Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem said in a cabinet meeting Monday she was “going to eliminate” FEMA, the government’s disaster relief agency.
Noem, 53, did not provide any other specifics about her shock announcement—just that she would seek to kill the agency tasked with responding to natural disasters and emergencies.
The announcement came and went quickly in Monday’s meeting, with there being no other discussion about FEMA’s future.
FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security, placing the agency in Noem’s purview. She said last month that she would “get rid of FEMA the way it exists today,” but did not take her aspirations as far as she did in Monday’s meeting. She and Donald Trump have suggested that—in FEMA’s place—each state should dictate its own disaster response.
FEMA has been under fire in Trump’s second administration partially for its bloated budget—at least, in the eyes of Trump and Elon Musk—and for supposedly providing aid to undocumented immigrants in disaster sites.
Officials in the Trump Administration wrote in an internal memo last month that they were reviewing “all disaster relief programs that may indirectly or incidentally aid illegal aliens,” Politico reported Friday.
FEMA was slapped with a hiring freeze last week and a review into its practices is set to commence next month.
Outright dismantling FEMA, as Trump has suggested since retaking the White House, cannot be done without an act of Congress. Republicans control the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, providing a clear path for Trump to flex his political muscle and have the agency scrapped—but many of his party-mates, including some from disaster-prone states, do not appear so thrilled with the idea.
Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from hurricane-magnet Louisiana, told reporters last week that “FEMA can’t go away.”
“I think the first job of the federal government is to protect people and property,” he added.
That is exactly what FEMA was founded to do in 1979 during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. Since then, it has been at the forefront of recovery efforts for some of the nation’s biggest tragedies—like the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and, more recently, the devastating wildfires in Southern California and flooding in southern Appalachia.
