FEMA’s Greatest Disasters – DHS Secretary Kristi Noem or Nature’s Fullest Wrath

Central Texas July Fires

California Fires

FEMA Boss, DHS Secretary Noem

                                                                                   

FEMA’s Greatest Disasters – DHS Secretary Kristi Noem or Nature’s Fullest Wrath?

They call them the once-in-100-years/500-years/1000-years, etc. disasters, but in the last few years this killer/billion-dollar-plus natural disasters phenomenon seems to occur twice a month on average. As of January 10th, before the DOGE/Trump budget cuts, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) has updated its 2024 billion-dollar disaster analysis. In 2024, there were 27 individual weather and climate disasters with at least $1 billion in damages, trailing only the record-setting 28 events analyzed in 2023. Even as the words “climate change” and related descriptive terms are now formally purged from federal websites and printed materials, as the Big Beautiful Bill cut the very successful job-creating alternative energy infrastructure and reemphasized the use of fossil fuels, the Texas floods took no fewer than 135 lives.

And yet, everything “Trump” is all about serving his ego and the wealthiest in his crony-pack. As the Congressional Budget Office (July 21st) released is reassessment on the fiscal impact of the now-passed Big Beautiful Bill, which dropped the tax rate (which overwhelmingly favored the mega-rich and giant US corporations over everyone else), and slashed over a trillion dollars off of Medicaid, SNAP and other social programs serving the lower levels of the US economy (leaving those programs to underfunded states to resurrect), the CBO reported a $3.1 trillion hit to our already bloated deficit and at least ten million people losing medical coverage. This bill created the greatest upward shift of wealth to the economic top, the greatest reduction of benefits to the lowest earners… further exacerbated by a further $9 billion cut to federal programs. And FEMA is still on the chopping block.

Weather disasters can no longer be predicted with the former accuracy, and states are now left to fend mostly for themselves as climate change disasters accelerate. Trump is reopening coal mines as the global demand for coal is plunging, commanding oil companies to “drill, baby, drill” as that resource is now a global pariah and telling Detroit to return to focusing on gasoline and diesel powered trucks and cars as China takes over the global EV market, selling four vehicles in the international marketplace for every US-made car or truck sold there. Job-killing, climate change disaster accelerants. Just looking at the incredible mediocracy (I’m being polite) of the leadership at the DHS (which controls FEMA), you know that self-destruction is the fate Trump has commanded for FEMA.

Infamous former South Dakota Governor Noem displayed her ignorance of the major constitutional parameters around her job – her legendary misstatement of the principle of habeas corpus while testifying before a congressional committee went viral fast – and developed more of a reputation as a puppy murderer and “whatever Trump wants” sycophant. Her easily disproven fabrications of how effective her response to the Texas floods placed her in a class of super-damage-enhancers and far from any solution as to how the federal government was going to handle the rising tide (literally) of natural disasters… just as FEMA was in the process of being shut down (transferring disaster relief to underfunded states).

Even as Noem and Trump claimed an efficient and full FEMA response to the Texas floods, facts suggested otherwise. A slow and inadequate Noem failure timely to approve a very small expenditure to launch rescue swift-swift boats cost lives. The dearth of FEMA operatives on the ground left virtually the entire rescue and recovery effort to Texas. The FEMA response was so bad and demoralizing to hapless FEMA officials unable to perform what had at once been routine, that its staff understood that the Trump administration just did not care: “The head of FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue branch, which runs a network of teams stationed across the country that can swiftly respond to natural disasters, resigned on Monday [7/21].

“Ken Pagurek’s departure comes less than three weeks after a delayed FEMA response to catastrophic flooding in central Texas caused by bureaucratic hurdles put in place by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the disaster response agency… Pagurek told colleagues at FEMA that the delay was the tipping point that led to his voluntary departure after months of frustration with the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency, according to two sources familiar with his thinking. It took more than 72 hours after the flooding for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to authorize the deployment of FEMA’s search and rescue network.

“After spending more than a decade with FEMA’s urban search and rescue system, including about a year as its chief, Pagurek said in his resignation letter, obtained by CNN, that he was returning to the Philadelphia Fire Department and did not mention the Texas flooding.” CNN, July 21st. David Graham, writing for the July 15th The Atlantic, describes the immutable path to defund and de-staff most of FEMA, cutting essential federal programs to fund those tax cuts: “One thing that’s helpful in a crisis is steady leadership. Unfortunately, disaster-stricken Americans are stuck with Kristi Noem instead.

“Noem, the secretary of homeland security, was unequivocal at a March Cabinet meeting: ‘We are eliminating FEMA.’ (She was echoing President Donald Trump, who’d suggested getting rid of the agency.) This weekend [mid-July], when asked point-blank whether that was still the plan, she had a different claim. ‘No, I think the president recognizes that FEMA should not exist the way that it always has been,’ she said. ‘It needs to be redeployed in a new way.’

“Noem is right that FEMA’s current deployment seems to not be working all that well. But no matter how officials describe their plans, the Trump administration is dismantling the federal government’s ability to prepare for, warn about, and help Americans recover from disasters… Trump’s attacks on FEMA have never been particularly coherent: He attacked the agency last year for doing too little after Hurricane Helene, and then said he wanted it to do less. But the basic premise that FEMA needs rethinking is not unreasonable, nor is it partisan. Professional emergency managers, including top FEMA leaders who have served under both parties, have suggested that states should do more to handle smaller disasters, making the federal government more of a coordinator and funder for major-disaster relief. (FEMA is also somewhat awkwardly wedged in the Department of Homeland Security, which the Trump administration narrowly views as a border-and-immigration authority, more or less.)

“But moving to a more state-reliant paradigm would take real investment in federal policy beyond just FEMA—both financial and administrative, neither of which Trump is interested in making… Such a shift would require research that readies the country for changes in climate and increases in extreme weather. Instead, the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate research into climate change, which the president has described as a ‘hoax.’”

Succumbing to pressure from Texas, weeks after the devastation, Trump finally ordered FEMA aid to eight states on July 23rd, notably excluding California. No single individual in history has created more damage and disruption to this nation than Donald Trump, and his clown car of cabinet and subcabinet leadership seems to be the equivalent using gasoline to extinguish raging fires.

I’m Peter Dekom, and what happens when we finally realize the damage to our people and our lands Trump has promulgated… and the resultant costs that are a vast multiple of what they would have been had we been willing to face reality at the appropriate moment?