The next hurricane, flood, or wildfire may hit your state and Washington may not be coming.
FEMA Administrator Cameron Hamilton told state officials Tuesday that states must build up their financial reserves and emergency capabilities to handle most disasters on their own, without federal help. Speaking at the National Emergency Management Association’s annual conference in Little Rock, Arkansas, Hamilton gave the most detailed public account yet of the Trump administration’s long-planned shift of disaster responsibility to the states, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by POLITICO.
“Every state must have the appropriate financial reserves” and other abilities “to ensure that recovery efforts can start immediately and not necessarily be held up simply because of the federal [disaster] declaration process,” Hamilton said.
His hope, he added, is a future where the country would not “require as many disasters,” meaning as many presidential authorizations of federal disaster aid, because state capability is “so high and so substantial.”
The remarks build on Hamilton’s Oct. 15 internal memo, reported by POLITICO, which said FEMA will “strengthen state and local capacity.” The administration also plans to launch “national mutual aid,” a system where states help each other recover from storms, floods, and wildfires, and to ask for waivers of federal environmental and historical preservation reviews that Hamilton called “layers of bureaucracy.”
The problem is the starting point. A FEMA report released Friday found that state disaster agencies “are typically understaffed and underfunded” and that many depend heavily on federal funding.
Eric Holdeman, a longtime emergency management official and former director in King County, Washington, wrote on LinkedIn Monday that many states have tiny emergency management offices, slim rainy-day funds, and no capacity to replace federal disaster money “without RAISING TAXES.” He added that cutting federal disaster declarations “will be difficult and its implementation will be impossible,” predicting presidents will ignore the policy when it becomes politically expedient.
President Trump threatened to abolish FEMA early in his current term and has since pushed states to take more financial responsibility. The administration has not publicly announced changes and has continued approving disaster aid, but Hamilton said the shift could begin “in the next six months.”
Hamilton argued states that skip federal aid could start cleanup and repairs “much faster” without submitting a detailed application and waiting weeks or months for a decision. Going forward, he said, FEMA will focus on “reducing risk and building capacity across the nation.”
“Federal dollars should be building greater capability, not creating greater dependency,” Hamilton said.
