The former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency has a startling proposal after a report found the agency is “not ready” for hurricane season.
Michael Brown, who led FEMA during Hurricane Katrina, says that the agency should be completely independent from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—and report directly to President Donald Trump.
“Get FEMA out of Homeland Security—that’s just a bureaucracy on top of a bureaucracy,” Brown said on NewsNation. “Make the FEMA administrator ... like it has always been, directly reportable to the president of the United States.”
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Trump has called the agency a “disaster” and suggested it might “go away” entirely. Trump fired the FEMA director, Cameron Hamilton, on Friday after he spoke out about Trump’s plan to shutter the agency.
Brown admitted during the Friday interview that he didn’t have much hope for the future of FEMA, an agency that responded to over 100 disasters in 2023 and provided over $1.3 billion to survivors, with communities and states receiving nearly $12 billion to rebuild infrastructure.
“It’s Washington, D.C.,” he joked.
Instead of providing federal support, Trump has claimed that states will need to take care of hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires on their own.
“I say you don’t need FEMA, you need a good state government,” Trump said while visiting the Los Angeles fires in January. “FEMA is a very expensive, in my opinion, mostly failed situation.”
In March, Trump signed an executive order forcing state and local governments to “play a more active and significant role” in preparing for disasters.
Brown echoed Trump’s remarks, saying states and municipalities should shoulder more disaster-related costs.
“We have actually weakened state and local governments by throwing so much money at them, and then they use that money to offset budget shortfalls they have,” he said. “Somebody just needs to step up and settle down the chaos.”
