The most precise timeline yet for his administration’s long-term plans to dismantle the disaster relief organization and transfer response and recovery responsibilities to states was provided by President Donald Trump on Tuesday, when he announced his intention to phase out the Federal Emergency Management Agency following this year’s hurricane season.
During a meeting in the Oval Office, Trump told reporters, “We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level.” He went on to say, “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 went on to say that the president’s office will provide the money and that the federal government will begin to distribute less federal funds for disaster recovery. This year’s hurricane season, which officially ends on November 30, is expected to be especially severe and perhaps fatal, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department is in charge of FEMA, have been vowing to abolish the agency for months, calling it needless and ineffectual. In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Noem restated similar ideas, stating that 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 stated.
“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 stated.
Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are co-chairing a new FEMA Review Council that was created under Trump. In the upcoming months, the council is anticipated to make recommendations to significantly cut the agency’s footprint and restructure its mission and operations.
In the midst of chaos, another senior official is departing the agency
Several high-level agency officials, both current and former, have stated that another top FEMA officer is departing the agency. He resigned on Wednesday, the day after Trump’s comments.
The agency’s Operations Division and National Response Coordination Center are led by Jeremy Greenberg, who is primarily in charge of managing personnel and resources that deploy during emergencies and organizing mission assignments.
Given the agency’s persistent brain drain and confusion, his departure is just one more setback for FEMA less than two weeks into hurricane season.
Following months of unrest, a decline in morale, and worker layoffs, the agency entered hurricane season underfunded and unprepared.
The agency is expected to lose about 30% of its employment by the end of the year, reducing FEMA from roughly 26,000 employees to about 18,000, as at least 10% of its entire workforce—including a significant portion of its top leadership—has left since January.
Federal and state emergency managers are perplexed by plans to dismantle FEMA, and they don’t think local initiatives could take the place of the organization’s strong disaster response infrastructure.
They claimed that even though the federal government offers financial support in the worst cases, the majority of states lack the resources and manpower to deal with catastrophic disasters on their own.
Noem extended contract extensions for thousands of staffers who deploy during disasters and reopened three FEMA training facilities in a last-minute effort to strengthen hurricane preparedness.
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In this administration, the agency’s influence is already waning.
David Richardson, a martial arts instructor and former Marine combat veteran who has no prior expertise managing natural disasters, was named FEMA’s new head by Noem last month. Since leaving DHS’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction unit, Richardson has relegated more experienced employees to lower positions and hired over six homeland security officials to assist him in running the agency.
Richardson has previously stated that his group was working on a revised disaster plan for this storm season. However, Richardson informed FEMA employees that the plan would not be made public, stating that the agency would try to function as it did in 2024 and that it did not want to preempt Trump’s FEMA Review Council.
Meanwhile, there seems to be a breakdown in coordination and communication between FEMA and the White House.
Funds to hard-hit areas were delayed in a number of recent incidents where the president authorized disaster declarations but it took days for FEMA, which is responsible for actually providing that financial relief, to learn about them.
Although Trump’s precise long-term goals for the federal government’s disaster response role are still unknown, the administration is already talking about methods to make it much harder to be eligible for federal assistance.
