Editorial: Communities need FEMA’s help to rebuild after disaster

By The Herald Editorial Board

The Trump administration — in its broad and breakneck campaign to transfer responsibility for much of what the federal government has previously delivered for its citizens “back to the states” — is jeopardizing one of the things that Americans collectively have always done best: reaching out with aid to fellow Americans in times of disaster.

Along with private donations of funds, clothing, food and literal helping hands, communities in the aftermath of disasters have been able to count on the nation’s taxpayer-supported emergency response system — whose roots stretch back to the early 1800s but was formerly organized as the Federal Emergency Management Agency by executive order of President Jimmy Carter in 1979 — to provide a foundation of financial support and assistance that shores up the considerable contributions and work of state and local governments to rebuild lives and communities in the aftermath of disasters, while also helping communities prepare for future calamities.

In the past, FEMA has positioned itself in a partnership of disaster preparedness and response that recognized the strengths of each sector: local execution, state management and federal support of those relief efforts.

The Trump administration now, in word and deed, appears to be walking away from that partnership. President Trump signed an executive order in mid-March that claimed it would end FEMA’s “subsidization of mismanagement” by expecting “local governments and individuals play a more active and significant role in national resilience and preparedness.”

If the intent wasn’t clear in the president’s order, Kristi Noem, Homeland Security secretary, was more blunt about a week later, saying publicly that “we’re going to eliminate FEMA,” and telling Trump administration officials that she intended to end FEMA’s role in funding long-term relief efforts and in halting its support of preparedness programs.

That abdication of federal responsibility has started.

Last month, the newly hamstrung FEMA denied federal aid for the November bomb cyclone in Western Washington, flooding in West Virginia, tornadoes in Arkansas and refused a request for extended relief for North Carolina and Georgia following Hurricane Helene’s destructive flooding in September, which killed at least 250, the deadliest such storm since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

More than being told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, states were admonished by a National Security Council spokesman who charged states and local governments “often remain an impediment to their own community’s resilience” and ought to instead have “an appetite to own the problem,” Stateline reported.

Those suspicious that politics are at play — as they had been during the first Trump administration in its refusal to deliver $37 million in aid following the September 2020 Eastern Washington wildfires — may be relieved to know that Trump’s FEMA is denying the requests of red states as well as blue. Sarah Sanders, the Republican governor of Arkansas — who previously served as White House press secretary during the first Trump administration — was refused her state’s “dire need of federal assistance” for tornadoes, including two that were rated as EF-4s, and killed three people on March 14 and 15.

The FEMA rejection letter assured Sanders and Arkansans that the damage “wasn’t anything state and local folks couldn’t handle.”

Gone, too, appear to be funds that communities have counted of for important work to prepare for disasters and avoid costlier losses from future calamities, some in the nation’s most disaster-prone regions.

FEMA, in April, announced the cancellation of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, which had promised $3.6 billion — approved by Congress — in funding for community projects across the nation, calling it a “wasteful, politicized grant process.” In Washington state, loss of the project jeopardizes $195 million in federal funds for hazard mitigation, tsunami evacuation work and adaptations for sea-level rise. Among the projects canceled was $12.5 million to relocate the residents of 45 mobile homes from a flood-prone valley near Tacoma, allowing Pierce County to acquire the land and restore a natural floodplain.

Also lost were BRIC funds to help Darrington — 16 miles east of Oso where the 2014 landslide killed 43 residents — to create a hazard mitigation plan, necessary for the town of 1,500 to be eligible for other preparedness grants, The Seattle Times reported last month.

It’s inconvenient, of course, for the Trump administration in pulling back from its responsibility to its citizens to face the reality that the effects of climate change — caused by the still increasing release of greenhouse gases — have resulted in record-breaking losses from disasters, whose frequency and intensity are increasing with the rise in temperature.

Last year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded 27 weather and climate disasters that each caused more than $1 billion in damage and losses in the United States. The total losses last year for disasters were more than $184.8 billion, with 568 deaths. In the last five years, there were 115 such “billion-dollar disasters,” causing a total loss of $755.8 billion and 2,520 deaths.

As the federal government steps away from its support role, consider the increase in the annual U.S. losses from climate and weather disasters, shown in NOAA records. Such annual losses averaged $22.2 billion during the 1980s, $34 billion during the 1990s, $62.8 billion in the 2000s, $100.6 billion in the 2010s, and more than $151 billion from 2020 to 2024.

Even assuming that the federal government would provide some support for the worst of such disasters — although there’s been no assurance of that in FEMA’s planned absence — no state would easily be able to absorb the costs of rebuilding even after disasters of moderate size. If Washington state’s appeal of FEMA’s denial of $34 million in damages from the bomb cyclone is unsuccessful, that’s $34 million left for the state and others to absorb.

Following a difficult legislative session that saw lawmakers piece together a budget of cuts and tax increases, add that $34 million in uncompensated costs to the balance sheet and then plan for as yet unknown disasters from future wildfires, floods, heat domes, cold snaps, earthquakes, tsunamis or other disasters.

Not to go all “School House Rock” on folks, but among the principles cited in the preamble of the U.S. Constitution are “insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare,” all of which would seem to recognize the collective duty of Americans to provide empathy and financial and logistical support in times of crisis.

That duty comes out of the recognition that there are indeed times when communities can’t do for themselves what the whole of U.S. citizenry can. As a nation, yes, there isn’t anything we can’t handle.