President Donald Trump entered his second term talking about eliminating the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Then Texas’s Guadalupe River flooded, killing more than 130 Americans. Now, Trump’s team is scrambling to insist that its changes at FEMA did not hinder the federal response.
Trump had a point before his administration’s change in tone: FEMA is a mess. Yet his provocative musings about cutting the agency were destined to make him look negligent as soon as a major disaster struck. So were some of the reckless changes his team made at FEMA before the Guadalupe tragedy.
But the emergency agency still needs big alterations — including a renegotiation of how much responsibility for disaster management the federal government shoulders, rather than the states.
In 2024, the Government Accountability Office warned that the agency was losing its ability to respond to disasters effectively, largely because its workforce was left stretched thin and struggling to handle the increasing number of disasters hitting the country.
In March, the GAO issued a separate report pleading with Congress to address the nation’s “fragmented” approach to disaster relief, which sprawls across more than 30 agencies. The complicated bureaucracy has often made it difficult for survivors to access federal aid and slowed down recovery efforts.
The second Trump administration made things worse. The U.S. DOGE Service conducted undiscriminating cuts of about a fifth of FEMA’s already resource-strapped workforce. The New York Times reported that on July 5, the day after the deadly floods struck Texas, the administration allowed the contracts of hundreds of workers managing FEMA’s disaster assistance line to expire. In the following days, FEMA answered only a fraction of the thousands of calls it received.
Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem, whose department oversees FEMA, insisted on personally signing off on any contract or grant of more than $100,000. This added yet another bureaucratic step that delayed approvals of federal aid for Texas’s search and rescue operations, CNN reports.
Noem dismissed reports of unanswered calls as “fake news” and struggled to defend her grant approval policy. “It’s not extra red tape,” she said. “It’s making sure everything is getting to my level,” she explained, restating the problem. A FEMA spokesperson also defended the federal flood response, noting the volume of resources it surged into the effort.
The Trump administration’s foibles risk overshadowing its fair point: States should play a more active role in disaster management. As things stand, the federal government is the primary payer of disaster aid, allowing states to shirk investing in their own disaster programs.
After big disasters, there are usually costs that states, which are more fiscally encumbered than the federal government, cannot handle. But they can invest more in resilience and disaster preparedness, which would lower costs of future disasters. Federal aid can spur, rather than discourage, these efforts. Yet the administration halted FEMA programs meant to help states with resilience projects.
Trump should reverse course on these programs. He could also press the agency to improve federal flood maps, which experts warn underestimate the risk to properties near bodies of water. Identifying risks is a prerequisite for limiting them. With better information, state and local governments can make more rational choices about how and where people build things.
Then Trump and Congress should reorganize the fragmented federal disaster apparatus to be lean and responsive, consolidating grant programs and reducing the number of agencies involved.
This wouldn’t be easy. But neither is digging out after yet another big flood that could have been less deadly if government officials had planned better.
