Within days of his second inaugural, Donald Trump sent an unmistakable signal about the future of the Federal Emergency Management Agency: As far as he was concerned, FEMA’s days were numbered.
“FEMA is getting in the way of everything,” the Republican president argued, failing to explain what that meant. Trump soon after said he saw the agency as an unnecessary department that should be “TERMINATED.”
In the weeks and months that followed, Trump and his team not only failed to properly respond to domestic national disasters, they also fired their own acting FEMA chief after he had the audacity to tell Congress that he believed his agency should exist.
It was against this backdrop that The Washington Post reported on the White House’s plans, which are now coming into sharper focus.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that his administration plans to “wean” states off Federal Emergency Management Agency assistance after this year’s hurricane season, offering in the most explicit terms yet his plans for states to respond to natural disasters and other emergencies on their own.
“We’re moving it back to the states, so the governors can handle,” Trump told reporters, seemingly indifferent to the fact that state governments lack the resources and wherewithal that only the federal government can provide in the wake of a disaster.
Trump says his plan for FEMA is to give out less money and make the relief decisions himself
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-06-10T16:34:27.131Z
“We’re going to give out less money,” the president added. “We’re going to give it out directly. It’ll be from the president’s office. We’ll have somebody here.”
Those comments were hardly reassuring: Trump seemed to suggest that White House officials, instead of federal disaster relief officials, will be exercising control over which communities receive assistance. A Reuters report noted, “Distributing funds directly from the White House would … mark a departure from current protocols, under which FEMA oversees the dissemination of financial aid to the states following the president’s declaration of a disaster.”
It’s not like this won’t open the door to problems, right? Trump concluded that the administration will “start phasing it [FEMA] out” after hurricane season, which ends in the November. Between now and then, the agency is likely to struggle to tackle its important work as a result of recent FEMA job losses and DOGE-imposed cuts. This might not have been what Americans thought they were voting for last year, but it’s apparently what they’re getting. I won’t pretend to know what’s likely to happen once communities nationwide start struggling, looking to a Trump administration that decides to start ignoring disaster relief requests, but it’s worth appreciating where this idea comes from. As Axios reported earlier this year, Project 2025 suggests “reforming FEMA emergency spending to shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government.” Evidently, Trump is inclined to agree.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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