Why Kristi Noem hates FEMA

First things first: Mainstream media reports that Donald Trump has “backed away” or “scrapped” plans to destroy the Federal Emergency Management Agency are greatly exaggerated. Trump is just doing what he always does when faced with intense public scrutiny of his unpopular positions: Lying. As usual, he will go right back to doing the bad thing as soon as the news cycle moves on to something else. Right now, the aftermath of the tragic floods in Texas is dominating the news, so Trump will pretend he has no desire to end the federal agency doing the heroic work of helping people in the state recover and regroup. 

The misleading Washington Post headline from Friday, which claimed Trump “moves away” from abolishing FEMA was immediately undercut by the actual reporting, which revealed the White House is using weasel words like “rebranding” and “reorganizing” to conceal that the goal of destroying the agency has not changed. Observing that Trump “has dialed up and down his aversion to the agency, depending on the occasion,” the reporters noted that White House spokespeople continued to insist that the agency is part of “a bloated bureaucracy” and talked about how it’s the job of states to deal with natural disasters, not the federal government. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary of homeland security, admitted out loud to the Post that, under Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, “FEMA, as it is today, will no longer exist.”

Noem isn’t giving up the dream of ending the federal agency. Sending innocent people to wither away in foreign gulags has been Noem’s top priority at DHS, but she’s seems to be nearly as excited about cutting off aid to Americans who are suffering from natural disasters. In February, she declared her intent to “get rid of FEMA the way it exists today.” In March, Politico reported that Noem plans to subject FEMA to the “chopping block.” Those plans haven’t changed. This week, she reiterated that FEMA “fundamentally needs to go away as it exists” and called for it to be “eliminated as it exists today.” The “as it exists today” caveat is put there to give Noem and Trump wiggle room, but make no mistake: Their goal is to destroy the system of disaster relief that Americans depend on, especially as climate change worsens. 

To people outside of the paranoid MAGA conspiracist bubble, Noem’s obsession with destroying FEMA makes no sense. The mission of FEMA is broadly popular, with 8 in 10 Americans agreeing that the federal government should have a “major role” in helping Americans after a disaster. Noem gets this, which is why she pays lip service to the idea that relief will somehow continue without FEMA, even as Trump has made it clear the goal is to “wean” states off financial aid from the federal government. But this is a White House that feels beholden to loony far-right conspiracy theorists, and not ordinary Americans. That’s why they’re embracing fringe ideas, from mass deportations to taking away vaccines, that most people reject. Killing FEMA has been a long-time goal of the crank right, especially those with white nationalist leanings. That’s a big reason Noem and Trump want to end the agency.

The history of conspiracy theories about FEMA goes back to the agency’s founding under President Jimmy Carter in 1979. Far-right groups immediately started circulating rumors that FEMA’s disaster relief mission was a cover story for the true goal: Rounding up white Christians into concentration camps, so the “globalists” (read: Jews, people of color, feminists, queer people) could impose the “New World Order.” As usual with racist conspiracists, the psychological motivation is a combination of sublimated shame and defensiveness, manifesting in a victim complex. In the imagination of right-wingers, the “real” victims are white Christians, and it’s the people who were once subjected to slavery, concentration camps and genocide who are the oppressors.

At the center of the conspiracy theory is this concept of “FEMA camps.” The claim is that FEMA will pretend to be setting up emergency relief stations, but really, they’re laying groundwork for prison camps for white Christians. To bolster this assertion, hoaxsters will use images of barbed wire around military prisons or tents set up for military training events, falsely labeling the installations “FEMA.” The racist subtext is never hard to spot. Militia groups that promote “FEMA camps” conspiracies will often spin yarns about how “urban gangs” will be recruited to round up “patriots” — their code word for white conservative Christians — into camps.

Unsurprisingly, fears of “FEMA camps” tend to flare up at times of heightened racial anxieties. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the George W. Bush administration was accused of racism due to the underwhelming efforts to rescue the largely Black population of flood survivors in New Orleans. Soon, however, conservatives circulated urban legends that it was white people who were the victims. Photos of trailer camps FEMA set up — belatedly — to house survivors were circulated, with false captions claiming these were being set up as concentration camps for “patriots.”

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But really, it was the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 that put the FEMA conspiracy theories into overdrive. Fears that a Black president would round up white people into camps spread rapidly, often aided by opportunistic Republican politicians. The Oath Keepers were one of the militias that formed after Obama’s election, based around a vow that they would not enforce imaginary efforts by the president to round up “patriots” into concentration camps. In 2015, the conspiracy theory grew even more pronounced, when fear about the “Jade Helm 15” Army training exercise tore through social media. Photos of soldiers undertaking standard training procedures in Texas were circulated as “proof” that the FEMA round-ups were about to begin. Shelters built to protect people from tornadoes were brandished as “proof” that the prison camps were coming.

The hysterics were obviously about the upcoming presidential election in 2016 and racist fears that Obama would not leave office without implementing the genocide the fringe right claimed was coming for white Christians. It’s easy to laugh at this stuff. But Trump, with his race baiting and conspiracism, rode this tidal wave of white anxiety right into the White House. He is the avatar of the oppressor who wants to believe he’s the victim. Of course he shares the same loathing of FEMA. In 2024, he even went back to the well, promoting the lie that FEMA was paying undocumented immigrants to vote for Democrats.

Similarly, Noem’s few months in office have been focused entirely on branding DHS primarily as an institution meant to promote white supremacy. That’s mostly communicated through her ICE photo ops, where Noem uses her self-presentation as a cartoonishly exaggerated icon of white femininity as a visual contrast to the darker-skinned immigrants her agents are arresting for real-life concentration camps, which the administration is euphemistically calling “detention centers.”

But attacking FEMA, which is central to white supremacist conspiracy theories, is part of the same schtick. Nor is it all talk. One reason that FEMA aid was slowed in response to the Texas floods is that Noem banned the agency from spending more than $100,000 without her direct sign-off, an obstacle that made it impossible for officials to move quickly. FEMA’s acting director, David Richardson, has been notably absent from the response effort, and as Salon reported Thursday, has not made a public statement since he took office in early May. DHS won’t answer journalists’ questions about that. On Friday, the New York Times reported that Noem allowed thousands of call center workers to be laid off after the flood, ensuring the majority of desperate calls for help from FEMA went unanswered.

This isn’t just about a longstanding right-wing conspiracy theory — though we have seen how much hold that has over the White House in similar situations involving vaccine approval or the fictional “Epstein files.” MAGA’s hatred of FEMA also speaks to the grotesque view of the role of government. The Trumpist model of federal government is that it’s there to streamline corruption for wealthy leaders and inflict pain on people MAGA doesn’t like, especially people of color. They don’t appear to think it’s the government’s job to help ordinary people.

The point of FEMA is that the vast majority of Americans don’t have the independent wealth that allows them to rebuild after a disaster with ease. But in the eyes of Trump and Noem, those who are not wealthy — like many of the victims in Texas — should be on their own if they can’t pay their way out of trouble.