CNN
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President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he plans to phase out the Federal Emergency Management Agency after this year’s hurricane season, offering the clearest timeline yet for his administration’s long-term plans to dismantle the disaster relief agency and shift responsibility for response and recovery onto states.
“We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump told reporters during a briefing in the Oval Office, later saying, “A governor should be able to handle it, and frankly, if they can’t handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn’t be governor.”
Trump added that the federal government will start distributing less federal aid for disaster recovery and that the funding will come directly from the president’s office. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects this year’s hurricane season, which officially ends on November 30, to be particularly intense and potentially deadly.
For months, Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department oversees FEMA, have vowed to eliminate the agency, repeatedly criticizing it as ineffective and unnecessary. Noem reiterated those plans Tuesday in the Oval Office, saying FEMA “fundamentally needs to go away as it exists.”
“We all know from the past that FEMA has failed thousand if not millions of people, and President Trump does not want to see that continue into the future,” Noem said.
“While we are running this hurricane season, making sure that we have pre-staged and worked with the regions that are traditionally hit in these areas, we’re also building communication and mutual aid agreements among states to respond to each other so that they can stand on their own two feet with the federal government coming in in catastrophic circumstances with funding,” she said.
Noem is co-chairing a new FEMA Review Council, established under Trump, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The council is expected to submit recommendations in the coming months to drastically reduce the agency’s footprint and reform its operations and mission.
Plans to eliminate FEMA have baffled federal and state emergency managers, who doubt localized efforts could replace the agency’s robust infrastructure for disaster response. Most states, they said, do not have the budget or personnel to handle catastrophic disasters on their own, even if the federal government provides a financial backstop in the most dire situations.
“This is a complete misunderstanding of the role of the federal government in emergency management and disaster response and recovery, and it’s an abdication of that role when a state is overwhelmed,” a longtime FEMA leader told CNN. “It is clear from the president’s remarks that their plan is to limp through hurricane season and then dismantle the agency.”
The agency has entered hurricane season understaffed and underprepared, after months of turmoil, plummeting morale and workforce reductions. At least 10% of its total staff have left since January, including a large swath of its senior leadership, and the agency is projected to lose close to 30% of its workforce by the end of the year, shrinking FEMA from about 26,000 workers to roughly 18,000.
In a last-minute push to bolster hurricane preparedness, Noem reopened several FEMA training facilities and lengthened contract extensions for thousands of staffers who deploy during disasters.
The agency’s influence is already shrinking in this administration. Last month, Noem appointed David Richardson – a former marine combat veteran and martial-arts instructor with no prior experience managing natural disasters – to lead FEMA. Richardson, who came from the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction office at DHS, has since brought in more than a half-dozen homeland security officials to help him run the agency, relegating more seasoned staff to lesser roles.
Until recently, Richardson had said his team was preparing an updated disaster plan for this hurricane season. But last week, CNN previously reported, Richardson told FEMA staff that the plan will not be released, saying the agency does not want to get ahead of Trump’s FEMA Review Council and that the agency will attempt to operate as it did in 2024.
Meanwhile, communication and coordination between the White House and FEMA also appear to be breaking down. In several recent cases, the president approved disaster declarations, but it took days for FEMA – which is tasked with actually delivering that financial aid – to find out, delaying funds to hard-hit communities.
Trump’s exact long-term plans for the federal government’s role in disaster response remain unclear, but the administration is already discussing ways to make it far more difficult to qualify for federal aid.
“The FEMA thing has not been a very successful experiment,” Trump said Tuesday. “It’s extremely expensive, and again, when you have a tornado or a hurricane or you have a problem of any kind in a state, that’s what you have governors for. They’re supposed to fix those problems.”
