Under President Donald Trump, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has turned down a request from a storm-ravaged state that narrowly voted for him three times.
Western North Carolina saw massive devastation last year from Hurricane Helene, which killed over 100 people and left the city of Asheville, along with a number of small communities in the Appalachian Mountains, struggling to pick up the pieces after flooding in areas that had hardly ever seen floods before. At the time, Trump supporters spread baseless conspiracy theories that the federal government was ignoring communities there, or only giving aid to Democratic areas, and Trump himself vowed to improve emergency management.
According to Rolling Stone, however, Trump's administration is now denying an extension of a commitment to pay the full amount for a vital portion of the recovery process.
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"Four months into his administration North Carolina Governor Josh Stein, a Democrat, has become the latest lawmaker from a disaster-ravaged state who has been forced to beg the president to provide much-needed aid," said the report. "On Friday, Stein published a video on social media informing the public that the Trump administration had denied the state’s request for FEMA to honor a Biden-era commitment to pay for 100 percent of debris removal costs."
FEMA is still expected to pay for 90 percent of the debris removal, which the agency argues is already larger than the standard 75 percent commitment — but this still falls short of what the agency has done in similar disasters, Stein argued.
“It’s going to cost a lot, up to $2 billion to fully clean the roads and waterways of western North Carolina,” said Stein in the video. “That’s why I asked the federal government to continue to pay 100 percent of our cleanup costs beyond the first 180 days, just like it did with hurricanes Ike, Maria, and Katrina.”
With Trump rejecting the state's request, he continued, "It will cost North Carolina taxpayers a lot more to clean up west through North Carolina, and debris removal is just one of the many categories of relief we need."
Since taking unified control of government, Republicans have increasingly toyed with the idea of making political demands of areas that require disaster relief. After wildfires destroyed several neighborhoods in Los Angeles months ago, for instance, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) repeatedly suggested Congress should impose new policy changes in California as a condition of receiving aid to rebuild.