President Donald Trump on Wednesday floated abolishing the federal agency charged with the response to all kinds of natural disasters and other emergencies across the nation, and leave the task of responding to emergencies up to individual state governments instead.
Speaking to Fox News host Sean Hannity in his first television interview since he was sworn in for his second term on Monday, Trump repeated false claims made during the election by online activists who alleged that the Biden administration did not send federal resources to North Carolina after a pair of hurricanes hit the state last fall.
He blamed the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has been the point agency for federal disaster response since its creation during the Carter administration.
“The Democrats don’t care about North Carolina. What they’ve done with FEMA is so bad. FEMA is a whole other discussion, because all it does is complicate everything,” he insisted. “FEMA has not done their job for the last four years,” said Trump, who added that the agency, which has been part of the Department of Homeland Security since 2003, had been “working really well” before he left office.
“Unless you have certain types of leadership, it really gets in the way,” he said of the federal agency.
Trump told Hannity that FEMA should “be a whole big discussion very shortly,” and said he’d prefer ending the agency’s federal mission and makeindividual states responsible for dealing with natural disasters, terrorist attacks and other matters normally handled by the federal agency.
“You know what? If they get hit with a tornado or something, let Oklahoma fix it … and then the federal government can help them out with the money. FEMA is getting in the way of everything. And the Democrats actually use FEMA not to help North Carolina. It makes no sense,” he said.
Trump also threatened to cut off disaster aid for states that are run by Democrats if their state governments don’t help with his effort to enact a mass deportation of non-white migrants who’ve come to the U.S. in recent years, including those who are awaiting court dates to argue claims for asylum.
Specificallty, he echoed calls for California to be denied federal resources to recover from the massive wildfires that have burned an area larger than some of the largest cities in America unless the state’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom agrees to reverse sanctuary policies that prevent state and local police from cooperating with immigration enforcement.
He also accused Newsom, of exacerbating the disaster by deliberately mismanaging water supplies in the state and failing to properly manage forests.
“I don’t think we should give California anything until they let water flow down into there just from the north to the south,” he said.
