Trump's push to shrink FEMA

Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina last year. President Donald Trump promised North Carolinians he wouldn’t forget them. But recently, Trump's FEMA rejected the state's request for extended relief funding.

Gerard Albert III, reporter for Blue Ridge Public Radio, where he covers western North Carolina’s rural communities.

Tim Manning, worked as a deputy administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, from 2009 to 2017. He’s now on the faculty at Georgetown University.

Monica Leavell, Swannanoa, North Carolina resident.

Colonel Brad Morgan, commander of the Wilmington Engineer District for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Leader of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ response and recovery efforts in western North Carolina following Hurricane Helene.

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: On September 26th, 2024, Monica Leavell hunkered down in her house in Swannanoa, Western North Carolina. She thought she knew what was coming.

MONICA LEAVELL: So the night that Hurricane Helene came in, I remember, the power went out. Being a seasoned hurricane person from Florida, like, I definitely just went into hurricane mode, got the candle lit and opened up a book and just went through it, right? I had no idea what was happening. All it was here in the house was rain and wind.

I kept getting all these emergency alerts on my phone. You know those main emergency alerts that are really annoying sounds. I probably got the third or fourth one around 6 a.m. in the morning, and that one was different than the other emergency alerts. It said,"The river is rising." And, in all caps, "SEEK HIGHER GROUND NOW."

CHAKRABARTI: Monica does live on higher ground, up a hill a half mile from the Swannanoa River. She and her partner stayed in the house.

Later in the morning, they lost phone service. When the rain stopped, they tried to go check on the damage in the rest of the town, but the river had risen to the very end of Monica's street, blocking them in. That first day, she says they focused on keeping the food in the fridge cool and cooked dinner on the grill.

LEAVELL: It wasn't until the next day, Saturday, that we walked through Swannanoa, so the water had receded and then that's when it really hit. Just a stone's throw away from my neighborhood, in the next neighborhood over, there was a landslide that took out three houses and people had died.

We have a trailer park across from a Christian academy, the entire trailer park, most of it was gone. There were trailers in the fields of the academy. And I saw the water main broken, like completely exposed, 20 feet underground. That's when it hit that we're probably not going to get water for some time.

CHAKRABARTI: Helene was the deadliest hurricane to affect the continental U.S. since Katrina in 2005.

Helene made landfall in the Florida Big Bend and proceeded to leave a roughly 500-mile-long path of destruction across the southeast. The storm blew into western North Carolina as a tropical storm, bringing hurricane-force gusts and dumping record breaking rain, catastrophic flash floods, and some 2,000 landslides swept away homes, property, and lives.

107 people in the state died, according to local officials.

After surveying the wreckage in Swannanoa, Monica decided to get out of the state. She knows she was lucky. A tree had fallen on her house, but it left no major damage. Some water got in through the roof, but she wasn't flooded. She and her partner loaded their two cats in the car and drove to Atlanta to stay with family.

LEAVELL: It wasn't until two hours over into the state line of Georgia that we finally got cell service. So I texted my mom, I said, "Mom, I'm okay. I don't know what you may have heard or anything, but Mom, I'm okay." And that's when we started collecting some news and some information as to what really happened.

CHAKRABARTI: They spent the next couple of months bouncing between family in Georgia and Florida and making trips back to Swannanoa to check on the house. A crane eventually cleared the fallen tree. She and her partner applied for money from FEMA and got $750.

On October 21st, 2024, then-candidate Donald Trump visited nearby Asheville, North Carolina.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We will not forget about you. We will never forget about you. We're going to be working with you for a long time to come to get it back together. When I'm president, I will stand with you until the communities are fully rebuilt. Every single inch of every property will be fully rebuilt, greater and more beautiful than it was before.

CHAKRABARTI: In her life, Monica's fears came true. Those fears about water. Because Asheville and Swannanoa went without water for three weeks. And they were under a boil water notice for another four weeks after that.

LEAVELL: We finally came back home, quote-unquote, one week before Thanksgiving. That is when we finally got back home. That is when they finally got the clean water going again. We had power, we had internet. We could work from home, and we feel safe and could shower and do all those things.

CHAKRABARTI: That was late November 2024. But many people in western North Carolina are still digging out from the storm, even now, some seven months later. Approximately 8,800 homes were significantly damaged or totally destroyed, and most of those families have not been able to return to their homes.

In January of this year, just a few days into his second term as president, Trump went back to Asheville and he again told residents they wouldn't be forgotten and repeated his criticisms.

TRUMP: Unfortunately, our government failed you, but it wasn't the Trump government. It was a government run by Biden. What a terrible situation.

CHAKRABARTI: Trump also promised the people of North Carolina that he would make changes.

TRUMP: Today, I'll also be signing an executive order, slashing all red tape and bureaucratic barriers and permits to ensure the rapid reconstruction of the roads here in Western North Carolina. We're going to go through a permitting process that's called no permitting, just get it done. That's the way they built them many years ago, I guarantee you that.

We will get them back very quickly and we'll begin the work of fundamentally changing, terminating, or overhauling FEMA. FEMA's been a disaster no matter where they are.

CHAKRABARTI: President Trump is indeed making massive changes to the federal government, and part of his FEMA overhaul includes a significant change in the agency's view of its very own mission. Here's why.

Just last month, FEMA redefined what "we will not forget about you" means in the Trump administration. When it comes to disaster relief funding, FEMA now says it means, "Forget about it." Because the agency rejected North Carolina's request to extend 100% of the state's relief funding. FEMA will extend 90% of that funding. And the White House says states must "have an appetite to own the problem."

Last week, North Carolina Governor Josh Stein wrote a letter appealing to President Trump to step in. Stein is a Democrat. And he told Spectrum News that while losing 10% of federal funding may not seem like much, it could cost North Carolina $200 million it does not have.

GOVERNOR JOSH STEIN: Here's the deal. The amount of debris that we have already removed from our waterways, our roads is more than enough to fill 3,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. We are nowhere near done.

And the fact of the matter is the federal government has provided 100% reimbursement for debris removal in other storms — Katrina, Maria, Ike. And Hurricane Helene's impact on North Carolina is absolutely in keeping with the extent of damage and it's worth hundreds of millions of dollars potentially to the state.

And every dollar that we don't get reimbursed by the Feds for this is one dollar less to help a small business, to help a homeowner. So we need these funds desperately.

CHAKRABARTI: North Carolina isn't the only one. FEMA similarly rejected requests from Washington State and Arkansas. The latter suffered from devastating tornadoes in March and has as its current governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who formally served as Trump's own press secretary in his first administration.

So today we're looking at how and why President Trump wants to shrink or even eliminate FEMA and what that might mean for residents across this country recovering from disasters like Hurricane Helene.

Let's go to Gerard Albert III. He's a reporter for Blue Ridge Public Radio, where he covers western North Carolina's rural communities, and he is joining us today from Asheville. Gerard, welcome to On Point.

GERARD ALBERT III: Hi. Thanks for having me.

CHAKRABARTI: And thank you for listening along with us to Monica there, because we really wanted to get the voices of western North Carolina residents in here. Tell me more about what you are seeing about the state of recovery right now, this many months after Helene.

ALBERT III: Sure. And yeah, Monica's story is one that we've heard a lot, especially there in Swannanoa, one of the worst hit places. And like you said, the place that President Trump visit visited twice.

Right now Swannanoa looks a bit better. One of the major bridges that connected the two highways through the town just opened up last month, to give you an idea of how slow the recovery is moving there, in terms of infrastructure.

I think the phase we're in right now in Western North Carolina with recovery is the one where we're going to need to see those hundreds of millions of dollars from government agencies, whether it be the Feds or the state.

Something we say around here is mutual aid played such a big role, the community played such a big role, in the days and weeks following the storm. But you can't crowdfund a highway repair. You can't mutual aid your way out of the land that your home one stood on being totally wiped down the river.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Governor Josh Stein in his interview with Spectrum News also said that in terms of the sheer volume of debris removal that still has to happen, that there might still be as much that needs to be removed as has already been taken away. Does that sound right, Gerard?

ALBERT III: It does, unfortunately. And there's multiple things to think about. Obviously, a hurricane hitting mountainous terrain is something that is not seen often. So just the shape of the earth and the way that the streams flow downhill, a place could have been, I'm thinking of a place like Lake Lure, which is this dumping ground of all this debris, but the area itself did not get hit hard. It's just the fact that the river, all the rivers flow into this lake. So it was covered with debris. They're only about halfway done picking up there.

And yeah, 10 million cubic yards is hard to imagine. You heard the governor give an example, the 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools, but you know, when I go out and see the rivers that are, this heavy machinery is going through big cranes and trackhoes pulling massive amounts of debris out every day and they can only cover maybe a quarter of a mile, half a mile every single day. So it's gonna be work for the next six months, a year at least.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Gerard, people will remember that just after Helene hit western North Carolina, alongside the devastation, there was also devastating misinformation about what FEMA was doing in the immediate aftermath there. Quick two-parter here from you. Can you remind us in truth what FEMA did on the ground in the immediate aftermath of Helene and what the agency is doing in western North Carolina, if anything, today?

ALBERT III: Sure. And I think my line having come up from Florida to Asheville and having experienced FEMA in a lot of hurricanes is, FEMA is a confusing agency. And part of it is their fault, because they don't do a lot of a great job of explaining exactly what they do, even when they're on the ground. So people here were at times frustrated, "where's FEMA? Where's FEMA?" in terms of setting up supply hubs or things like that, which is not something, that's not the agency's main role.

They were here on the ground in Western North Carolina after the storm. There was a lot of misinformation about them not being here, but they were. A lot of agencies, it took a little bit longer than it usually does to get here. As you said, the storm hit Florida and then the other southern states and then North Carolina. And also, the roads were so destroyed, it took people just a while to get here.

Once they were here though, they were going out and surveying damage. They were handing out supplies. But the main thing that they did was set up their disaster recovery centers in almost all of the counties that were affected. So these were these one-stop shops of, you can go and ask questions about applying for FEMA, what they do and do not cover, what you should and should not do on your property if you have damage, how they can help you in that way.

They also had county officials there. Most of those are closed now, as we shift into this new phase of recovery. But FEMA has been here throughout.

CHAKRABARTI: We actually reached out to FEMA for a statement or if they could provide someone to join us, and they sent us a statement. And in it they said, they outlined what FEMA has provided as of May 5th, so just two days ago.

They say, more than $439 million for almost 160,000 households have been approved to support people in North Carolina, more than $472 million in public assistance reimbursements. And 7.1 million cubic yards of debris have been removed in North Carolina, and they're saying more than 4,500 federal personnel, including more than 1,600 FEMA personnel were deployed to support Hurricane Helene, in Hurricanes Helene's Response and Recovery. And FEMA says right now there are 863 personnel in North Carolina.

I guess the big question, Gerard, is from your reporting in these rural communities and also from what you're hearing state government say, why do people like Governor Stein say they actually need much more funding or much more assistance from the federal government?

ALBERT III: That cut from FEMA is coming from their match program, which is, you know, what it sounds like. It's going to match counties, doling out these millions of dollars for debris removal. A lot of these counties, almost all of them, in fact, are based on a tourism economy.

So the storm hit right at the start of our peak tourism season here in western North Carolina in the fall. So all of these restaurants, all of these counties, all of these businesses had no one coming. And that lasted not just a week, but months into the spring tourism season, which we're experiencing now. Counties have lost out on hundreds of thousands, some of the millions of dollars, and now they're having to deal with the budget shortfall and also pay out of pocket for debris removal and things like that. And not get reimbursed by FEMA, not getting reimbursed by FEMA 100% is a big deal for them.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. So it's not, it's the totality of what it will take for a community to recover. Not just getting the fallen trees and the mudslides out of the way. That's what you're saying.

ALBERT III: Yeah, that is the small example of the larger issue.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Gerard, hang on here for just a second because in terms of still just the muck and the grime and the hard work that does have to go into making communities livable again, we reached out to Colonel Brad Morgan. And for him, today is day 223 in responding to Hurricane Helene. That's because Morgan leads the Wilmington district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

COLONEL BRAD MORGAN: In terms of scale and complexity, I've talked to some of our debris removal contractors, and they've compared it on par with what they experienced from Hurricane Katrina in both the state of Louisiana as well as the state of Mississippi.

CHAKRABARTI: Morgan says the Army Corps of Engineers has some 200 people on the ground working on projects supported by hundreds of contractors. Their biggest task? Clearing storm debris.

MORGAN: So the next debris mission we have is the waterway debris removal mission. And this is our largest mission to date and continues to grow. So this is where we're out into the creeks, streams, and rivers of western North Carolina to include some of the lakes. And we're removing that storm-generated debris, a lot of the vegetative debris, even some former homes — we call it construction and demolition debris. Things that have been washed out through the course of the storm.

CHAKRABARTI: So far since Helene, the Corps says it's removed just under 5.8 million cubic yards of debris. Morgan says in a lake called Lake Lure, they still need to fish out at least a million more cubic yards.

MORGAN: We'll take those truckloads of tree limbs and logs and stumps, or the construction and demolition material and sort it. So the vegetative material, we'll grind down and turn that into mulch. The construction and demolition material, that will just get hauled directly to a landfill for final disposition. And any type of white goods, whether it's a refrigerator, dishwasher, washer machine, those will get separated and then sent off for recycling.

CHAKRABARTI: FEMA assigned the Army Corps of Engineers to clear all of this debris, and Morgan says they're hoping to finish getting it out of waterways by June 1st. Meanwhile, the Corps is also doing projects like setting up water treatment devices and building temporary facilities in places like Canton and Black Mountain and Spruce Pine, North Carolina.

I want to bring Tim Manning into the conversation now. He served as deputy administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, from 2009 to 2017 in the Obama administration. He's now on the faculty at Georgetown University. Tim Manning, welcome to On Point.

TIM MANNING: Hi, good to be here.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so first and foremost I want to ask you in the statement that FEMA sent us, they said this: "The typical assistance FEMA provides through its public assistance program is 75%. Due to the severity of the disaster with Hurricane Helene, FEMA is currently providing North Carolina 90% of federal cost share, far exceeding the normal 75%." Is that true that we are incorrect in presuming that the federal government always matches 100% when states are requesting disaster aid like this?

MANNING: Yeah, that's definitely true. The Stafford Act, which is a law that governs how FEMA does disaster assistance, that's a minimum threshold of 75% federal for 25% state. But it is not uncommon, in fact, it's very common in a catastrophic level disaster, like what we saw in North Carolina, to have that 100% and sometimes back down to 90% at some point. But it is not unusual to be 100% for very large catastrophic disasters like this.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So then if that's the case, are we and the rest of the media making a tempest in a teacup here if it's not unusual for the federal government to not provide that 100%?

MANNING: No, I would say that taken in totality, what we're seeing out of the administration in regards to FEMA and disaster assistance, helping citizens across the country face disaster, is a pretty significant scale back from where we have traditionally been in providing assistance.

That move from 75% to 100% in a big catastrophic disaster, that's really predicated on the severity of the impact. How hard did it hit the communities? How concentrated was the damage? How hard is it on the state, on their budgets, to be able to recover from a disaster like this?

I would expect to see a significantly higher provision of assistance in the example of North Carolina. But I think it goes beyond that. We see significant changes in the way that they are doing considering disasters, as we've seen in Arkansas, for example. And there have been memos moving around within the administration, and they have publicly telegraphed, that they are going to scale back the amount of assistance provided to state and local communities.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so that gets us straight to this deep, philosophical isn't even the right word, because it's turning into a practical change in the mission of FEMA. Because there has been a statement put out by Brian Hughes.

He's the spokesman for Trump's National Security Council. And in this statement, it says, quote:

The federal government focuses its support on truly catastrophic disasters, massive hurricanes, devastating earthquakes, or wide scale attacks on the homeland.

And then, Hughes in the statement blames local government, saying that they are an impediment to their own community's resilience.

And here's the money quote. It says, quote:

States must have adequate emergency management staff, adoption and enforcement of modern building codes, responsible planning and strategic investment to reduce future risk, common sense policies that prioritize preparedness over politics, disaster reserve funds to handle what should be routine emergencies, pre-negotiated mutual aid and contingency contracts at speed up recovery, and above all, an appetite to own the problem.

End quote. How do you read that, Tim Manning?

MANNING: That's hard to hear. The emergency management system in America is built on one of mutual support among levels of government.

There are dramatically more incidents that happen at the local level and to the state level, before the federal government really ever gets involved. As a matter of fact, NEMA, the National Emergency Management Association, ran some numbers and they came up in calendar year 2023, there were 23,910 governor level emergencies that were dealt with by the states with no federal assistance for 60 presidential emergency declarations.

That's something on the order of 400 to one, and that doesn't even count the local government. The emergency, the system there is a national mutual aid system. There has been for many decades. There is a significant state and local emergency management presence, and it is those events that are bigger than a city can deal with.

The state steps in and help. And when it's beyond the capability of a state, on those rare incidents, the system is built, FEMA was designed at the request of the Southern governors to provide, coordinate the resources that only the federal government can bring to bear. For example, the Army Corps of Engineers.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Let me just pull Gerard back into this conversation here. Gerard, that statement, where states have to have an appetite to own the problem. Would you say that North Carolina is as ready as it could be for a once in a century event like Helene? Or could there be additional changes made at the state and local level for communities to be more resilient?

ALBERT III: It's a good question. And North Carolina has a coastline. Which is where most of the storms come in. And we've dealt with, I hesitate to use the word catastrophic in comparison to Helene, but we've dealt with bad storms here on the East Coast. This storm is unlike anything I think the country had seen in almost 20 years.

And it's a mountainous region that doesn't experience hurricanes. I can't stress that. No one here expected anything more than some rain and wind. Our local officials jumped in. Not a lot of them knew how to deal with FEMA. It was a lot of their first times dealing with FEMA, because that was just the case.

They didn't have to deal with FEMA in any other regard because there hasn't been a natural disaster here like that. On the state level, there are policies and agencies in place to deal with this. But on this level, we're talking just in terms of money. This storm cost an estimated $60 billion.

That's not something the state can fund.

CHAKRABARTI: $60 billion just in North Carolina.

ALBERT III: Yes. Sorry.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. And how much then more is the state asking for the federal? From the federal government.

ALBERT III: Governor Stein has asked for initially a $19 billion allocation from Congress, and then he asked for an additional $11 billion, so that's $30 billion from Congress.

Some of that money's been allocated. It's just taken such a long time and we still are very unclear on how that money's allocated, how it's going to be distributed, who gets what. Also from the state, he's received in two separate bills the equivalent of about $1 billion dollars for things like home repair programs, farm repair programs, road repair programs, things like that.

And there's more coming from the state, but so far, think about a $60 billion cost, and the states so far been able to provide $1 billion.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So Tim Manning, the numbers are truly enormous, and they get bigger and bigger every year. As storms or even earthquakes, wildfires, what have you, become more devastating in human communities.

The cost continues to go up. Does the Trump administration, in a sense, have a point that it's incumbent upon states to be more prepared when we know that inevitably a disaster's going to happen sometime, somewhere? And should they be looking to the federal government to absorb these increasingly astronomical costs?

MANNING: Yeah, that would be, that is the argument that they put forth. And it is an argument that's been made for quite some time. The Heritage Foundation has been, a lot has been made of the Project 2025, but they've been working, they've been advocating for less disaster assistance for many decades.

They've been writing on it, going back into the late '90s, early 2000s. I would say though, that the challenge is there are more disasters every year. But it is more of an artifact that there are more people and there's more built environment, and we have more cities.

The state and local governments are doing considerable work to mitigate the impacts of disaster, try to prevent a disaster from happening in the first place. The administration, however, just for example, cut, eliminated $1 billion dollar grant program that went towards those efforts to prevent a disaster in the first place.

Those kinds of efforts, which we show, studies show, somewhere on the order of $7 to $13 saved for every dollar invested in prevention. So there is a great deal of work going on. There are more disasters, that is clear, but that's because of a changing climate, changing the way that communities live within their environments.

That's why we see more disasters.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: I am thinking about when President Trump visited Western North Carolina, those couple of times that you mentioned earlier, and he was talking about how President Biden's FEMA had forgotten the people of Western North Carolina. That message, I presume, was welcomed by many of the residents there at that time.

Do those same folks now see Trump's FEMA as withdrawing or not extending as much of a helping hand as it could?

ALBERT III: It is a good question. And while Asheville itself, the city, is pretty liberal. All of the exterior or all the counties outside are pretty red and those are the counties that I cover, and we hear less name dropping, I'll say.

We don't hear Trump as much as we hear the government. Or FEMA. Whereas before Trump came into office, there was the occasional, Oh, Trump's gonna come in and figure this out. Hopefully. Or, Biden doesn't know what he's doing. The government's too slow. The name dropping in terms of the blame game has gone from the president to the government.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Gerard Albert III reports for Blue Ridge Public Radio on rural communities, especially in Western North Carolina. Gerard, thank you for your reporting. Thank you for serving your communities and thanks for joining us today.

ALBERT III: Thanks so much.

CHAKRABARTI: Tim Manning, I want to take a step back here because really at the core of this conversation, as it is with any discussion of the federal government, is what is the role of a national level government in local and state level issues. And in the case of FEMA, in disasters.

Now I want to actually note that one of the first moment in U.S. history where the federal government stepped in with some kind of aid for a municipality was way back in 1803 when a fire really tore through a town in New Hampshire. So the idea that there are some problems that are bigger than a state can handle is a pretty old one here.

But then it was in 1979, then President Jimmy Carter actually formally established FEMA, and made it such that the government agency was given the specific task of aiding the American people in the aftermath of disasters. So with that background in mind, Tim, I want to go back to what President Donald Trump said about the existence of FEMA during one of his visits to North Carolina.

And this was again in January.

TRUMP: Whether it's a Democrat or Republican governor, you want to use your state to fix it and not waste time. Calling FEMA and then FEMA gets here, and they don't know the area, they've never been to the area, and they want to give you rules that you've never heard about. They wanna bring people that aren't as good as the people you already have.

And FEMA's turned out to be a disaster. And you could go back a long way. You could go back to Louisiana; you could go back to some of the things that took place in Texas. It turns out to be the state that ends up doing the work. It just complicates it. I think we're gonna recommend that FEMA go away.

And we pay directly. We pay a percentage to the state, but the state should fix this. If the state did this from the beginning, it would've been a lot better situation. I think you guys agree with that, right?

CHAKRABARTI: Tim Manning, respond to that.

MANNING: It's funny, the irony is that what he described as a future sense is exactly how it does work.

FEMA is the Federal Government's Emergency Management Agency that brings assistance to bear to the states. But every state, every governor has an emergency management agency, have their own state version of FEMA. And every local government does, as well. So large local governments anyway, and smaller ones tend to have people who are designated as a coordinator. They just don't have enough staff on a general basis. But that is 100% how disaster management works in America. There is, the states are, the governors, by the Constitution, by 100 of years of tradition.

And the way that the law works, the governor's own disasters. It's only when it's beyond, they need resources that they don't have. Like the Army Corps of Engineers, like the national level search and rescue teams, the assistance from the Department of Energy for coordinating power restoration, for example, that FEMA comes in.

To help that kind of direct federal assistance to the states, but the states are in charge, always have been, are, and always will be. What the president's describing is no change from the existing structure.

CHAKRABARTI: You know what though? I'm thinking about how is FEMA just like any other federal agency, insofar as it is beholden to the priorities and/or whims of the president that is currently in that White House?

Because, thinking back to, we've mentioned Katrina a couple of times, and there were those infamous words from then President George W. Bush, who, you know, even as New Orleans was still completely struggling from the aftermath of Katrina and there was this sort of awful death and destruction.

When President George W. Bush infamously told then FEMA manager, Michael Brown, 'you're doing a heck of a job, Brownie.' And all the people of Louisiana were like, no, he is not. I bring that up, because there's always this political edge to how disasters are managed and perceived in this country.

And is that what we're experiencing right now?

MANNING: Yeah, I'd say it's exactly what we're experiencing and it's not uncommon and it happens pretty frequently, and I think it's a challenge of the fact that disasters, while we deal with them on a regular basis at some level, the people that do disaster response, that those large catastrophic disasters that kind of impact the national psyche are few and far between.

And most elected officials, governors included, don't pay a whole lot of attention to how the disaster response structure works outside of a disaster. And you're absolutely right. FEMA is a federal agency. FEMA administrator is appointed by and works at the pleasure of the president.

And absolutely is subject to the policies and opinions and direction, or lack thereof of whomever the president is at the time.

CHAKRABARTI: Does that mean though, that the White House then could have potentially have the power to, if it wanted to even get rid of FEMA as an agency entirely.

MANNING: I mean that is a much broader constitutional, philosophical debate that we're having really across the government.

As the efforts of DOGE is dramatically reducing the scale. Most would argue, and I would too, that FEMA was created by Congress under the Stafford Act. Originally by an executive order, but codified by Congress, and it would require an act of Congress to reduce it.

As a matter of fact, because of a lot of what the Bush administration had been doing in the 2000s, leading up to Katrina, Congress added a specific provision to the law that prevents the president or the secretary from making any reductions in the capacity in the size, scope, budget, or anything of FEMA without congressional consent. They are currently laying people off, freezing programs and limiting programs. They're doing things that are degrading FEMA's operational capacity to assist the states in disasters now, absent con congressional approval, but that provision of law is in there.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So let's then, short of eliminating FEMA altogether, I wanna talk a little bit more about some of the changes that the White House could and perhaps is making.

In terms of FEMA's operations. We discussed the reimbursement a little earlier in the show, but in Arkansas, what's happening is a little bit different, and correct me if I'm wrong, because the arcanery of federal regulations sometimes escapes me, but again, as background, what, in March?

On March 14th and 15th, some 14 tornadoes touched down in Arkansas. Dozens were injured, caused a huge amount of damage. The very next week Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who yes, used to work as press secretary in Trump's first administration. She requested this administration to declare a major disaster, that major disaster declaration, which is the key first step in securing funds, federal funds from FEMA.

My understanding is that's a pretty, usually, that's a pretty, like a no brainer. That in fact, sometimes even before a storm hits, governors will ask for that disaster declaration. But in this case, the administration rejected it. They will not give a major disaster declaration to the state of Arkansas.

Can you explain that?

MANNING: (LAUGHS)

CHAKRABARTI: You can't explain it.

MANNING: Yeah. But I have some, I think I've got a decent sense of what's happening in that. So you're right. In an event like this, the amount of the scale of damage and destruction that happened in Arkansas, as detailed in the Governor's request for assistance, and in her further appeal to that denial, outline certain costs.

Now the law, the way, you know, the threshold for getting the president to declare a disaster, it's for an emergency declaration, it's up to him for a disaster declaration, where FEMA will provide funds to help rebuild. There is actually a dollar value.

They have to have so much dollar, so much damage per capita in the state, and that changes with inflation. It's currently $1.89 per capita for the state. And if you're over that threshold, you can get a disaster declaration. Arkansas was clearly over that threshold. By all of the traditional ways you would evaluate whether they would be eligible for disaster assistance.

They were. That they were denied points to the fact that they have changed that criteria internally. There was a memo. There was a proposal from the senior official performing the duties of the administrator, a guy named Cameron Hamilton, to a senior OMB official, proposing that they immediately quadruple the threshold to get assistance.

They go from $1.89 per capita to $7.56 per capita. That would quadruple the amount of damage required in order to get federal assistance from the president, and I believe that's probably what happened here. And why you didn't see Arkansas get declared. Because they were well over the legal requirements, but they were under that new proposal.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. I wanna be sure that everyone who understands this correctly, that $1.89 per capita measure again means what?

MANNING: So the amount you cut, you tally up the amount of disaster damage that happens, roads, bridges, schools, those sorts of things. And you have a damage assessment. It's gonna cost X to repair this.

That damage assessment, under law, has to be over that threshold of, in the case of Arkansas, basically the population times the $1.89.

CHAKRABARTI: I gotcha.

MANNING: And they met that they would've qualified for assistance under normal circumstances, but it was denied. And as of this morning, I believe they still have not acted on Governor Huckabee's appeal.

So it looks to me like they may have, in fact, raised that threshold internally for the consideration of whether the president will declare or not.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. Okay. So quadrupling it perhaps.

MANNING: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's why you said there would need to be four times as much damage, or the cost would've be four times higher in order to qualify for assistance in the Trump administration.

MANNING: That's right. That's what was proposed by President Trump's FEMA administrator through the Office of Management and budget to the president. Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: That seems like a lot.

MANNING: It is a lot.

Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: I guess the reason why I'm just blurting out the obvious is I'm trying to imagine, in states like Arkansas or if we're talking about tornadoes, like basically anywhere in the middle of the country, that four times as much damage, meaning that the states or the localities would be responsible for what, most, if not all of the cost up until that four times. We are speaking once again of not just now, hundreds of millions potentially, but billions of dollars.

MANNING: Yeah. Potentially. Yeah. So any disaster that reached that threshold, that failed to pass that threshold would not get federal assistance and then would be completely up to the state. Now it's important to point out that the states all do have disaster management programs, and they deal with orders of magnitude more disasters than the federal government ever helps with. So what we're talking about here is dramatically raising that threshold where it's already beyond their capability, where it's already significantly impacting.

I think it's, as you think about populations too, you can imagine a small town in, say, Illinois, Southern Illinois, that could be almost completely destroyed, but still not be able to do four times the population. If you include the city of Chicago or Western New York.

And New York City. Or Northern California and Los Angeles. It's gonna leave a lot of communities out in the cold.

CHAKRABARTI: So, Tim Manning, to be completely fair, it's not as if FEMA is this sort of like saintly perfect agency. There is no such thing. And it has come under, I would say, in a sense, nonpartisan criticism in times in the past for lack of, let's say, reaching efficiencies in helping the most people possible. From your time there as deputy administrator, like what are some actual changes you would recommend that FEMA make so that it could actually do its job better?

MANNING: A lot is made about the complexity of FEMA, and I think that is very well founded and that is a product of many decades of additional requirements from Congress and additional requirements from inspectors general. Basically, things to prevent or to try to avoid fraud, waste, and abuse. And what that does is make very complicated programs. And so the public interfacing, the public trying to get disaster assistance, it's a complicated, slow process. And that could absolutely be reformed. There are many places where that can help.

I go back to a comment that Gerard mentioned earlier in the hour, andhe made a good point in that FEMA's not very good at explaining what they do in their job. And FEMA is just the kind of the avenue by which the federal government helps. But a lot of times when people say, where's FEMA?

All we've seen is the Coast Guard, for example. That's FEMA coordinating helicopters to come in and do assistance, or the Army Corps of Engineers or something like that. But ultimately, it's that partnership between the federal government and the governors, and the governor's people, and the local government.

It's all one coordinated response. And I would say that we could all do much better at helping to explain how the assistance is coming, but you're absolutely right. It's too complicated and it does need to be simplified.

CHAKRABARTI: Last quick question. During your time at FEMA, is there one particular disaster or event that stays with you, that you felt, like, okay, we're doing what we were meant to do?

MANNING: I've been in, even before FEMA, I was a state emergency management director, and I've stayed in the business since. Every disaster has tragic stories of people who lost their lives and families who have lost everything. Big disasters like Hurricane Sandy and Hurricane Katrina. All the way down to small things you've never heard about, people and people's lives are impacted and we're there.

We need to be there to help them.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.