FEMA Declares FEMA a Federal Emergency
Internal document suggests FEMA could use an extension on its hurricane-season assignment, please
May 16: Internal FEMA doc says it’s “not ready” for hurricane season … Massive Trump-agenda bill may be too big to fit through the House … Supreme Court issues rare good ruling making it easier to prove excessive police force … Georgia law keeps brain-dead woman on life support so internal parasite can feed off her body’s nutrients …
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Hurricane season officially starts in two weeks, on June 1, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is ready.
CNN reports, and ABC confirms, that an internal FEMA document says Pres. Donald Trump’s staff cuts and redorganization have crippled the agency and left it unprepared for hurricane season. Of course, putting it that clearly would be a real disaster, so…
“As FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint,” says the document, referring to Trump’s plan to cut off FEMA’s feet and everything above its feet, “the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood. Thus FEMA is not ready.”
One reason the intent is not well understood is that the intent is very fucking understood. Trump and Homeland (sic) Security Secretary Kristi Noem have said they want to destroy FEMA like a Category 5 hurricane for which FEMA is not prepared, which Trump and Noem cannot do because FEMA’s not theirs.
The document highlighted the core contradiction inherent at the eye of FEMA’s Schrödinger's hurricane at the moment: “[The] intent cannot be wind down and be ready to support nation in a major response."
Making this unnatural disaster worse, FEMA has no one to turn to for help. The Republican-controlled Congress isn’t checking or balancing. And there is no Federal FEMA Emergency Management Agency (FFEMAEMA) to help FEMA respond to historic disasters such as Trump’s election.
Here are just some of the damage assessments that will impair FEMA’s ability to do damage assessments, brace people for disasters, and help them bounce back afterward:
Reduced training for state and local emergency managers.
Reduced briefings for state and local emergency managers on current FEMA capabilities.
About 30% of FEMA’s 20,000 staff are no longer staff.
Most hurricane prep has "been derailed this year due to other activities like [de-]staffing and [killing] contracts."
The administration is considering dramatically raising the threshold of death and destruction required for FEMA to help states.
FEMA’s third acting administrator this year has one (1) week of disaster-management experience, which began last week when he was made acting FEMA administrator.
The National Hurricane Conference last month in New Orleans, LA — because obvi — canceled several sessions to have been led by FEMA because FEMA cut back on travel. Including the conference’s director. One canceled session was about making evacuation decisions during hurricanes. Gulp.
National Emergency Management Association President Lynn Budd, whose group represents state emergency managers, said states didn’t get enough time to make up for the FEMA cuts. In other words, the federal preparing agency didn’t give state preparers enough time to prepare for the lack of preparing.
The Dept. of Homeland Security said CNN’s reporting was “grossly out of context,” but didn’t explain what context would make it less gross that one FEMA operational leader told CNN, “What Americans will see is a federal government that is either absent completely or, if present, sputtering to deliver response and recovery resources.” I mean, that’s gross.
The document also confirms the plan “to reduce the footprint of FEMA. Do it in the logical way, controlled burn, to ensure states have burden and FEMA not taken advantage of.” (Obviously, “controlled burn” is a nice shoutout to wildfire season. Well played, FEMA document!)
As for FEMA not being “taken advantage of” by, um, America’s united states, this is the same GOP paranoia that’s also cracking down on feeding and caring for poor people in the GOP budget. So, in that spirit, maybe FEMA should implement work requirements for states, so we don’t find out that Arkansas is getting sweet, sweet extra sandbag money while sitting home all day playing Fortnite.
Here is just a partial glimpse at the neural storm that formed off the coast of acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson’s brain last week and then gathered heat and stupidity to develop into a full-blown natural disaster that barreled from his face into FEMA’s staff on the first day of him managing the disaster that is the disaster-management agency, inspiring the team with his introductory remarks:
“Don't get in my way if you're those 20% of the people … I know all the tricks. …Obfuscation. Delay. Undermining. If you're one of those 20% of the people and you think those tactics and techniques are going to help you, they will not because I will run right over you. … I am as bent on achieving the president's intent as I was on making sure that I did my duty when I took my Marines to Iraq."
Richardson added that casual Fridays are still a go. And you thought Michael Scott was bad!
(Just for the record, as someone who’s managed people in a previous life, if TWENTY PERCENT of Richardson’s previous teams have been “those” people, that’s not a 20% problem, that’s a Richardson-percent problem.)
CBS obtained a recording of Richardson’s how’dja do, and quoted him thusly after he assumed the title of Senior Official Performing the Duties of FEMA Administrator:
"I can't recall the full title, but essentially, I'm acting. I don't need the full title. All I need is the authority from the president to put me in here as some degree of acting and I will make sure that his intent gets completed. I don't stop at yield signs."
(Failing to stop at a yield sign when it’s required to let right-of-way vehicles pass is a crime and rude as fuck and don’t try that shit in Jersey, Mr. Whatever Your Full Title Is.)
A FEMA spokesperson said that “FEMA is fully activated in preparation for Hurricane Season,” which sounds about as reassuring as when my mother asked me whether I was ready for school and I said I was fully activated in preparation for school while looking for my sneakers, unfinished homework, clean underwear, and one third of my disaster-response team.
Seventeen named tropical storms are forecast this year by remaining forecasters, including nine hurricanes, none of which will arrive with fruity garnish or tiny umbrellas.
NEW PROCEDURES Remember TFN told you last month about Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R-AR) calling Trump a FEMAucking liar? Kinda?
Trump had rejected Sanders’s request for FEMA aid after a batch of storms and tornadoes in March, with FEMA telling her “federal assistance is not necessary.”
Sanders appealed with a 17-page letter saying that, actually, federal assistance was “essential,” which weirdly didn’t work, despite Trump’s well-known fondness for reading 17 whole fucking pages.
Knowing Trump from her days as his press secretary, Sanders called him. And on Tuesday, Trump changed his mind and FEMA authorized federal aid.
Sanders, of course, then kissed his ass, the last formal step in the new FEMA process. So, you storm-belt governors might wanna write down the new procedure: File request, get denied, file appeal, get ignored, kiss ass over phone, get funds approved two months after disaster, kiss ass in press release, bury the dead.
REMINDER For the low, low price of still having public libraries, you can get a copy of Trump’s prophetic bestseller…
Trump’s Big, Beautiful Bill Breaking Badly
The Republican-controlled House Budget Committee today is supposed to be combining all the committee legislation into one “big, beautiful bill” enacting Pres. Donald Trump’s demented domestic agenda and do for America what tariffs have done for world trade. But it’s not clear the committee will actually pass the bill, which House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) wants the full House passing next week.
At least 3-½ GOP factions are publicly balking:
Republicans who publicly poop on the Green New Deal but would very much like to use it as fertilizer for jobs and industry and lower energy costs in their states.
California/New Jersey/New York Republicans who are okay with taking food and medical care from poor people but when it comes to preventing rich people from deducting more than $30,000 in state and local taxes on their federal filing, well, that’s where they draw the fucking line, Mister, and good DAY to you, sir.
Pure, unalloyed Republicans who hate government and want it to go away and object to the bill not doing that.
(I’m rounding up.) Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who claims he supports Medicaid but is fine with paper/work requirements that create new government bureaucratic hurdles to weed out people who actually should qualify for Medicaid.
In fact, the GOP already appears to have lost two three votes just in the Budget Committee.
And another committee member, Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-WI), said he wasn’t sure about voting for the bill enacting Trump’s agenda, saying it “doesn’t seem that sincere” about trying to cut spending. My dude, “not that sincere” is Trump’s agenda.
Hilariously, we learned yesterday that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) won’t have its numbers until next week for the Energy and Commerce chunk of the “big, beautiful bill,” which includes nearly a trillion in Medicaid cuts. Which means the committee will have to vote without even knowing the full cost, let alone the human cost.
But the CBO might also reveal whether the Republican bill accidentally creates incentives for some states to expand Medicaid. And that’s where they draw the fucking line, Mister, and good DAY to you, sir.
Here’s at least some of what appears to be in the bill that we know of. (Keep in mind, even Republican leaders have been stunned and amazed to discover the forbidden mysteries of what’s in their own fucking bill):
$3.8 trillion in tax cuts mostly for the rich and businesses owned by the rich
$800 million in tax cuts for multinational companies in the U.S. Virgin Islands, just like MAGA demanded
$1 billion in tax breaks on the interest payments banks get from farm and ranch loans
$1 billion tax break on gun silencers, eliminating the $200 tax on silencers for, y’know, silent hunting and silent self-defense
Kill a 10% tax on tanning salons so that all of MAGA can afford Dear Leader’s healthy, natural glow
Tax breaks on using health savings accounts for gym memberships, for the people
Tax increases on universities, non-citizens, and some families with kids
Eliminate $330 billion for student loans
Make remaining student loans more costly
Cap what parents can borrow for their children’s graduate-school loans
Reduce Pell Grant availability unless it’s for job training because jobs jobs jobby jobs jobs praise Jobus jobs jobs and also jobs
Did I mention the $1 billion tax break for gun silencers?
Cut millions of people from Medicaid, Obamacare, and all health insurance
Cut food relief — the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — for millions of people
Reduce school-lunch programs
$150 billion for new weapons and a missile-defense system in space to protect America from missiles no one’s firing at us but not from starvation or lack of medical insurance or climate change
$175 billion to fortify the border against people coming in to work and raise families and lower our crime rate
Wait that $1 billion tax break for silencers can’t be real, can it? I have doubts!
Eliminate the child tax credit for two million kids (I almost wrote “for families with two million kids” but the only family known to have two million kids is Elon Musk’s)
End Democratic tax credits that so far have alternative-fueled $841 billion in private investments
End the $7,500 tax credit for buying an electric vehicle
Reduce tax credits for alternative-energy power sources
End a credit for making hydrogen fuels
The only credit the bill doesn’t seem to cut down is the massive one at the end of any Marvel movie. But the big, beautiful bill does provide for some big unbeautification, killing a number of environmental regulations:
Increasing approvals of oil and gas projects
Ending some emission rules for new vehicles
Ending efforts to curb methane leaks from oil and gas projects and Trump’s pants
Reportedly, Johnson is considering ways to get his caucus back on board with changes to the bill. Well, one change: Moving up the Medicaid paper/work requirements to kick in two years earlier and start kicking needy people off Medicaid in 2027.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT To avoid cutting food stamps for millions of their own constituents voters, congressional Republicans crafted the “big, beautiful bill” so that states will do it, instead.
As the American Prospect writes, no longer will Washington and the states split SNAP administrative costs evenly. Now the federal government will only cover 25% of administrative costs.
It gets better. In the sense of more cartoonishly evil.
The bill uses “error rates” to determine how much DC pays for each state’s food stamps. States with low error rates will only have to pay 5% of SNAP’s food stamp costs. States with error rates higher than 10% will have to pay 25% of food stamp costs.
Two things to note, out of the millions of things we could note. Thing One is that the language TFN just used elides the reality that states do not “have to” pay anything. “Have to pay” is a shorthand you may have seen in the coverage, which TFN only used because TFN will now newsfuck what that means.
States can just…choose not to. If states don’t have the money — or pretend they don’t have the money, or pretend they couldn’t just get the money by raising taxes on the rich — SNAP can just die along with the people it’s not feeding. States don’t “have to” fund jack, let alone Jack’s food.
“We’re going to see some states that have smaller budgets, like in the South and in rural parts of America, not be able to support that change,” Food Research & Action Center SNAP Director Salaam Bhatti told the Prospect.
Thing Two is what the fuck is an error rate? You won’t see that explained, either, so TFN did the research you Newsfuckers demand. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explained last year, error rates are when states pay too much or too little in SNAP benefits, food stamps.
How do they know they’ve fed too many or too few people? Because rather than risk having the wrong people get food, we spend taxpayer money to monitor these payments. And states overfeed people much more than underfeed — so when we’re talking about “error rates,” that’s code for punishing states that don’t dedicate enough resources to manning the gates against free-food-having.
The national rate for overfeeding people in 2022 was 9.84%. The underpayment rate was 1.7%. States admirably err on the side of nutrition.
Which means that the cheapest way for poor states to escape the GOP’s error-rate punishment scheme will not be by spending money ensuring accurate payment rates, but just going whole hog to make it really hard for anyone to afford a whole hog.
This is a hidden cost of the bullshit “waste, fraud and abuse” campaign that you’re just not hearing discussed, even in some lefty quarters. Because as long as Democrats keep buying into the basic, bullshit canard of “waste, fraud and abuse” it will always get weaponized to make it hard as possible to access relief for food or health or education or lodging or whatever the fuck.
Three Quickies
The Supreme Court yesterday unanimously did away with a legal concept that limited assessments of police violence to merely the split second in which the actions occurred. The ruling requires courts to consider the totality of the circumstances (although not, obviously, the totality of systemic racism). A Texas lawsuit claims an officer used excessive force when he shot and killed 24-year-old Ashtian Barnes after a traffic stop for unpaid tolls. The car was a goddam fucking rental. The court’s ruling revives the suit, but not Barnes.
A brain-dead Georgia woman — no, not Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, be nice! — has been kept on life support for three months now with no regard to the family’s wishes. The woman was declared dead in February. But thanks to the “pro-life” Supreme Court inflicted on us by Presidents Trump and Bushes, Georgia state law now prevents doctors and the family from deciding what to do, because she’s pregnant. Which, in this case, means another three months on life support until the fetus will be capable of surviving outside the uterus unless it needs food stamps.
Former FBI Director James Comey, best known as The Reason We’re All Here, is now under investigation by the FBI. Comey yesterday posted a photo of seashells on a beach arranged to write “8647” — as in, potentially, 86 the 47th president. Comey wrote, “cool shell formation on my beachwalk.” Homeland (sic) Security Secretary Kristi Noem called it a “threat,” while Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard skipped the whole due process thing and said Comey should be imprisoned. Because everyone knows freedom of speech doesn’t include numbers, yo.
Campaign Watch
NEBRASKA A Democrat just beat a Republican in the Omaha mayor’s race. It gets better. A Black Democrat just beat a Republican in the Omaha mayor’s race. Want more, you greedy Newsfuckers? A Black Democrat just beat an incumbent Republican in the Omaha mayor’s race.
Mayor-elect John Ewing, Jr., will become the city’s first Black mayor after voters on Tuesday decided they were done with Republican Mayor Known Only to History. Gov. Jim Pillen (R-NE) blamed Republicans for not showing up to vote, which is apparently their fault. So here’s your new family heirloom, suitable for framing, embroidering, or face-tattooing:
Recommended Bruce Springsteening
You’ve probably already seen some of these, but Bruce Springsteen has had some thoughts about the Trump presidency that he’s shared on stage in his European tour dates. Spoiler: Born in the USA is not about birthright citizenship.
TCB
THANKS! TFN got a nice shoutout from the newish MOMocrats Messenger Substack, which you can check out here. Thanks!
SUPPORTING TFN One thing that drives me crazy, and I suspect is driving us crazy, is the creeping commodification of everything. Public spaces succumb to the parasite quest for constant commercial, corporate growth. We have to pay for more and more…things. Our money is sought from us on more surfaces and spaces even in public places — public transit, public squares, public schools.
I genuinely believe this fucks us up in ways that may thwart full understanding.
So when my heart sank and my rage soared seeing Netflix planning to spike America’s brainless bingeing with generative AI commercials — bespoke TV ads — it got me thinking about this space, this newsfucking space, and why I bury my own ads — what you’re reading now — way down here, seldom even posting an upgrade box up top.
And it’s related to why I want to keep my reporting and commentary free. It just feels important to me to preserve those spaces where we’re not defined in monetary terms. Every paywall hits me like a wall dividing us. And I think Netflix helped me see that and better understand my visceral distaste for it.
This is also why I explain that every Newsfucker supports TFN. Those who pay make it possible for TFN to keep going — for everyone — but all forms of support matter. Reading, commenting, sharing. I see all of it. So, thank you all for helping me do this … in a space where we can still all be one.
ELECTIONS
June 10 — New Jersey Democratic gubernatorial primary.
June 24 — New York City mayoral primary.
TAKING ACTION
Today-The Second Coming: Tesla boycott.
Target boycott: The boycott is back on until Target reverses course on DEI and Black-owned suppliers.
Boycott El Salvador products (you can find a list of potential products here) (h/t).
Sept. 21: Climate-action events for Sun Day.
Pre-Christmas: SaveChristmas.net.
The unknown future: Find upcoming events near you here.
RESOURCES
Jim Earl channels your rage
Look up who your member of Congress is and their contact info
Mental reassurance that at least lawyers are fighting back on fill-in-the-blank.
REVOLVING DOOR PROJECT
The Revolving Door Project has a number of ways you can help and/or get help/info:
Tip line (assuming you didn’t send TFN your tip first!)
CONNECTING Come say hi on Bluesky, Mastodon or Spoutible!
Go get ‘em, kids! Us focusing on what matters is why Trump’s big, beautiful bill is in danger of breaking…
TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.
Concerning the FEMA changes, ( and knowing that every accusation is a confession) people that needed FEMA last year, but didn’t trust FEMA because of a certain presidential candidate are now going to have the exact amount of FEMA help they were willing to trust when the president was a candidate.
If memory serves, the Biden Administration was adept at steering hurricanes, so FEMA’s best plan to divine the intent of the upcoming hurricane season is to ask former Biden Administration officials and other Democrats to spell it out.