Donald Trump’s latest is just an opinion, not an order: Let the affected states deal with disasters, no matter how widespread, no matter if they are man-made or a Mother Nature angered by human-driven climate change.
Just before touring hurricane and wildfire devastation in North Carolina and Southern California, Trump told Fox’s Sean Hannity in an interview that we would be better off cutting out the federal government in managing disaster recovery. “I’d rather see the states take care of their own problems,” with the feds sending a block of money. He repeated it after seeing the damage.
It’s the kind of Trump policy we’re getting used to once again — a one-line summary to cover a host of layered and complicated decisions that neither address the root of the problems at hand and leaves him to play politics with whether the affected state voted for him or not.
North Carolina did vote for Trump, and so, by this logic, that state’s residents are deserving of aid; California has not ever supported him, and so, Trump’s not so sure. At the minimum, Trump and Republicans want to roast Gov. Gavin Newsom over the embers of these urban wildfires over local policy changes that range from seriously expensive to nonsensical.
The political overlay makes a mockery of running to be a president governing the entire country, of course. And Trump’s position is consistent with longstanding Republican ideology for a smaller federal government, leaving most decision-making about policy to the states.
The Project 2025 document, drafted as an outline for Trump by the Heritage Foundation, advises flipping the financial burden of response to small disasters so that 75 percent is carried by states and the rest by the federal government. Project 2025 suggested reducing federal aid to states that fail to protect their communities against future disasters. Hmm, like Republican-led Florida allowing home-rebuilding on the coasts hit annually by hurricanes?
What throws this type of fix all off, of course, is the reality of the nature of these disasters and the vastness of the destruction involved. The Los Angeles fires, which happened in urban areas where 50-foot flames whipped by hurricane-force Santa Ana desert winds were not supposed to occur, has the potential to bankrupt much of the nation’s insurance industry as well as tens of thousands of homes, businesses, churches, libraries and communities.
As Trump witnessed for himself this weekend, the damage in North Carolina will require years of rebuilding, and Southern California is way past hundreds of billions of dollars — soon to be boosted by tariff-increased cost for lumber for construction.
In North Carolina, after Trump trashed FEMA, he then promised the help of the Army Corps of Engineers and suggested he might “take over” the disaster — contradicting himself. In Los Angeles, he eschewed any public empathy and promised aid only if California adopts voter ID laws and pushes more water from the north of the state to the south, neither of which would have helped deal with this problem.
That kind of scale might just get in the way of spending to build border walls or underwrite mass deportation of millions. Simply put, Trump doesn’t want to be in the disaster aid business.
Running Dislike for Aid
Trump has always had a tenuous relationship with disaster responsibility. During his first term, he was reluctant to help Puerto Rico — which cannot vote in presidential elections — and ridiculously spent his one visit to throw out paper towels to a small crowd. In Florida this year, the, FEMA, the federal emergency agency in Homeland Security, had to fire a manager for advising his agent to skip by homes with Trump support signs.
So, Trump has had enmity for the agency as well as for the whole idea of having to offer aid.
Truths about managing disasters of size is that state and local officials have their hands full with rescues to evacuate or protecting life and property, organizing firefighting or the equivalent, policing against looting, providing immediate shelter and lots more. They always need more hands, they need logistical help, and they need to give the job of organizing specific household rebuilding loans and efforts to someone not overwhelmed by the immediate.
That’s how FEMA came about in 1979 through an executive order by Jimmy Carter, though the agency says its roots go back to 1803. More than 20,000 FEMA employees work on prepositioning emergency services and after the disaster unfolds. Over years, FEMA has been lauded in general but criticized for delays in helping individuals through a process we all would describe as red tape.
FEMA officials almost always defer to state and local officials already. But just take Covid as an example. As a national disaster, what we saw were state governors and officials fighting with each other to secure ventilators, considered crucial life-saving tools, as well as gloves, masks and medical beds and gowns. Creation of emergency hospital beds in arenas required National Guardsmen and far-flung help — coordinated finally by the federal government.
If the insurance industry seeks to short individual homeowners and businesses on claims, it will fall to the federal government to resolve. The industry is certain to ask for federal government bailout or loan guarantees or simply for exemption from having to pay out claims for policies from which they have drawn lifetime profit.
Matching Aid to Disaster
Disaster on the scale of tornado, hurricane, earthquake and wildfire devastation is not something individuals can handle by themselves, or by the block. Saying that the responsibilities should be shouldered by cities or states is an arbitrary line in the sand. The idea of federal response is to bring the resources of many to the relative few who need it as a humane, shared view of expense.
Matching aid to preventive effort is fine — so long as that is the accepted rule by which all states will play. But Trump’s views on the role of climate change in intensifying the impact of these huge hurricanes that we now experience, or the arrival of hurricane-fueled urban wildfires do not match with this preventive philosophy.
Prevention is about development rules and construction standards, not about raking forests, or summarily deciding that water in Northern California should magically be equally available to support agriculture, homeowner and business uses hundreds of miles away and held in reserve and available by the ton on a moment’s notice for a wildfire in a Los Angeles canyon. Who decides whether preventive efforts are good enough, anyway?
If Trump is right about crafting federal aid to states only if they demonstrate policies to prevent the worst of disasters, then the federal government should be held to the same standard. Rather than promoting more oil and gas drilling in vulnerable ocean areas and public property, we would see Trump endorse suggestions akin to the Green New Deal rather than ridicule them, or embracing regulation of methane gas emission, or demanding that cars meet increasingly tough emission standards.
The trouble with being king is that people expect the king to fix what’s wrong.