Two weeks before Election Day last year, Donald Trump dropped into western North Carolina, where the devastation from Tropical Storm Helene was still fresh and frustration with Washington was boiling over. If elected, Trump pledged, he would do better in future crises, learning the lessons of the destruction the hurricane had unleashed there on Sept. 27.
“The power of nature, nothing you can do about it. But you got to get a little bit better crew in to do a better job than has been done by the White House, because it’s not good, not good,” Trump said during a two-day trip to a state that weeks later would vote for Trump as president for the third time in as many elections.
Now back in power, however, his Administration is not exactly championing the rebuild of that part of Appalachia, where 95 people died and about 185,000 homes were damaged or destroyed in North Carolina alone. In fact, he’s scaling back federal help available for that region and telling the states to take bigger pieces of the financial burden for future storms, just as hurricane season gets underway.
Given the chance to take extraordinary steps to continue full government funding, Trump is declining, breaking with how his predecessors handled major crises. In North Carolina alone, the price tag to recover from Helene is expected to be around $60 billion; Gov. Josh Stein’s budget proposal in March called for total state spending on all programs to be almost $34 billion, meaning folks expected Washington to carry much of the recovery.
But Trump wants to shift the burden back to Governors. The shortfall is especially worrying as hurricane season starts this weekend with most experts—including those inside the Federal Emergency Management Agency—warning that the feds are nowhere close to being ready. It looks like there will be about $8 billion in disaster costs that are not funded by the time the new federal budget starts in October, and the White House seems fine letting that check fall beyond the Beltway.
Anyone who has watched Trump knew this was a likely outcome. The mismarriage of campaign trail pitch and White House action is a hallmark of his governance style. Given a chance to make grand promises, Trump’s salesman DNA kicks in. When there’s a chance to kick a political foe, it’s an even surer bet.
“What’s happened there is very bad. They’re offering them $750 to people whose homes have been washed away,” Trump told a crowd in Butler, Penn., on Oct. 5, repeating debunked claims that the Biden Administration was capping rebuilding funds and instead spending cash on people improperly in the United States. “And yet we send tens of billions of dollars to foreign countries that most people have never heard of. They’re offering them $750. They’ve been destroyed. These people have been destroyed.”
But given a chance to keep the cash that Biden had sent the State flowing, Trump has decided to throttle it back. Stein estimates the scaling back will cost the state an extra $200 million in federal dollars to clear debris and take emergency measures to safeguard surviving infrastructure.
To be clear: FEMA is still on the ground and likely will be for months to come. In other parts of the government, federal programs to rebuild often take years to get finished. But instead of the feds picking up the full cost of the clean up, as has been the case after major storms that defy any one state’s capacity to get roads back open and mountains of shattered timber out of leveled neighborhoods, the feds’ share is going to notch down to 90% of the cost. It’s still better than the typical 75% reimbursement rate for other disasters, but Stein had wanted to keep it at a 100% level for at least an extra 180 days. And the request is not without precedent: Hurricanes Katrina, Maria, and Ike were covered at 100% during previous moments of crisis that took a long time to clear out.
The downgrade in federal cover to dig out dropped to the current 90% in March but Stein and the congressional delegation had lobbied to have the Trump team reconsider. Stein asked FEMA to give it another look at the time but was rebuffed. He appealed and lost the ask in April. And in a letter on May 22, FEMA stuck to the position that North Carolina needs to take care of at least 10 cents of every dollar going to clear away the lingering damage.
Zooming out, this decision is of a piece of Trumpism’s ongoing campaign to get Washington out of things that, in the President’s mind, should be someone else’s problem. FEMA in particular has been a source of contempt. On his first trip outside of Washington during his second term, he visited North Carolina and said he was considering eliminating FEMA. He appointed a task force to study how to wind down FEMA’s reach and work has begun. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said last week that “our goal is that states should manage their emergencies and we come in and support them.” She suggested a rebranding of FEMA might help.
That has left Governors chasing exemptions. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was Trump’s top spokeswoman during his first term, successfully asked Trump for a second look after his administration initially rejected an emergency declaration after tornados hit her state, but it was a point of serious frustration. Missouri Gov. Mike Kehoe found himself in limbo after a tornado hit St. Louis, only to get it after Sen. Josh Hawley confronted Noem during a hearing last week. And Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves was stuck twisting after tornadoes arrived in his state.
But banking on state governments to match the resources of the federal government—cash, expertise, largess—is an inefficient use of funds, as states in most cases have to stay in the black and cannot use debt for operations like a from-the-ground-up rebuild. That apparently is not Trump’s worry. But as hurricane season starts in earnest, it may soon be everyone else’s.