Trump administration mulls moving FEMA to Texas
Texas Division of Emergency Management Chief Nim Kidd
AUSTIN, Texas — New reporting from Politico finds the Trump administration is considering moving FEMA from its current home in Washington, D.C., to Texas and tapping the state's top emergency manager, Nim Kidd, to take charge of it.
Tom Frank, deputy climate editor with Politico, joined KVUE to talk more about the report.
Ashley Goudeau: Talk to us about how you found this out, what you learned.
Frank: I found out from sources I have, and they basically [said] FEMA is – the Trump administration is looking at moving the FEMA headquarters out of Washington, D.C., to Texas, and that would be part of a package to get Nim Kidd, the head of the Texas Division of Emergency Management Agency, to run FEMA.
Nim Kid, it's been known publicly since almost the start of the second Trump administration, that he's been a leading candidate to run FEMA. But he's also made it very clear in public writings that he has no interest in leaving Texas, so this would be a way to, first of all, get an agency outside of D.C., which is one goal of this administration, and secondly, get a high, highly qualified, highly experienced person in charge of FEEMA who has good relations with the Trump administration.
Goudeau: This is all coming after the resignation of the current FEMA director, so talk to us about the timing of all of this.
Frank: I think the coincidence is more that – I was talking to a lot of people yesterday and they said this is also what's going on. And also there's a lot of discussion now that the acting FEMA administrator has resigned about who will eventually take over the agency. There's another acting administrator who's taking the place of David Richardson, who resigned yesterday, but they still want a permanent administrator, and that could be a couple of months off.
Goudeau: Obviously there are some FEMA offices in the state of Texas, but moving the entire headquarters, you were told, could create some real challenges.
Frank: Well, the biggest challenge is that you're taking an agency that is part of the Department of Homeland Security, which is based in Washington, D.C., 2,000 miles away, and that's going to create just plain logistical problems in terms of: How do you have a face-to-face meeting with the homeland security secretary, or with the White House or with Congress? So it could be a logistical problem in many ways.
But keep in mind that most FEMA employees do not work out of the headquarters in Washington, D.C. They work basically out of their homes, and they get called up when a disaster happens and told to go to a disaster fairly near their home, so it's a pretty dispersed agency already.
Goudeau: How does this compare with, or the dynamic there, when we were hearing so much about the Trump administration's desire to get rid of the agency altogether?
Frank: Well, they're not going to get rid of the agency. That's been a lot of, and I understand that the president has said it himself, but he's walked that back, that comment back, a number of times. What he's talking about is really weakening and shrinking the agency and shifting a lot of the responsibility that FEMA now has in disaster recovery to states.
And this is where a place like Texas is at a real advantage because it has one of the best emergency management agencies in the country, and it has money to fill the funding gap that would be left if FEMA starts to pull back its own funding.
1 comment:
45-47 is trying to let the States take a larger role in Emergency Management.
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