Trump’s doing more than neglecting western NC. He’s finding new ways to deprive it. | Opinion
The 2024 presidential campaign coincided with the widespread and unprecedented devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina. Also unprecedented was the degree to which candidate Donald Trump politicized the disaster, falsely accusing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) of ignoring Republican areas and diverting funds to support undocumented immigrants. Ironically, however, now that he is in office, Trump and Elon Musk, his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) chief, seem to be making every effort to make those earlier accusations of FEMA underperformance come true.
Helene’s winds and torrential rains struck on Sept. 26, 2024, claiming at least 250 lives across seven states, 107 in North Carolina alone, and causing $58 billion in damage, as calculated by the state’s budget office. The scale and location of the disaster were unexpected, but FEMA had 1,500 personnel in the state within a week. By mid-October it had distributed $124 million in housing assistance to some 87,600 households and had set up fourteen Disaster Recovery Centers across the western counties to assist individuals and businesses in obtaining aid.
Trump, however, found nothing to commend and loudly made baseless charges: “Kamala [Harris] spent all her FEMA money,” he said, “billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants.” Elon Musk chimed in: “FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country, instead of saving American lives. Treason.” Reports abounded of FEMA workers being turned away by suspicious residents in western North Carolina communities. Misinformation “is reducing the likelihood that survivors will come to FEMA in a trusting way to register for assistance,” one administrator reported. All of this prompted a local congressman, Chuck Edwards (R.-NC), to urge constituents to cooperate with FEMA, assuring them that the agency had “NOT diverted disaster response funding to the border or foreign aid.”
Trump had been in office barely three weeks when DOGE went to work on FEMA. Its badly understaffed workforce was reduced by 200 more. Musk claimed to have discovered undocumented immigrants being housed with FEMA funds in New York City and vowed to stop funding for such individuals and the “sanctuary” jurisdictions protecting them. The resulting indiscriminate freeze — broadened further by the Secretary Kristi Noem of Homeland Security, FEMA’s parent department — halted disaster payments across the board and across the country. The New York Times documented two North Carolina cases in point: a grant to Warren Wilson College for repairing roofs and clearing debris, and an $18 million reimbursement to the French Broad Electric Membership Corporation to pay workers for repairs to power lines and poles after all of its 43,000 customers lost power.
This was only the tip of the iceberg.
Payments have been delayed for hundreds of FEMA grants and reimbursements. In North Carolina, reimbursements of more than $60 million for debris removal and other operations are overdue, and $105 million from FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund has been frozen. The state is still awaiting over $1 billion in related Department of Agriculture funding that was due March 21. And North Carolina will be especially hard hit by the announced cancellation of FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, presumably because it relates to climate change. The state’s Emergency Management department estimates that all BRIC grants from 2020-23 will be cancelled, with a loss of $184 million, to say nothing of unmet needs going forward.
Now, amid reports that DOGE plans to “decimate” FEMA further, the administration has indicated it aims to abolish the agency entirely. “We’re going to eliminate FEMA,” Noem told the Cabinet — a proposal that North Carolina’s House Democrats rightly called “reckless and irresponsible” in a letter to the Secretary. Trump suggested that FEMA’s functions might be returned to the states. In fact, we would be hard pressed to find a better example of the need for the federal government to provide backup resources and emergency “surge” capacity for the states. No state can provide this degree of expertise and multifaceted recovery support on its own — or even know what resources might be needed or when. The federal government must be ready to direct relief and recovery efforts whenever and wherever disaster strikes. Every state and locality has a stake in maintaining this capacity. The Trump administration and DOGE may learn this the hard way, but in the meantime North Carolina is getting a foretaste of what a reduced federal capacity would mean.
As former members of the U. S. House from a state susceptible to natural disasters, we know FEMA well. One of us (Etheridge) served on the Homeland Security authorizing committee, and the other (Price), as Homeland Security Appropriation Subcommittee chair, was closely involved in the reform of the agency that followed its disastrous Hurricane Katrina performance in the Bush administration. We have participated in the bipartisan cooperation North Carolina’s congressional delegation has generally displayed in working with FEMA after natural disasters — and we watched with dismay as Donald Trump upended that tradition last Fall. Now, we are sounding an alarm. Western North Carolina needs a well-staffed, well-funded, well-managed FEMA, not Musk’s wrecking ball. The Trump administration must call off the DOGE and get to work.