Days after being sworn in for his second term in January 2025, Donald Trump visited states on opposite sides of the country reeling from disasters. In North Carolina, he visited with families impacted by Category 4 Hurricane Helene, which in September 2024 killed more than 100 people. In California, he toured Los Angeles communities ravaged that January by the Eaton and Palisades fires that killed 31 people. He was doing what has come to be seen as mandatory voyages by politicians to see disaster areas firsthand and confer with victims and government officials.

Yet, Trump’s comments were combative from the start. 

In Asheville, North Carolina, he told reporters that FEMA “let the country down” and “turned out to be a disaster.” And in Los Angeles, he characterized the agency as “not good anymore.” Taking to Truth Social, he also excoriated California’s politicians: “The fires are still raging in L.A. The incompetent pols [politicians] have no idea how to put them out … This is one of the worst catastrophes in the history of our Country. They just can’t put out the fires. What’s wrong with them?” 

At the heart of Trump’s rhetoric was a dramatic plan he had in mind for the nation’s top disaster response agency: to gut it. “I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away,” he said in Asheville, announcing he would sign an executive order focused on overhauling or eliminating the agency.

Trump and his conservative supporters have pointed to FEMA’s costs as examples of agency failure: “Despite obligating nearly $30 billion in disaster aid each of the past three years, FEMA has managed to leave vulnerable Americans without the resources or support they need when they need it most,” the president wrote in his January 24, 2025, executive order.

But there is likely another, more personal reason Trump set his sights on terminating the agency. Days before the presidential election, as FEMA employees responded to Hurricane Milton in Florida, a supervisor instructed hurricane responders to skip over homes displaying election campaign signs supporting Donald Trump. The worker was fired, and an internal investigation found no proof that such guidance had been issued agency-wide. But Trump has a memory like an elephant. 

“I believe candidate Trump took it personally … this put FEMA in his sights, so I believe he thought FEMA had become politicized and it had to be addressed,” Michael Coen, a former FEMA chief of staff in the Obama and Biden administrations, told me. “Couple that with Project 2025, calling for having to rein in spending of FEMA over the year, because of the complexity and increased strength of the risk that this country has seen.”

“There are serious concerns of political bias in FEMA,” Trump wrote in his executive order. “It has lost mission focus, diverting limited staff and resources to support missions beyond its scope and authority, spending well over a billion dollars to welcome illegal aliens.” 

That claim about undocumented immigrants was mentioned again during an August 2025 press release from DHS that FEMA was “back on track” after decades of failure, including the debunked claim that Biden misappropriated FEMA disaster funds to house migrant workers in hotels. The same address claimed disaster funding was now getting to communities 126% faster than under Biden, that money was reaching survivors in 12 days instead of 17 on average, and that FEMA workers were arriving on the ground to help in half the time (one day on average instead of two).

“FEMA is being radically reformed into a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers states and local communities to provide relief to their citizens,” the announcement read.

But by last fall, the agency had already delayed $11 billion in disaster aid funding. That was in part due to former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem making it her personal duty to sign off on all disaster relief grants exceeding $100,000, which led to significant backlogs for disaster resources.

 Her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, described the policy as “micromanaging.”

The agency is now considering cutting thousands of FEMA jobs, with some reports saying cuts could affect half of the agency’s more than 20,000-person workforce by October. Former employees say a cut that size would be devastating, not only to disaster response on the ground, but to helping localities get the funding they need to restore infrastructure and rebuild homes.

“It would be significant,” said Coen. “It would slow down and cause frustration with states, whether it’s for preparing for disasters, responding to disasters, or mitigating future risks.”

Already, FEMA jobs dropped from roughly 25,800 in January 2025 to 23,350 by June of that year, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office. FEMA’s records were taken by force by DOGE staffers, who gained access to data on disaster survivors and sensitive grant programs, according to four current and two former FEMA officials.

FEMA serves communities hit by disasters, including floods, wildfires, hurricanes, and tornadoes. As climate change makes extreme weather events more frequent, intense, destructive, and deadly, FEMA has been increasingly strained to address them. The agency had a $33.1 billion budget in fiscal year 2025—the same year the U.S. experienced at least 23 separate weather and climate events with damages exceeding $1 billion, with 276 deaths and a total cost of $115 billion, according to Climate Central. The disparity in funding versus damage highlights just how challenging and expensive it is to respond and rebuild after modern-day disasters. 

The agency, admittedly, has shown real cracks in the system at times. For example, FEMA was sued for causing expensive flood insurance—often seen as insurance of the last resort—due to the agency’s new risk estimates. 

But while Trump administration officials have blasted FEMA as inefficient and costly, some of the president’s own advisors have disagreed with dissolving the agency—even at the cost of retaliation. Cameron Hamilton, former acting FEMA administrator, was removed one day after telling Congress the agency should not be eliminated because it helped communities “in their greatest times of need.”

Trump’s position is that states, not the federal government, should be responsible for disaster recovery. That means the administration is likely to put more pressure on them to respond to storms. Mullin last week said that FEMA would be “restructured, not eliminated.” 

But states only allocate so much to disaster funds, and are often ill-equipped to deal with the massive scale of extreme weather events such as 2005’s Hurricane Katrina or last year’s Hurricane Helene. And the majority of areas hit regularly by hurricanes and rising waters are in the Southeast: predominantly Republican-controlled states that increasingly rely on federal funds to help with disaster declarations.