Texas’ six-month hurricane season just hit the halfway point, and elected officials across the state say they’re bracing themselves for delayed responses, reduced funding, and an increased strain on local resources as President Donald Trump threatens to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
U.S. Congressman Al Green, D-Houston, joined the chorus last week of representatives condemning the president’s actions and calling on state officials like Gov. Greg Abbott to do more than approve “Band-Aid bills” while Texas stands to lose $74 million because of Trump’s cuts.
Trump has said he’ll “phase out” FEMA after the 2025 hurricane season ends in November. “We want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level,” the president said in June.
But the cuts have already begun. The U.S. government announced in April it had eliminated FEMA’s $4.6 billion Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program in the middle of a distribution cycle.
Before adjourning a second special session this month, Texas lawmakers approved, in response to the July 4 Kerr County floods, a $368 million one-time appropriation from the state’s Rainy Day Fund for disaster relief, with $50 million to help local governments purchase flood warning sirens and rain gauges and $28 million for flood monitoring grants. Green said last week that’s not enough.
“The state of Texas is not known to spend federal dollars wisely, and I’m not sure the state of Texas is prepared to handle the amount of dollars necessary if FEMA is eliminated in its entirety,” the congressman said on a press call last week. “I regret that Texas is not doing more to insist on FEMA being managed as it has been. It’s not a perfect organization but I’ve been in Congress long enough to see how FEMA has benefited my constituents.”
“Unfortunately, it seems that if Trump can aggressively dismantle an agency, he will,” Green added. “While this is not a good time for the most vulnerable in Texas, it is a great time for us to unite, band together, and fight to protect our communities.”
In August, Houston Controller Chris Hollins spoke at a virtual press briefing with finance chiefs from New Mexico, Vermont, and Minnesota to discuss the long-term repercussions that FEMA cuts could have on the economic health and safety of the country.
Harris County’s population is larger than 26 individual states, so the impact of a disaster is widespread, Hollins said.
“Houstonians deal with and live the consequences of these disasters on a regular basis,” he said. “This is not theoretical for us. There is significant human and economic pain, families who are displaced, small businesses shuttered, city and county budgets that are spread thin, and billions and billions of dollars of damage that we’re still paying for.”
The federal government is turning disaster relief into a political game, the controller added. “These disasters, when they come, don’t check if you’re rich or poor, Black or white, Republican or Democrat,” he said. “The floodwaters do not stop at the city line because the precinct voted blue or red. When Trump Republicans, when MAGA, go after these programs like FEMA, when they kneecap HUD’s disaster recovery work, they don’t punish a city. They punish human beings.”
Half of Houstonians can’t afford an unexpected $400 expense, Hollins added, so the impact of a storm and rising insurance premiums can be devastating, forcing people to go into debt or rebuild alone. The homes of some residents in north Houston have still not been repaired after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, he said.
“They slashed FEMA, hollowed out staffing, they tried to kill proven resilience programs and wrapped it all in red tape that slowed the response down,” Hollins said. “That can be life or death for Houstonians and for Texans. That’s not fiscal discipline. It’s not responsibility. It’s recklessness, it’s partisan sabotage, and it’s a lack of public safety.”
Harris County commissioners and Houston City Council members have also expressed concern that, while FEMA hasn’t traditionally swept in like a white knight and solved everyone’s problems in the wake of a disaster, the agency is relied upon for much-needed funding that state and local governments don’t have.
Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis said last month that Trump and Abbott have attacked Harris County, not just by ignoring its needs but by “actively working to undermine our ability to serve the people who need us most.”
“Donald Trump has slashed, and continues to slash, federal safety net programs, even as more families have fallen into poverty,” Ellis said. “Greg Abbott has imposed state revenue caps that choke local budgets — part of a broader war on local governments and working people.”
At last week’s press briefing, Green was joined by Bexar County Commissioner Tommy Calvert and Houston-based former FEMA Public Affairs Director Rafael Lemaitre to address how federal budget cuts are “sabotaging the safety” of Texans.
Calvert said that 13 people in his San Antonio-area precinct died during flash flooding in June. The legislature had an opportunity to earmark funds to repair drainage and coordinate emergency systems, but didn’t do it, he said.
“They only allocated $50 million out of the Rainy Day Fund for a state that is full of rainy days,” Calvert said. “Texas has more money in its Rainy Day Fund than almost every state in the United States combined. Whether it was Winter Storm Uri, the February freeze that we had in 2021, or a number of emergencies that are truly rainy days for communities, we’ve seen the state benefit the bankers holding onto that money a lot more than Main Street getting that money, and that is shameful.”
Thousands of lives would be saved if state and federal governments would fund “microgrids” so hospitals and assisted living homes would be self-sustaining in a power outage, Calvert said.
“When you start seeing microgrids funded in local communities, that’s when you’re cooking with grease,” he said. “Right now we’re not cooking with grease for a state that has a lot of emergencies.”
“It is an emergency right now that the people in Harris County and the Houston area do not have a congressperson should a hurricane or flooding happen in their area,” Calvert said. “The fact that the governor hasn’t moved that election faster after the death of Congressman Turner is a shame, and it’s going to matter if we have an emergency.”
Rafael Lemaitre worked as a spokesman for FEMA during the Obama administration and said last week that the agency’s importance has increased as climate change has caused natural disasters to become more frequent and more severe.
Following his tenure with FEMA, Lemaitre moved to Houston and worked as a senior adviser to County Judge Lina Hidalgo. His family received individual FEMA assistance as disaster survivors of the 2024 derecho, he said, noting that he’s dealt with the federal agency on multiple levels.
Lemaitre said there’s a dangerous narrative being advanced by Trump that FEMA is not prepared to handle disasters; that it’s the role of state governments.
“That simply isn’t how disaster management operates,” he said. “During Democratic administrations, FEMA has always had a supporting role in helping states and governors in disaster response when their capacity is exceeded, which happens quite often. Even on what we call blue-sky days, FEMA has a vital role in supporting states and local communities.”
The agency used to operate the Center for Domestic Preparedness and the National Fire Academy, where first responders trained for free, learning to respond to mass casualty incidents and biological attacks, among other things.
“This was gutted and closed down at the beginning of the Trump administration, forcing 7,000 first responders from across the country to miss out on the vital training that makes our communities more resilient,” Lemaitre said.
“I fear that we’re on a course to painfully relearn the lessons of Hurricane Katrina,” he added. “Folks on this call who saw that disaster unravel in real time on television probably remember that it was a bad time for emergency management. FEMA was underfunded. It wasn’t a respected agency. And we saw the result of that. We saw a bungled response to a major disaster.”
Green said the matter of disaster response and recovery ought to be a bipartisan issue.
“We have a president who seems to believe that Congress is subordinate to him and that he is a superior personality,” he said. “We’re trying to restore funding, but to do that, you have to have it in a bill that my Republican colleagues need to support. All of these things are very difficult when you don’t have control of the House and don’t have control of the Senate.”
“Democratic members of Congress will work to maintain FEMA, strengthen FEMA, and get more dollars into states when these events arrive,” Green added. “We cannot eliminate the one agency that has the experience and the expertise to manage a disaster.”
