Traveling to North Carolina Friday to survey damage caused by last September’s Hurricane Helene, President Donald Trump called for the overhaul of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and suggested that he might seek to eliminate the agency entirely.
While no final decision has been made on the fate of the agency, founded in 1978 to help coordinate the increasingly complex federal responses to natural disasters, Trump told reporters that he would sign an executive order “to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA, or maybe getting rid of them.” Later, he added that, “We’re going to recommend that FEMA go away.”
Speaking to the press before departing Washington, Trump complained about the conditions in North Carolina, where he said that destruction from the hurricane in the western part of the state has been allowed to “fester.”
“North Carolina has been treated very badly,” he said.
Once in the state, Trump questioned the way FEMA operates. In the future, Trump said he’d like to see “probably less FEMA, because FEMA just hasn’t done the job.” He added that “we’re looking at the whole concept of FEMA,” and suggested that disaster responses should be driven by individual states rather than the federal government. “I like, frankly, the concept: When North Carolina gets hit, the governor takes care of it. When Florida gets hit, the governor takes care of it, meaning the state takes care of it.”
Trump claimed that local responses would be more efficient and cost considerably less. “Let the state take care of the tornadoes and the hurricanes and all of the other things that happen,” he said. “And I think you’re going to find it a lot less expensive. You’ll do it for less than half, and you’re going to get a lot quicker response.”
In response to a reporter’s question, Trump said that he wants any federal aid provided by Congress for disaster relief to flow through “us,” presumably meaning the White House, rather than through FEMA. “I think maybe this is a good place to start, because — and in all fairness to the governor, in all fairness to everybody else, FEMA was not on the ball, and we’re going to turn it all around.”
Threats to California disaster aid: After his North Carolina visit the president headed west to survey the devastation caused by the recent fires in Los Angeles. Trump has clashed with political leaders in California in the past and has sharply criticized the state’s response to the fires that have destroyed thousands of homes and businesses.
On Friday, Trump confirmed earlier indications that Republicans want to put requirements on disaster aid for California. “I want to see two things in Los Angeles. Voter ID, so that the people have a chance to vote, and I want to see the water be released and come down into Los Angeles and throughout the state,” he told reporters. “Those are the two things. After that, I will be the greatest president that California has ever seen.”
Trump has repeatedly claimed that California is holding back a significant supply of water, though it’s not clear what he’s referring to. “Think of a sink, but multiply it many thousands of times and you turn it back toward Los Angeles,” he said earlier this week, referring to the mysterious water source. “The size of it, it’s massive. Why aren’t they doing it? They either have a death wish, they’re stupid, or there’s something else going on that we don’t understand.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom, the California Democrat who Trump accused this week of being part of the “radical left,” rejected the idea that there is a great untapped water source that would have helped extinguish the fires. He said Trump was expressing “wild-eyed fantasies … that somehow there’s a magical spigot in Northern California that just can be turned on and all of a sudden there will be rain or water flowing everywhere.”
As The Wall Street Journal’s Jim Carlton reported, “Trump’s talk of a spigot—which he calls a faucet or valve—has stumped observers for a while.” Noting that Los Angeles gets much of its water from the Sierra Nevada mountains and not the Pacific Northwest or Canada, as Trump has suggested, Carlton was unable to dig up any further details on the secret spigot.
As for the other condition for getting aid, there appears to be no connection between Voter ID and disaster aid, but it does indicate that Trump is willing to use federal resources as leverage for political purposes. Unlike North Carolina — which Trump notably did not place any conditions on in exchange for federal aid — California voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024, even as Trump mused that he might win that state.
California Sen. Alex Padilla pushed back against Trump’s heavy-handed approach. “Trump says he’ll only approve aid for fire victims if the state implements voter ID?” he said Friday. “This is nothing but pure political payback for a state that refused to support him in his last three presidential campaigns.”