States that are disaster-prone and traditionally reliant on the feds for help will need to pinch their pennies and deal with their own emergencies in the future, the head of FEMA said Tuesday at a conference in Little Rock, according to a report from the national news outlet Politico.
Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Cameron Hamilton gave more details about the Donald Trump administration’s plans to have states fend for themselves in the aftermath of floods, tornadoes and other emergencies.
Politico reporter Thomas Frank obtained a recording of Hamilton’s remarks, made at the National Emergency Management Association’s annual conference. You can read his story here, no paywall.
Frank reports that “the Trump administration plans to launch ‘national mutual aid, whereby states help each other recover from damaging storms, floods, wildfires and other events, Hamilton told state emergency management leaders.”
Trump has spoken for years about his DOGE-related plan to shut down FEMA and other longstanding federal agencies. On Tuesday, Hamilton reportedly made his argument using language similar to how conservatives speak about social safety net benefits for poor people, essentially saying that federal assistance is creating dependency among states that should pull their own selves up by the bootstraps.
This dependency argument is a newfangled conservative way to think about the federal government, but one Arkansas Republican leaders have already found not particularly to their liking – at least not when we’re the ones who need the cash. In 2025, Gov. Sarah Sanders and the entirety of the state’s congressional delegation sent a letter to Trump asking him to reconsider after he denied Sanders’ request for a major disaster declaration following a double whammy of fatal storms.