ASHEVILLE, North Carolina, Jan 24 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said he would sign an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally overhauling or eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “FEMA has turned out to be a disaster … I think we recommend that FEMA go away,” he said during a tour of North Carolina to see damage done by Hurricane Helene last year.
Goodbye New Orleans, Miami, Jacksonville, Virginia Beach, all those Florida cities that are underwater from hurricane surge every year now, etc
Asheville North Carolina received 63 million in FEMA aid just a few months ago to help recover from hurricane season. He lied trying to say they didn’t have the money and now he’s making that the case.
They say they have a plan to give money directly to the states instead. So far nobody has seen or heard this plan.
Even if such a plan exists, that still sounds like they’re taking a stockpile of vehicles and personnel and getting rid of it all only to be unprepared for all future disasters.
The plan is to give money to states that kiss trump’s ass, and none for the blue states or cities that don’t.
Trump: fuck the poor, they’re on their own.
Every accusation is a project. They will turn FEMA into what they’ve been accusing FEMA of.
This is gonna go over well next time there’s half an inch of snow in Texas and the entire power grid goes down. 😂
Oh no it’ll be fun.
He’ll get rid of FEMA, and just throw money at the states he likes. Of course the real trick is, his buddies in the States he likes will just pocket the money.
Nobody gets helped, horrible press all over the place. Lots of disenfranchised red voters.
Won’t turn them blue, But they might be less likely to vote.
Fun fact, it just snowed in Houston. Surprisingly went okay. Not to defend the Texas power grid. I still had random power outages all year. But it did survive some snow. So that was nice.
They’ll just pull themselves up by their… wait
I think if he denies a state assistance because they won’t play his games, other countries step in and send all the assistance that state could want. Imagine if China just threw billions of dollars at LA without conditions to make a point. I don’t expect Xi to be that smart, but it would be funny as hell watching Trump scramble.
I remember a story about a remote town that needed a bridge replaced. And the federal government was dragging their feet about it until the town wrote to the Soviet Union about helping them build the bridge.
Xi and Trump seem to coordinate pretty closely. If Trump weakened US cohesiveness and Xi stepped in, Trump would thank him and kiss his ass.
The replacement will have jump shot training sessions with paper towels.
I’m really wishing for a big hurricane seasons this summer
The monkey’s paw curls.
By July, the southeastern United States is battered by storm after storm. The Gulf Coast and much of Florida are devastated, with levees failing, cities flooding, and millions displaced. The media dubs it “The Year of the Tempest.”
With much of the southeastern U.S. uninhabitable, millions of displaced people flee their homes to other states. Entire communities pack what little they can carry and flee inland. Many seek refuge in neighboring states, but the sheer volume of displaced people overwhelms resources. The refugees keep moving, spreading across the country, heading as far as California and the Midwest.
At first, they are met with compassion. Towns open their doors, offering shelters and supplies. But the strain is enormous. Schools overflow, hospitals run out of beds, and housing markets skyrocket.
The social fabric begins to tear. The newcomers carry with them not just their belongings, but their political and cultural beliefs. Many are deeply conservative, opposed to the progressive policies in the states that take them in. School boards clash over curriculum changes. Gun laws, environmental regulations, and LGBTQ+ rights become battlegrounds in communities that had once considered these issues settled.
What starts as a humanitarian crisis quickly becomes a cultural and political one.
By the end of the year, the consequences of the wish are undeniable. Many states see their progressive majorities evaporate. Refugees from the southeastern U.S., driven by desperation and fear, vote in droves to undo the policies of their host states. Climate action bills are tabled as state legislatures pivot to immigration control and oil subsidy.
Meanwhile, the southeastern states, still battered and uninhabitable, become a no-man’s-land, a haunting reminder of the devastation. The hurricanes force millions to leave, but the political ideologies that resist change endure, spreading like a second storm across the country.
Weather patterns put us on track for that
So trump thinks that a president is king and that royal decrees (executive orders) can just do whatever the hell he wants, bypassing senate and all, ignoring existing law
It’s not how that works, it’s not how anything works, but for some weird reason the Senate just goes with it and for existing law, well, so far judges are striking down all his shit but something tells me that the supre court will just say with the first trial that cheeto is always right and that will be it.
In other words: It is exactly how it works.
It’s very demonstrably how that works in the context of recent US history. It shouldn’t, but it does.
The south hurt itself in its confusion.
I think you misunderstand his goal here. This won’t stop him from giving aid to the people/states who help him. This will only stop FEMA helping everyone unconditionally. He isn’t trying to stop aid. He’s trying to stop aid without strings attached. This is a power play.
States would need to create an emergency bureaucracy redundant to each other state. California or Texas could do it but good luck South Dakota.
Plus read about how he specifically didn’t want emergency response people ready to jump in and help, just money. Money to be allocated on personal choice, not need, to the governor. Money for the governor to allocate by personal choice, not need, to communities and companies. This is about buying favors all the way down.
…again
This is a decades long goal of Republicans. This is what I grew up with https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEMA_camps_conspiracy_theory
More recently https://www.fema.gov/node/rumor-fema-operations-threats
Yay
This 1million%
Also grew up being promised that any day now, 1) Bill Clinton will take all the guns, and 2) We’ll go to FEMA camps to get gassed. It was all part of the UN Agenda 21 thing that George HW Bush/Clintons/Soros/CNN/Bill Gates and the New World Order One-World-Government are bringing.
Except none of that ever happened. Hm…were those guests on Art Bell in 1998 possibly…wrong?
And yet, 30 years later, here we are.
Fuck it. Bye Texas. Bye Florida. You will not be missed.
Yeah that’s not how this plays out. This will only affect states that he wants it to to affect, and when.
Yeah… probably :(
I’ll miss me, but also not really. I’ve already accepted that I’m probably gonna die before Trump is out of office—I don’t know if it’s better to go out in a concentration camp or some unmanaged aftermath of a natural disaster.
Take some fascists with you.
You could move up north if you have the funds
They live in Texas, they likely don’t have the funds.
Written by someone that lives in texas.
Just like the covid crisis (it’s a hoax) where he said it would ‘disappear’, President Felon & his cult will leave us all to die without any help or caring from our government, that we fund !
Funds for me, not for thee.
It’s kind of funny when you put it that way because the FEMA claims and reimbursement process is so convoluted and labor intensive that those funds often only go to the wealthy.
FEMA funds are often only for [the wealthy] and not for [the poor]. FEMA absolutely needs an overhaul, but probably not the one Trump has in mind.
wtf, I got fema cash once. No paperwork. No convoluted process. I’m certainly not wealthy although I was surprised to qualify. Just money directly to fund repairs
Many of us have direct experience getting FEMA relief and cash. We disagree with your claim.
Here is some research on the inequitable distribution of Stafford Act disbursements. They go to wealthy and white neighborhoods that have the resources to navigate the barriers to receiving funding. People in these neighborhoods have an easier time passing through the federal government’s fraud detection barriers, and are more likely to receive support from their (better-funded) local governments in filing for and receiving federal aid. FEMA payouts and insurance payouts are often intertwined, and this leads to further red tape, delays, and denials.
That said, I’ll admit that I may be biased because my mental model on the topic almost entirely comes from a former boss who relied on talking up these inequities to secure investment funding for a tool we claimed we wanted to design (in our public messaging) to help people navigate these barriers, organize their claims paperwork, and receive funding.
I would agree with the assessment that there can be a lack of fraud investigation, or even simply the inability to determine what areas need help vs. not, so they blanket approve some places. Whether or not that approval is driven by demographics I can’t say, only that in-laws who did not get much damage from one of the past storms had complete opportunity to claim some money for “whatever damage there was”, and didn’t because…that’s the wrong thing to do morally. How many people would do that, probably not 100%. But I don’t blame FEMA in concept, only in its funding and organization, and not being manned well enough to do its job well.
Looks like Trump fixed that problem by just removing it altogether. Free market disaster response will be a fascinating thing to document. Not to live through.
Fully agree.
+1. i got money from fema in 2017 and all i had to do was sign a webform saying i was impacted by the hurricane that just hit
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/08/fema-direct-payments-state-recipients
Where FEMA’s direct relief money is going
Florida, Louisiana and Texas residents have received the lion’s share of FEMA direct assistance since 2015, per newly gathered data.
Texas and Louisiana have been Republican-favoring states for some time.
https://www.270towin.com/states/Louisiana
https://www.270towin.com/states/Texas
Florida is more swing, though has been trending Republican:
https://www.270towin.com/states/Florida
I’d guess – not familiar with the politics – that maybe there’s irritation with FEMA’s speed of processing hurricane aid in those states, and that’s what’s driving Trump’s statements. However, if FEMA simply disappeared tomorrow, along with the aid it provided, it’d probably be generally-disadvantageous to Republican-favoring states.
Nah, “get rid of FEMA” has been a thing for a long while, since before 2000. The issue is FEMA looks like a giant black box that does nothing but suck money when they aren’t being actively used, at least to the layperson, and when they ARE engaged with a disaster, people don’t get that it’s almost always local aid networks and such that actually handle distributing things because they know their town and the people who need help better than FEMA does, so they still look like all they’re doing is dumping truckloads of supplies off in the middle of the area. They also buy scary things like body bags (because natural disasters tend to wind up with a lot of dead bodies), making dumb people think they have some ulterior, sinister motives (see X-Files).
The layperson doesn’t think about FEMA at all unless there’s been a recent disaster. Regular people aren’t making lists of government organizations and cataloging their budgets. If an org hasn’t literally just been in the news, they forget it exists.
Oh, I do remember the FEMA conspiracy stuff from back when, believe that that was from the right.
kagis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FEMA_camps_conspiracy_theory
The FEMA camps conspiracy theory is a belief, particularly within the American Patriot movement,[1] that the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is planning to imprison US citizens in concentration camps, following the imposition of martial law in the United States after a major disaster or crisis.[1][2][3][4] In some versions of the theory, only suspected dissidents will be imprisoned. In more extreme versions, large numbers of US citizens will be imprisoned for the purposes of extermination as a New World Order is established. The theory has existed since the late 1970s, but its circulation has increased with the advent of the internet and social media platforms.[2]
I know this is stretching it, but given how stupid of a timeline we’re in, I have to allow for the possibility that FEMA is being disbanded because CA Gov. Newsom is taller than Trump.
