Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Wednesday reiterated her desire to “eliminate” the Federal Emergency Management Agency and overhaul the way it operates.
“Federal emergency management should be state and locally led, rather than how it has operated for decades,” Noem said to open a meeting of the FEMA Review Council, created by President Donald Trump earlier this year to reassess how the federal agency operates.
“It has been slow to respond at the federal level,” she said. “It’s even been slower to get the resources to Americans in crisis, and that is why this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today and remade into a responsive agency.”
She later said, “In fact, some of how we’ve responded to Texas is exactly how President Trump imagined that this agency would operate: Immediately making decisions, getting them resources and dollars that they need so that they conduct the response that they need to do on the ground.”
Both Trump and Noem have criticized the current form of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, established in 1979, calling it ineffective and arguing that states should be responsible for managing their own disaster responses.
Noem described FEMA’s failures over the years as “staggering,” citing its responses to Hurricane Katrina two decades ago, Hurricane Helene last year, and the Maui fires in 2023.
“The scale of those failures is matched only by their longevity,” she said. “FEMA has been disastrous at times, incompetent at times, and not just in the last few years, but for decades.” But she also added: “There’s times FEMA has performed very well and has responded and delivered the help that people needed.”
The future of disaster management, Noem said, “has to be led by local communities and by states, with the federal government coming in in a supporting role, empowering them, not hindering them and slowing them down with paperwork, bureaucracy and lack of resources.”