Nobody who’s lived through disaster should find Trump’s FEMA remarks funny

President Donald Trump, thankfully, appears to have given up on his awful campaign promise to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency. However, he and the sycophants to whom he’s given control over FEMA persist in trying to incapacitate it, and treat it as a source of political patronage, rather than disaster relief. Two days after Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, railed against a federal judge’s ruling that a plan to fire half of FEMA’s employees was illegal, Trump told an audience in North Carolina that people in the state should only expect FEMA funding if they choose the Republican U.S. Senate candidate, Michael Whatley.

“We spent more than $2 billion in FEMA funding,” Trump said about the money disbursed to North Carolina after Hurricane Helene caused catastrophic flooding in the state in 2024. Speaking of Whatley, the president said, “You know, you’re waiting for some additional funding … and I’m going to get that to you, Michael. Now, if Michael loses, I’m not sending it.”

He said he was “only kidding,” something he often claims after a threat. But in Trump’s value system, anyone seeking help from the government he controls owes him and his party allegiance. He maintains a profound contempt for Democrats, for states run by Democrats and for virtually anyone who doesn’t abjectly genuflect before him. He has already politicized FEMA aid by withholding it from majority-Democratic areas. And just last week, he promised all American adults money — but only if the country collectively votes for Republicans in November.

In addition to that, Trump has said he doesn’t think FEMA should exist. So what motivation does he have to ensure that it operates with fairness, integrity or effectiveness? If Trump valued what FEMA does, then he wouldn’t have made Mullin the leader of its umbrella agency. And if Mullin valued FEMA’s work, then he wouldn’t have argued this week that a DHS leader such as himself would be within his rights to fire half of FEMA’s staff.

Last year, when Kristi Noem was still running DHS, she ignored the objections of FEMA’s leadership and ordered the agency to devise a plan to slash 50% of its staff. The plan was never carried out. Even so, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston of the Northern District of California ruled last week that such a plan would be unlawful and wrote, “Frankly, the FEMA staffing plan number appears as if pulled from thin air.”

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At a FEMA roundtable event on Monday, Mullin responded with the kind of mythical math we might expect from conservatives who don’t value the federal workforce. “We know, being in the private industry like myself, usually in a large corporation, 20% of the people do the majority of the work, 80% of the people do their job,” Mullin said.

He added, “When you’re in a disaster, you need 100% of people doing the majority of the work every single day.”

It’s unclear how the equation works in Mullin’s mind, but somehow 20% of the people doing the majority of the work, 80% of the people doing their job and the need for 100% of people responding to disaster to do the majority of the work every day equals DHS’ right to order the firing of 50% of FEMA’s staff.

FEMA’s staffing was one of the issues raised by the American Federation of Government Employees and other labor groups in a lawsuit pushing back against Trump’s attempt to slash the federal workforce. Mullin called it “laughable” that a federal judge would have a say in staffing issues and, among other things, said to Illston, “Stay in your lane, deal with law.”

She did. The judge said that DHS (still under Noem’s leadership) had violated the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, signed into law in 2006 by George W. Bush, the president who infamously botched the federal response to Hurricane Katrina. The law followed complaints from the New Orleans community — including The Times-Picayune editorial board I served on — that taking away FEMA’s independence and making it subservient to DHS had been a bad idea. And Illston found that Noem demanding that FEMA slash its staff in half violated Congress’ will to protect FEMA from DHS’ political interference.

As bad as Bush was during Hurricane Katrina, and he was bad, I can’t imagine him telling those of us who were displaced from New Orleans, or who had our homes damaged or destroyed, that he would only support more money from FEMA if we voted GOP. And if he had been so crass as to say such a thing, I don’t know anyone who would have received such as a statement as “only kidding.”

It should be taken as a truism that people waiting for FEMA assistance are not in a kidding mood.

In 2025 alone, there were 23 disasters in the United States that caused at least $1 billion in damage, and the total of those 23 disasters was $115 billion. According to the Disaster Dollar Database, managed by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in the 10 years between June 2016 and May 2026, FEMA responded to 552 disasters by disbursing $66.9 billion to all 50 states. Disasters are too frequent, too costly and too widespread for the president to play partisan games with aid, and for those same reasons Mullin ought not be arguing for the right to chop FEMA’s staff in half.

For an editorial timed to the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we on the Picayune’s editorial board acknowledged some of the positive changes we had seen in the federal government. We wrote: “Political appointees with little or no disaster experience, for example, no longer lead FEMA.”

Now they just lead the agency that controls FEMA. And now the president doesn’t just fail to get people the help they need. He refuses.

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