Chaos in the White House is preventing federal disaster relief from reaching its recipients, sparking fears that the government may face more delays and lapses during the upcoming hurricane season.
The Trump administration issued millions of dollars in relief to Virginia in early April after the state was battered by severe winter storms, but in doing so, the West Wing failed to alert a key player responsible for actually distributing the relief: the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Unidentified FEMA officials told CNN Wednesday that they only knew of the order thanks to newspaper headlines. Direct and official communication from the White House, according to the sources, did not reach FEMA for another four days. That left Old Dominion communities waiting an extra week for direly needed assistance.
Officials at FEMA claim that this is just one instance in a troubling pattern of miscommunication between the disaster relief agency and the Trump administration.
Typically, FEMA advises the White House as to which sites around the nation require federal assistance. That’s been true for practically every other administration, as well as Donald Trump’s first term. But since the MAGA leader has returned to the Oval Office, that relationship has been flipped.
“This is more than just who gets to tell who,” one longtime FEMA official told CNN. “There are regulatory timelines, especially for individual assistance, that are in play, and these delays do affect the delivery of assistance. It is very frustrating to the state and local partners because they think we should be doing things, but without the paperwork we cannot execute on the declaration.”
A similar slipup happened in early May, when the Trump administration failed to notify FEMA officials that it had reversed course on Arkansas’s aid request, approving distribution to the state. That stalled the process for an additional five days.
“A five-day lag is unheard of, as it prevents FEMA from fulfilling its statutory roles,” another longtime FEMA official told CNN. “It feels like a way to make it look like FEMA is being slow when we’re not yet authorized to act.”
Exactly who receives FEMA aid—and when they receive it—is no longer a guarantee under Trump’s direction.
In April, FEMA rejected North Carolina’s application for an emergency aid extension as the state grappled with recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Helene, a Category 4 storm that killed 250 people in September. It was the deadliest hurricane in state history.
Even Trump’s voting base has been left in the lurch. Months into his presidency, residents of devastated communities are still begging the president to send relief.
Since Helene, Trump and his allies have spread unfounded conspiracies that the lead response agency had run out of money and that the Biden administration had diverted funds from FEMA to assist undocumented immigrants enter the country. (FEMA administrators have fervently and repeatedly denied this.) Conservatives, at the time of the storm, claimed that working with the Biden White House to expedite disaster relief “seemed political” and even conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes were a government manipulation.
Days after his inauguration, Trump pitched that it would be better to do away with FEMA altogether, in favor of handing the money directly to the states, though that plan never seemed to gain traction.
Since then, Trump has actively worked to dismantle the agency. The administration has blocked states across the nation, including California and Michigan, from accessing preapproved relief. A coalition of Democratic-led states have sued the federal government, claiming that “hundreds of millions of dollars in FEMA grants” are still inaccessible.
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