‘I think, frankly, FEMA is not good,’ Trump said. ‘You want to use your state to fix [a disaster], and not waste time calling FEMA.’
President Donald Trump said he would be signing an executive order to start the process of fundamentally overhauling or “getting rid of” the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), while touring areas in western North Carolina on Jan. 24 that were devastated by Hurricane Helene last year.
Trump made the comments at a press conference in Fletcher, North Carolina, a small town close to Asheville. He criticized the Biden administration’s response to Hurricane Helene, a catastrophic Category 4 tropical cyclone that tore through the southeast in late September 2024, leaving tens of billions of dollars in destruction and killing more than 200 hundred people throughout several states.
Trump called for immediate disaster relief for North Carolina without conditions for aid but suggested that FEMA may no longer be up to the task of providing funds to rebuild areas facing devastation.
“I’ll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA, or maybe getting rid of FEMA,” Trump said.
“I think, frankly, FEMA is not good. I think when you have a problem like this … you want to use your state to fix it, and not waste time calling FEMA.”
The president said he would provide direct aid from the federal government to North Carolina so it could “come back bigger, better, stronger than ever before.” He said the timeline for federal aid would be immediate so infrastructure rebuilding can commence.
Trump will also be visiting Los Angeles later today, after the region has been scorched by wildfires since early January, leaving tens of thousands of buildings in rubble.
The president, however, said there will be conditions for aid to California: The state must first pass a voter ID law and also route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for fire response and agriculture. California had implemented policies to allow water runoff into the Pacific Ocean to protect an endangered fish species, the Delta smelt.
“If they release the water, they wouldn’t have had a problem,” Trump said, adding that North Carolina was facing a destructive storm it could not control.
By Jacob Burg
