President Donald Trump is planning to wind down the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) after the 2025 hurricane season, shifting more of the disaster response burden onto states—even as climate-fueled disasters grow more frequent and severe.
“We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level,” the president said during an Oval Office briefing Tuesday, according to CNN.
“A governor should be able to handle it, and frankly, if they can’t handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn’t be governor,” he added.
Trump has long criticized FEMA as ineffective and said disaster relief funds would instead be distributed directly through the president’s office—giving him greater control over where the money is allocated.
“We’re going to give out less money,” he said. “We’re going to give it out directly. It’ll be from the president’s office. We’ll have somebody here, could be Homeland Security.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department oversees FEMA, said the agency “fundamentally needs to go away as it exists” at Tuesday’s briefing.
“We all know from the past that FEMA has failed thousand if not millions of people” she said. Noem—who sought FEMA funds as South Dakota’s governor after the state was hit by a bomb cyclone in 2019—added that the administration is working on “mutual aid agreements” between states—reserving federal involvement for “catastrophic situations.”
Federal and state emergency officials are skeptical that local systems could replace FEMA’s extensive infrastructure if the agency were to be eliminated.
“This is a complete misunderstanding of the role of the federal government in emergency management and disaster response and recovery, and it’s an abdication of that role when a state is overwhelmed,” a longtime FEMA official told CNN.
Trump said the FEMA phase-out would begin “after the hurricane season”, which officially runs from June 1 to Nov. 30 and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration projects it to be unusually intense this year.
Yet, an internal FEMA assessment admitted the agency “is not ready” to handle catastrophic storms this summer, a CNN report revealed in May. Sources told the outlet that FEMA has lost around 30 percent of its total staff, which once numbered more than 20,000 people, due to DOGE buyouts and layoffs.
Last week, FEMA’s acting administrator David Richardson—a Marine veteran with no prior disaster response experience—raised eyebrows when he said at an all-hands meeting that he was unaware the U.S. had a hurricane season.
The Department of Homeland Security later insisted it was meant as a joke.
