Welcome To Trump And Noem's Feral Emergency Management
Don't ask what the hell they're doing. They have no idea.
Nobody really knows why exactly Donald Trump hates the Federal Emergency Management Agency so much. Maybe he associates FEMA with Puerto Rico, which was never grateful enough for what he clearly remembers was the best disaster recovery effort in history. Maybe it’s his profound disgust for people he considers losers, however they got into a terrible situation, because only weak people need help. He prefers winners. Maybe a young, more popular blue tarp made him look foolish at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
For whatever reason, Trump said several times during and after the campaign that he thought FEMA should just go away and stop costing him money that could be going to something cool, like deportations or tanks or using tanks to deport people. So far, his administration has actually been cancelling disaster aid — or not processing the requests — even in red states.
But then stupid Texas had to go and get hit by a climate catastrophe in the form of horrifically deadly flash flooding, with, as of this morning, at least 110 confirmed dead and at least another 161 missing. And gosh, even though Trump thinks that neither climate change nor empathy are real, he loves Texas, by which we mean he loves how useful it is to him. Really great people, they all voted for him.
On Monday, Propaganda Minister Karoline Leavitt was resolutely vague, saying that “The president wants to ensure American citizens always have what they need during times of need. […] Whether that assistance comes from states or the federal government, that is a policy discussion that will continue.”
With the sort of wide-eyed credulity that sometimes gets this country into shooting wars, Politico said that pile of nothing meant that Leavitt had “opened the door to salvaging” FEMA. Yes it did.
Whatever he actually does later, Trump for now wants to be praised for doing disaster response in Texas, and doesn’t wanna talk about gutting FEMA, because it’s inconvenient. Two days after the floods hit, when a reporter asked if he still plans to phase out FEMA, Trump “explained” that he was unable to process the question, saying only, “Well, FEMA is, uh, something we can talk about later, but right now they're busy working, so we'll leave it at that.”
Or the FEMA workers would be working right now, if the agency itself weren’t also caught in the throes of Trumpian chaos. As Marisa Kabas reports,
[According] to sources within FEMA, “barely any staff” have been deployed, and the Acting Administrator David Richardson “is nowhere to be found.” Per one source, “if this is how they are going to do a major hurricane response, people are fucked.”
What should the FEMA response in Texas look like? As one current FEMA employee told Kabas, anonymously because obviously mentioning normality is dangerous,
“We would have hundreds of people on scene in FEMA jackets registering people for assistance, regional coordination center fully activated, national at least partly activated. […] Setting up disaster recovery centers with federal partners, we’d have our search and rescue there already. We would have mission assigned other agencies like USACE (US Army Corp of Engineers) to clear debris and establish power.”
Hey, isn’t that what Department of Homeland Security Secretary and cosplay enthusiast Kristi Noem is already doing, with the “just 86 total staff deployed at this point” in the disaster area? They’re just a lot more efficient than the bloated agency of old, that’s it! The worker told Kabas that by this point, after a normal president declared a major disaster, there should be several hundred FEMA people on the ground, but “We are doing a lot less than normal.”
The teams needed to tell people how to apply for FEMA assistance, and to start processing those applications, haven’t even arrived yet, and remember, this is a state Trump supposedly loves. At least FEMA staff were finally informed on Monday that federal search and rescue teams were on the way to Texas. Up to now, Kabas notes, “the search and rescue teams who have been working tirelessly since Friday have been deployed by Texas and neighboring states.”
This is where we remind you that within six days after the flooding in North Carolina last fall — really, it was that recently, although time is now all broken — hundreds of FEMA workers were already setting up offices and providing assistance in the state, although some areas remained inaccessible.
That was a few days before Donald Trump, who really cared, geared up to ensure North Carolina residents received all the lies and conspiracy theories they needed, as quickly as possible.
So let’s review: Hundreds of FEMA workers were sent to North Carolina by the 46th president, rather more than the 86 47 had sent to Texas by Monday. (I will not apologize for this sentence.) Since then, the New York Times reports, that number has swelled to … well, scores, at least:
In an internal update on Tuesday morning, FEMA said it had sent about 70 search-and-rescue workers to Kerr County and had dispatched to Austin around a dozen others who could help manage responses. Another unit of about 40 personnel was on standby, able to be in place on short notice.
That staffing was dwarfed by the response from the state, which had deployed more than 1,750 personnel and more than 975 vehicles and other equipment by late Monday, according to the Texas Division of Emergency Management.
But let’s not get all partisan about disaster response, lest we make Ted Cruz sad. Besides, Texas, unlike a lot of red states, does have a reasonably robust emergency response system — unlike a flash flood alert system, which in Kerr County’s case they have not got.
Noem even crowed about how great the federal nonresponse has been, explaining that in not doing much, FEMA is doing precisely what God and America want:
“We, as a federal government, don’t manage these disasters. The state does. We come in and support them, and that’s exactly what we did here in this situation.”
We’re cutting through the paperwork of the old FEMA streamlining it, much like your vision of how FEMA should operate,” Noem said of Trump’s promise to scrap the agency. Noem added that Americans helping one another after such tragic events is proof that “God created us to take care of each other.”
Noem added that God, now apparently running FEMA in the acting director’s absence, had done a great job, mostly:
“The parents that were looking for their children and picking up their daughters’ stuffed animals out of the mud and finding their daughter’s shoe that might be laying in the cabin and, just hugging and comforting people matters a lot,” the secretary said.
“I’m extremely grateful for God’s hand in that whole situation because hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people were saved,” she said. “And and this is a time for all of us in this country to remember that we were created to serve each other.”
Sure, there were the 27 little girls who drowned at one of the Jesus camps along the Guadalupe River, but for a new hire, God did pretty great on average. Under the Federal Vacancies Act, the Almighty can serve in His temporary appointment for 210 days, although that period can be extended if Trump forwards the Lord of Hosts to the Senate for confirmation.
Good luck, America! He’s got the whole world in His hands, and if he drops a few of us now and then, it’s still better than socialism.
[Roll Call / The Handbasket / CNN / Politico / NYT / Guardian / NYT (October 2024) / AP]
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OT: "BREAKING: Linda Yaccarino steps down as head of Elon Musk's social media platform X after 2 years"
She is stepping down after chasing away all advertisers and releasing MechaHitler.
It’s the stuff. FEMA means people want stuff (and money). All the money and all the stuff is supposed to belong to Trump and ICE and that’s it. So no FEMA.