Trump announces plans to ‘wean off’ FEMA after 2025 hurricane season

WASHINGTON — President Trump has given the clearest indication yet that his administration is ready to shut down the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and shift its operations to US states after the 2025 hurricane season sputters out.

“We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday, months after he signed an executive order for a “full-scale review” of the agency.

“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.”

The Jan. 24 executive order tapped Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to co-chair a FEMA Review Council analyzing the agency’s effectiveness. That body has yet to publish any findings.

The order also called out FEMA’s “political bias” after a supervisor was dinged by a federal watchdog for engaging in illegal partisan activities by telling her disaster relief team responding to Hurricane Milton in Florida in October 2024 to “avoid homes advertising Trump.”

Noem affirmed Tuesday that FEMA “fundamentally needs to go away as it exists” during the Oval Office gaggle.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has forecast between six and 10 hurricanes between June 1 and Nov. 30, three to five of which will likely be major storms.

Last year, hurricanes caused $182.7 billion in damages, according to NOAA, much higher than the average annual cost ($149.3 billion) over the past five years.

Trump suggested that in the future, less disaster aid for any recovery efforts would be provided by the federal government — but if sought, would come directly from the president’s office.

“We all know from the past that FEMA has failed thousands, if not millions of people, and President Trump does not want to see that continue into the future,” Noem told reporters, echoing the president’s remarks in January as he visited hurricane-struck regions in North Carolina.

“FEMA has been a very big disappointment. They cost a tremendous amount of money. It’s very bureaucratic and it’s very slow,” Trump said at the time while surveying the damaged town of Swannanoa, NC, before joking: “Other than that, we’re very happy with them.”

Trump also accused his predecessor’s administration of having booted 2,000 displaced North Carolinians out of temporary shelters during the federal disaster response “into freezing 20-degree weather.”

Some Democrats, like Rep. Jared Moskowitz, have backed legislation to let states receive more direct disaster relief funding through block grants.

“Bureaucracy at the Department of Homeland Security is getting in the way of FEMA fulfilling its core mission,” Moskowitz (D-Fla.) said in a statement last month.

“Under DHS, FEMA has become a grant agency that also does emergency management, rather than an emergency management agency that also does grants.”

Moskowitz, however, has advocated removing FEMA from under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security — rather than abolishing it entirely.