Trump to disaster victims, past and future: eat shit

I will bet that false claims that Biden was not responding to the flood damage in North Carolina will end up getting more press attention that Donald Trump explicitly blowing off the state will:

Today Governor Josh Stein released the following statement in reaction to news that FEMA had denied North Carolina’s request for an extension of its 100% cost reimbursement for debris removal: 

“The first step to help western North Carolina recover is to clean up all the debris. So far, we have removed more than 12 million cubic yards of debris from roads and water ways, but given the immense scale of the wreckage, we have only scratched the surface. FEMA’s denial of our appeal will cost North Carolina taxpayers potentially hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up out west. The money we have to pay toward debris removal will mean less money towards supporting our small businesses, rebuilding downtown infrastructure, repairing our water and sewer systems, and other critical needs.

And the situation is about to get much worse:

Hurricane season in the United States kicks off this Sunday, June 1st, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is not prepared.

In an internal memo obtained by The Handbasket that was sent on Thursday to Acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson by Stephanie Dobitsch, Associate Administrator for Policy & Program Analysis, Dobitsch outlined the status of “critical functions” at the agency that a working group determined were at “high risk” of not properly functioning because of “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” It offers justifications for certain functions being included in the report, and “corrective action” staff can ostensibly take to fix them. The document paints a picture of an agency in charge of mitigating disasters that’s in the midst of its own.

One slide in the memo, which was also shared with approximately 30 members of FEMA senior leadership, pertains to staffing at Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, a critical high security facility in Virginia. (It contains the nuclear bunker where congressional leaders were stashed on 9/11.) The slide states that “staffing was already at a critical low at the beginning of 2025” and because of departures “the facility is at risk of not being fully mission capable.”

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem visited Mount Weather in early April and posted on X, “This DHS Command Center is crucial to emergency relief and federal coordination in the face of disaster.” But now Acting Administrator Richardson has been made aware that the facility is in astonishing danger.

Another slide in the memo details the high risks facing FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery—what a FEMA staffer told me is “THE disaster response program.” It lists issues with Resource Deployment; Disaster Staffing; Operational Guidance; Planning, Training and Exercising; Interagency Coordination; and Pre-Staging Assets. “Failure to mitigate or eliminate identified risks in critical functions will challenge the Agency’s ability to execute response and initial recovery operations and may disrupt life saving and life sustaining program delivery,” the slide reads.

Bush’s inept response to Katrina, led by a completely unqualified head of FEMA, generated a remarkable amount of negative coverage. Trump’s deliberate and malicious sabotage of federal disaster relief might get a similarly broad and consistent reaction, but I know how I’m betting.