FEMA’s Uncertain Future Leaves N.C. and Other States in Limbo

This story is republished through our partnership with NOTUS.

The South is especially vulnerable to storms and flooding due to its low-lying coastal plains, and lawmakers and activists there are questioning what President Donald Trump’s shifting views on the future of the Federal Emergency Management Agency could mean.

It’s front of mind for many of them as recent storms, like the deadly flash flooding in Texas over the Fourth of July weekend, and Hurricane Helene, which tore apart North Carolina in September, have devastated their states. The latter prompted remarks from Trump about the changing role FEMA should play in disaster response moving forward. For Democrats, this is cause for concern. For Republicans, it’s a temporary state of limbo. 

Republican state Rep. John Wyble of Louisiana told NOTUS that Trump’s changing stance on the agency is part of the “legislative process” that often “gets murky and complicated.” He said if he had the chance to talk to Trump, he would advocate for a continued investment on behalf of the federal government in disaster response.

“I think with FEMA … it seems to me that the administration is looking to see how much of a role the states can play,” Wyble said. He added that he still expects “federal support” as the agency goes through changes, but understands that states will “also have a role in the process.” 

Trump’s latest shift on FEMA came after he visited the Texas Hill Country, where floods killed at least 134 people. White House officials said during Trump’s visit that completely abolishing the agency was no longer the plan. 

Prior to that, Trump had said that he wanted to “wean off FEMA.”  He pointed to Oklahoma as a state that would benefit from the reform and embrace it. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vowed to “eliminate FEMA” in March, and acted on that plan by cutting employees, removing funding allocations and ending grant programs the agency provides. 

In response to inquiries on the future of the agency, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told NOTUS in a statement that “effective” response to disaster depends on local and state governments.

“While Federal assistance was always intended to supplement state actions, not replace those actions, FEMA’s outsized role created a bloated bureaucracy that disincentivized state investment in their own resilience,” Jackson said. 

She added that Trump “is committed to right-sizing the Federal government while empowering State and local governments by enabling them to better understand, plan for, and ultimately address the needs of their citizens. The President’s FEMA Review Council, comprised of top experts in their field, will recommend to the President how FEMA may be reformed in ways that best serve the national interest, including how America responds to and recovers from disasters such that the Federal role remains supplemental and appropriate to the scale of disaster.”  

Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards of North Carolina, who serves on the administration’s FEMA task force, told NOTUS that he would support “a scaled-down, more nimble agency in Washington, D.C., that would provide support to the states to handle their own disaster recovery.” 

In a report that he released in April, Edwards argued that the agency should be reformed, and that western North Carolina couldn’t handle its recovery effort being “interrupted by total terminations of critical recovery programs.” 

“There have been no actions taken to create any level of uncertainty,” Edwards said. “What has taken place is conversations around the fact that FEMA is failing at their core job. And I believe that the administration and Congress is doing the right thing in having discussions about what should take place next. How FEMA should be, if at all, reorganized to be able to react quicker, more nimbly and more efficiently to those folks that are affected by disasters.”

Democratic state Rep. Eric Ager of North Carolina told NOTUS that the administration has put his state in a tough situation due to the lack of clear guidance. If another storm like Hurricane Helene were to hit North Carolina, he doesn’t believe his state would get the same level of FEMA assistance that it previously received.

“Everything we do in society is based on planning, whether that’s business planning or whether that’s local governments who have just finished it for next year, whether that’s at the state level,” Ager said. “Folks need to know what the reality is from the federal side, and that’s just what we’re not getting.”

For Democrats like Ager, there’s another concern: Trump’s history of threatening to withhold aid from states dealing with disasters. For example, in 2019, Trump threatened to withhold federal aid from California to help with wildfires as he criticized Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “terrible job of forest management.” 

Catherine Coleman Flowers, the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice who served on President Joe Biden’s White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, told NOTUS states will find it hard to account for that uncertainty.

“We’re starting to have these types of disasters, especially flooding in areas where it didn’t flood before, to this magnitude,” Coleman Flowers told NOTUS, referring to the flooding in Texas. “In my view, it’s going to be hard for states to plan and budget for that without having the support of the federal government when these disasters and these events occur. Because generally, we don’t plan for this.”

Republicans have largely said they back Trump’s plan, and have confidence in their states’ ability to prepare for disasters. 

“I think the president’s on track. There’s a transition time between going from the old model to whatever the new model is going to be, and I think that’s where we are,” Republican state Rep. Michael Echols of Louisiana told NOTUS. “Disasters don’t stop based on how you’re changing an agency’s culture. They’re going to keep coming. So the administration has to keep working through those issues until they have a viable path forward and a new retooled, new culture, new agency.”

Republican state Rep. Brian Glorioso of Louisiana told NOTUS that he supports the administration’s idea of using DHS to help “marshal resources through other agencies more readily.” While he does think FEMA needs to be reformed, he still thinks the agency or something similar will be needed for coordination. 

“Obviously there are things that can be done to fix FEMA to make it more effective, especially on the ground level,” Glorioso said. “I think at some level, you’re going to need to still have an agency that’s going to respond to disasters and do the bulk of the top-level coordination. Because most locations, most localities, just aren’t going to be in position, especially after a disaster, to do that.”

Meanwhile, Democrats don’t see any bright spots in a potential overhaul.

“I don’t know if they [states] fully understand how to budget for this,” former Alabama Democratic Sen. Doug Jones told NOTUS. “I don’t think states have been given a clear indication yet of what they should be budgeting for, how they should be budgeting for it. Will they get money from the federal government that they will allocate themselves? I just think it’s a world that states are going to struggle with for some time because they’ve not been given the guidance.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Torrence Banks is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.