The irony is deliberate: Trump systematically weakened FEMA's capacity, then uses that weakness as evidence it should be eliminated. Meanwhile, disaster survivors wait for withheld relief funds and emergency managers prepare for hurricane season without federal coordination or assurance of FEMA help."
Experts confirm Trump's push to let states handle disasters is economically impossible and would devastate relief efforts. Josh Morton, president of the International Association of Emergency Managers, told NPR: "If every state has to have their own individual assistance program and their own public assistance program on the scale that it takes to actually manage the funding post-disaster, you're talking about multiplying the cost by 50 because now every state is going to need just as robust of a team."
Disasters don't respect state lines. Hurricanes cross borders. Floods overwhelm local capacity. Wildfires spread across regions. A patchwork of 50 separate disaster systems—many underfunded and understaffed—cannot coordinate the complex, multi-state response that modern disasters demand.
“Eliminating FEMA won't make communities safer; it will leave them catastrophically unprepared. Millions of Americans in hurricane-prone regions need a functional disaster response system. Instead, they're getting political theater designed to shift blame for deliberately engineered failures,” continued Lewis.
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