By the Sun Sentinel Editorial Board
WASHINGTON — President Trump signed an executive order Monday to abolish the Department of Defense.
“I say you don’t need the DOD,” Trump said. “You need a good state government.”
No such April Fool’s prank made the news.
But except for that one acronym — DOD — it’s exactly what Trump said in January when he speculated about abolishing FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“I say you don’t need FEMA. You need a good state government,” Trump said after he saw Hurricane Helene’s devastating flooding in North Carolina and the damage from the wildfires in Los Angeles.
Abolishing FEMA is scarcely less senseless than making states individually responsible for the armed forces.
FEMA is irreplaceable
Natural disasters can devastate multiple states, with costs far beyond any state’s ability to pay. Planning for them, as FEMA does when it pre-positions supplies, is a legitimate multi-state function. So is its technical expertise in recovery, which the states could never pay for or efficiently duplicate.
From 1980-2024, there were 27 weather-related disasters each of which cost more than $1 billion, totaling nearly $3 trillion, adjusted for inflation, according to the National Center for Environmental Information.
Climate change will make future numbers worse, notwithstanding the Trump regime having banned the words “climate change” from its own vocabulary and from grant applications.
After Hurricane Ian hit Florida and the Carolinas in 2022, FEMA said it allocated more than $2 billion to Florida alone.
Targeted by Noem, DHS
Trump has also talked about mending FEMA — not ending it. Then he appointed Kristi Noem to run the Department of Homeland Security, which includes FEMA, and she said she intends to eliminate it.
FEMA would be rescued from Noem if two Florida congressmen, Democrat Jared Moskowitz and Republican Byron Donalds, can somehow pass their newly filed bipartisan bill to make it an independent, Cabinet-level agency rather than remain one of 30 components of Homeland Security. But it’s unlikely.
“A bigger problem isn’t where FEMA’s at. I’m more concerned that the president doesn’t know what FEMA does,” said Craig Fugate, a Floridian who ran FEMA for former President Obama and served as Florida’s emergency management chief for former Gov. Jeb Bush.
Mend it, don’t end it
Fugate and Peter Gaynor, who ran FEMA in Trump’s first term, published an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Times citing ways FEMA could be improved and warning against simply abolishing it.
“Spreading the risk and cost of disaster around the country is good, efficient policy that makes the whole country strong,” they wrote.
Failure to “fix the system,” they said, would fate stricken communities to “the kind of downward economic spiral that leads to poverty and displacement, forcing families to relocate, businesses to close and entire neighborhoods to deteriorate,” and to “long-term social instability that weakens the fabric of our nation.”
They conceded that FEMA’s customer service and cost control have to be improved and that states, cities and counties have not taken resilience seriously enough to control recovery costs.
A perverse incentive
A major issue is that few state and local governments properly insure their facilities, then rely on FEMA to repair or replace them. The agency covers only uninsured losses, a perverse incentive to purchase no insurance at all.
The political price of saving FEMA will inevitably shift more costs to the states.
States should get serious about forbidding, rather than replacing, structures in seriously flood-prone locales like some barrier islands in Florida or the banks of North Carolina’s French Broad River.
People who can’t afford to buy flood insurance should not be allowed to build there — then wait for FEMA to bail them out.
Not a good time to cut taxes
As for Florida, Trump’s ignorance and Noem’s hostility toward FEMA should warn against any precipitous state tax cut by the Legislature.
But if it’s to be, House Speaker Daniel Perez has a better approach than Gov. Ron DeSantis does.
Perez’s proposal to cut the statewide sales tax rate from 6% to 5.25%, leaving nearly $5 billion in people’s pockets, would make the nation’s most regressive revenue base somewhat less unfair to everyone who isn’t wealthy. DeSantis’ scheme to abolish property taxes would make it markedly worse.
But FEMA isn’t the only federal function under siege in Washington. Amid such uncertainty, the Legislature would be wise to keep a grip on all of the state’s revenue sources for now.
This opinion piece was originally published by the Sun Sentinel, which is a media partner of The Invading Sea. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Opinion Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Opinion Editor Dan Sweeney, editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman, and Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant. Banner photo: FEMA canvasses Lake County to help residents after Hurricane Milton. (Chief Petty Officer Daniel M. Young/U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa, via Defense Visual Information Distribution Service).
Sign up for The Invading Sea newsletter by visiting here. To support The Invading Sea, click here to make a donation. If you are interested in submitting an opinion piece to The Invading Sea, email Editor Nathan Crabbe at ncrabbe@fau.edu.
