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'Nowhere to be found': Disaster workers slam Trump's 'slow-walking' after flood
July 8, 2025 10:45AM ET
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced that President Donald Trump had made disaster assistance available to Texas to assist recovery efforts from last week's deadly flooding — but sources say not much has been done to help.
The president has made clear he wants to phase out FEMA and leave disaster recovery up to individual states, and sources told independent journalist Marisa Kabas that many critics of his moves are seeing their worst fears play out already.
"The deadly Texas flooding isn’t the first natural disaster of this administration — devastating tornadoes ripped through Arkansas, Oklahoma and Missouri this spring — but it’s the first to gain widespread national attention," Kabas wrote on her Handbasket website. "But according to sources within FEMA, 'barely any staff' have been deployed, and the Acting Administrator David Richardson 'is nowhere to be found.'"
"Per one source, 'if this is how they are going to do a major hurricane response, people are f---ed,'" the journalist added.
At least 104 deaths have been reported across six counties, including 56 adults and 28 children who died in Kerr County. Rescue crews continue to search for additional missing people in the flood-ravaged region, but hope is fading for survivors.
“We would have hundreds of people on scene in FEMA jackets registering people for assistance, regional coordination center fully activated, national at least partly activated,” one current FEMA employee told The Handbasket on the condition of anonymity. “Setting up disaster recovery centers with federal partners, we’d have our search and rescue there already. We would have mission assigned other agencies like USACE (U.S/ Army Corp of Engineers) to clear debris and establish power.”
Trump officially activated FEMA on Sunday, but the agency has so far deployed just 86 total staffers to the area, according to figures shared Monday evening with agency staffers, and sources told Kabas that in the past several hundred aid workers would be on the ground by now.
“We are doing a lot less than normal,” the FEMA staffer said.
Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem sent out a memo last month announcing she would have greater control over FEMA operations going forward, saying she must personally approve every contract or grant over $100,000, and Kabas said staffers indicated to her that the Trump official was failing her first major test.
"In Kerr County where 84 people perished in the floods, 28 were children, most of whom were campers at Camp Mystic," Kabas wrote. "It is every family’s worst nightmare; and now the agency typically tasked with assuaging the pain of a disaster are slow-walking the recovery response."
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