Trump officials discuss making it much harder to qualify for federal disaster assistance, starting this hurricane season

Trump emergency management officials are discussing reforms that would make it much harder for communities to qualify for federal disaster assistance, honoring President Donald Trump’s executive order to shift more responsibility for disaster response and recovery to states rather than the federal government.

Trump emergency management officials are discussing reforms that would make it much harder for communities to qualify for federal disaster assistance, honoring President Donald Trump’s executive order to shift more responsibility for disaster response and recovery to states rather than the federal government. A memo from acting FEMA administrator Cameron Hamilton, a Trump appointee, obtained by CNN, outlines a long list of recommendations for Trump to follow that could drastically reduce the number of emergency declarations the president approves and the amount of federal assistance doled out to cities and states hit by natural disasters. Such a change ahead of what are typically the worst months for natural disasters across the US could pose significant problems for states that are unprepared to foot the bill and for the millions of Americans impacted by disasters every year. Most notably, the memo, sent to an official with the White House Office of Management and Budget, proposes dramatically raising the threshold for states to qualify for public assistance, effectively quadrupling the amount of damage a community must suffer in order to receive federal aid. The proposal also recommends reducing the share of recovery costs the federal government will pay, limiting the types of facilities eligible for assistance and denying all major disaster declarations for snowstorms. “The primary purpose of this memorandum is to identify short-term actions to rebalance FEMA’s role in disasters before the start of the 2025 hurricane season,” Hamilton writes in the memo, which is part of the administration’s ongoing effort to dramatically shrink the disaster relief agency’s footprint and cut federal costs for disasters.