The Consequences of One of Project 2025's Most Surprising Attacks Are Becoming Clear

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Over the past week, the central United States has been walloped. It started out with thunderstorms. Then, tornadoes. Pictures tried to convey the scale of what happened, but honestly? When storms travel hundreds of miles—from St. Louis, Missouri, to London , Kentucky, it's hard to fit all that destruction into a single frame.

What happens now seems obvious, right? The aid rolls in. It is, or is starting to. But the question is how much the feds will kick in.

According to Tom Frank, who reports on disaster relief for E&E News, this has changed in the past few months. If it were business as usual with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, states government could count reliably on the federal government to pay 75 percent at least of the cost of cleaning up debris, repairing public facilities, and so forth. But now, the federal government has started blurring its own guidelines for sending aid and is becoming less reliable during these times of crisis.

On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Tom Frank about how the Trump administration's disaster management system has become a disaster itself. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Last year, when Hurricane Helene hit the Southeast, you did some reporting that warned about how a second Trump administration could handle disaster response differently. Why did you want to write this article?

Tom Frank: It's an issue that was getting no attention. There was no focus in any of the presidential debates, press conferences, or rallies on climate change, about disasters. And if you read Project 2025, there were some major government plans to change how the federal responded to disasters.

The plan is to shift the burden of moderate and minor disasters to states. FEMA would still respond to the Hurricane Helenes, the Los Angeles wildfires, but lesser storms or events would be really up to the states to do all the logistics and pay the funds for the repairs.

Ken Cuccinelli was the author of the section that included FEMA, and really spoke pretty openly about shrinking FEMA. You quote him as saying, “People think of FEMA as a first responder. It's not a first responder,” which struck me, because yeah, I do think of FEMA as the first responder, but I thought that was the whole point. It's the Federal Emergency Management Agency. It manages emergencies.

FEMA, under federal law, responds when an event is beyond the capacity of a state to respond. The idea that FEMA has been responding to too many small disasters has been around for a long time, going back at least to the Obama administration. And there is a consensus in the emergency management community that FEMA is overextended and that it really isn't necessary for FEMA to, say, give Vermont a million dollars to clean up after a snowstorm, because a state should be able to afford these small disasters.

The question then is: Where do you draw the line? How high do you raise the threshold for FEMA involvement? The concept of what the Trump administration is doing is actually quite reasonable. The question really is the transition. I don't think states are anywhere near prepared to take over what FEMA used to do.

I will say that FEMA plays a unique role: They're locally managed and federally supported. FEMA doesn't run the disaster recovery, it funds it. It is, to some extent, a check-writing agency. Free money is another way to look at it. And the bipartisan support for FEMA is really striking. Some of the strongest supporters of FEMA are senators from Louisiana, which is probably the most important state on FEMA. Senators from Florida and Texas and a lot of Republican states support it because FEMA has given trillions of dollars over the years.

Can you walk me through a disaster or aid decision that got some attention over the last couple of months?

The most glaring example wais in Arkansas following tornadoes earlier this year . The governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, was President Trump's White House press secretary in his first term. There, the hurricane's disaster wasn't catastrophic. The dollar number was something like $8 million or $9 million worth of damage, and that was enough damage to meet the threshold for Arkansas. FEMA will usually make a recommendation to the White House, and finally it gets the president's desk. In this case, what was unusual is that the president rejected the request. The denial got an enormous amount of attention, much more than I've ever seen any denial get.

Part of why I wanted to talk to you is that you have this interesting take on FEMA, which is that maybe the states have become too liaison on federal assistance for small-scale natural disasters. It seems to be something that folks actually agree on, right?

That is true. FEMA is basically an insurance policy for states with no premium, and because there's no premium, there's minimal incentive for states to do the things that they could do to reduce damage from future disasters by elevating homes and flood zones and things like that.