Late in the 2024 campaign cycle, parts of western North Carolina were devastated by Hurricane Helene. Donald Trump accused former President Joe Biden of abandoning the region and mishandling the response to the crisis. The disaster in North Carolina became the jumping point for a myriad of conspiracies and attacks by Republicans against the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FAMA). Trump vowed he would improve disaster responses as president.
Now, four months into his administration North Carolina Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, has become the latest lawmaker from a disaster-ravaged state who has been forced to beg the president to provide much-needed aid.
On Friday, Stein published a video on social media informing the public that the Trump administration had denied the state’s request for FEMA to honor a Biden-era commitment to pay for 100 percent of debris removal costs.
“It’s going to cost a lot, up to $2 billion to fully clean the roads and waterways of western North Carolina,” Stein said. “That’s why I asked the federal government to continue to pay 100 percent of our cleanup costs beyond the first 180 days, just like it did with hurricanes Ike Maria and Katrina.”
“FEMA rejected that request, so I immediately appealed […] last night, we got word from FEMA that it has denied our appeal. That means, quite frankly, it will cost North Carolina taxpayers a lot more to clean up west through North Carolina, and debris removal is just one of the many categories of relief we need,” Steid added, noting that “more money North Carolina has to spend on debris removal and other types of cleanup that the federal government often executes, that’s less money we’ll have for other categories of relief.”
According to Stein, the damages caused by Hurricane Helene exceeded $60 billion, in a state operating off of an annual budget of about $35 billion.
Trump repeatedly blamed FEMA and the Biden administration for mishandling the response to the disaster, and in January said he would consider eliminating the agency while “taking strong action to get North Carolina the support that you need to quickly recover and rebuild.” However, according to a Thursday report from Politico, Trump’s response to the disaster has actually slowed recovery efforts.
It began even before Trump assumed office. The right’s eagerness to spread misinformation about the disaster response in order to hurt the Biden campaign — including claims that FEMA ignored Republican communities, that aid recipients would be forced to repay grants, and that disaster funds were being stolen by undocumented migrants — contributed to on-the-ground hesitancy to accept aid.
Local officials told Politico that at one point, less than 15 percent of the eligible households had applied for disaster aid, and that the numbers were still lagging. Under the Trump administration, the amount of monetary aid provided for the state saw no significant jump, despite lip service to state leaders from the new president. The need for aid also began to clash with the political agenda of the president. In March, the city of Asheville, which was catastrophically affected by the storm, was denied aid and ordered to eliminate a program promoting the hiring of female and minority contractors that the administration accused of violating their anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies.
North Carolina is not the only state struggling to convince the federal government to give it disaster aid. On Wednesday, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) begged Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for assistance in getting the president to approve pending federal disaster declaration requests for the state of Missouri, which was recently ravaged by a series of tornadoes. During that same hearing, Noem reiterated that the administration still planned to dismantle FEMA, but that “there is no formalized, final plan.”
On Friday, the Trump administration finally approved a request for aid from Mississippi — almost two months after it was initially submitted.
Last month, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders was similarly reduced to pleading with the president to reconsider FEMA’s denial of an emergency disaster declaration request as the state recovered from a series of tornadoes in March. The declaration was approved on April 13, nearly two months after the initial ask.
Amid all the delays, families and individuals affected by these disasters remain in limbo. While Trump has a history of leveraging disaster aid against Democratic-leaning states and politicians, the fact that red-state governors and lawmakers are being put in such a difficult position speaks of a deep incompetence of governance rivaled only by the administration’s cruelty.
