President Donald Trump has repeatedly said he intends to whittle down or phase out the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and last week he gave a rough timeline for that: “after hurricane season.”
“We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump told reporters on June 10 during a briefing in the Oval Office.
Related: Trump Says FEMA Phaseout to Begin After Hurricane Season
The nation’s disaster relief and recovery agency was established in 1979 through an executive order by President Jimmy Carter. Subsequently, Congress passed laws codifying its functions and status within the Department of Homeland Security. Emergency management experts say the president can’t get rid of FEMA’s core responsibilities, which are dictated by the Stafford Act of 1988.
Calls to reform FEMA — as it responds to more frequent climate-driven disasters — aren’t new. Previous laws and proposals have tried to encourage states to be more independent and to carry out more pre-disaster mitigation. Nor are concerns over the agency’s costs and bureaucracy unique to Trump and his allies. Last month, two members of Congress released a draft of a bipartisan bill that would amend the Stafford Act to address some long-running criticisms of FEMA. The draft bill was released by Missouri Republican Sam Graves and Washington Democrat Rick Larsen, who are the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure.
Related: The Trump Administration Keeps Denying Disaster Preparedness Aid to States
Bloomberg Green asked Craig Fugate, who ran FEMA for eight years under President Barack Obama and has since consulted on emergency management, what changes to US disaster response are needed and how the future of FEMA might look. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
FEMA is the agency that is supposed to save us in times of disaster. Why does it have so many critics?
It was never intended to transfer risk from local and state governments to the federal taxpayer, because they find it cheaper. It makes sense for FEMA to pay out for debris cleanup or sheltering people when there is an extraordinary event. Now it pays out for schools, firehouses and houses of worship that are damaged. And for recurring events, not just extraordinary events. And the first question you should be asking is: Why don’t these entities have insurance?
Can Trump really get rid of it?
No. Not even Trump can resist the blowback of not helping out after an event like Hurricane Katrina. And the other thing is that the states that are the frequent flyers in the disaster program are all Republican dominated. They throw in California as an outlier — but if you look at where the disaster dollars go, it ain’t California.
Given that FEMA is likely to stay around in some form, what are some of the changes to it that have the most chance of actually being enacted?
Well, there is the Public Assistance Program, which is the reimbursement to state and local governments and eligible nonprofits and faith-based institutions — the last [group] was added in the first Trump administration — to rebuild. And the rap on that is the complexity of administering it.
Take a fire station that is destroyed in a flood and has no insurance. FEMA would reimburse the local government 75% of the cost of rebuilding. But there’s lots of caveats. FEMA has to look at what was the condition of the station, how big it was. Then they would agree to replace the station as it was, and build in a little bit of mitigation, maybe elevating it.
When this is finally resolved, the city has to go out and get bids. FEMA has to review that and approve a design. And then the city has to go out and get financing. They have to start the construction. In each step, FEMA goes back and reviews the work being done, and they actually will send inspectors out to the job site to make sure that the station is being built back the way the approvals say it was.
If the city says, “Hey, that fire station got flooded, so we want to move it,” that’s more paperwork. If they say, “Hey, we need to add another bay, since the fire station was too small in the first place,” FEMA will not approve the new bay. The locality has to pay for that out of pocket, and that will have to be kept separate from the reimbursement for the primary replacement. And this process can drag on for years.
So what is being proposed in the House bill is what they call an alternative project. Essentially, it says, “We’re going to treat this like an insurance policy: You’re going to come up with an estimate of what it’s going to take to replace that station, based upon the current costs, and if you can get the designer of that replacement to put their seal on it, we’ll [give] you 75% of that, and we’re done.”
If you took the House [draft] bill and you fully implemented it, you could probably do everything that FEMA does today with a substantially reduced workforce. The [contract] recovery workforce can be anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 people, depending on how many disasters are being closed out. And some of these disasters are decades old, and you’re still paying contractors to handle the reimbursement and management of those grants.
There is also much tougher language [in the draft bill] about insurance requirements. If FEMA pays you out to rebuild after a disaster, you have to get coverage. You can’t come back again. That also incentivizes mitigation, since you’ll be paying insurance and repairs yourself.
What about aid for individuals?
Individual aid is a very miscommunicated program. People think, “I pay my taxes, I should get enough to rebuild my house.” It doesn’t work like that. Congress never intended FEMA to supplant insurance.
When hurricanes come through, roofs get damaged. FEMA has always interpreted the limitations in the Stafford Act as [meaning] they are not authorized to do permanent repairs to individual homes, and that has led to some very expensive solutions. For example, FEMA will put blue tarps on roofs to minimize the rain that gets into a house. It can cost them, in contracts, $7,500 to $10,000 to put a tarp on a roof. They will do that even though it may only cost $8,000 to do permanent repairs to fix the hole.
It’s not uncommon for FEMA to spend $100,000 for temporary solutions like a trailer or a hotel room. In Hurricane Maria, they actually flew people to the [mainland US], since there weren’t even hotel rooms available in Puerto Rico. So you had people that were sent to New York, Orlando, other places, put in hotels for 18 months.
The bill provides that FEMA can use public assistance monies to do repairs. And again, this is all uninsured homes, and this has to be a primary homeowner. This is not for rental properties.
The House committee is looking for some feedback [from stakeholders] on — should they fully repair the home, or should they do the minimal amount of repairs required to get the power turned back on and get the local code enforcement to say it’s safe? It may mean that you don’t have painted walls, you don’t have trim, but your house envelope is safe.
When Trump says he’ll end FEMA, what do you think he means? Reforms like this, or blowing it up?
Who knows? Yet responding to disasters is the primary responsibility of states, not the federal government. Most states have ordinances on the book that put the governor in charge of disaster response. That’s why, when they declare disasters and FEMA comes in, FEMA is not in charge — they’re in support of the governor’s team. They’re in charge of coordinating on behalf of the president the federal assistance.
The more states rely on FEMA as the primary responder, the more you lose the resilience of the country. The more you lose the possibility of each of the 50 states and the territories having [its own] capabilities to respond to more recurring, smaller disasters. And that’s not good for anyone.
Photo: A resident whose house was destroyed speaks with a FEMA worker after the Eaton Fire in Pasadena, California, Jan. 17, 2025. Photographer: Jill Connelly/Bloomberg
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