Look who is celebrating the fruits of their labor? You'd never know that watching Project 2025's Kevin Roberts praising Trump for taking a page out of his playbook and announcing his plan to "overhaul" or completely get rid of FEMA.
Trump and Roberts have been doing their best to try to put distance between themselves, given the fact that most of Project 2025's proposals are deeply unpopular with the majority of the American public.
As CAP reported last year, Project 2025 wants to eliminate aid for families and businesses trying to rebuild after disaster strikes:
Federal agencies play a critical role in providing swift and efficient support to these families and businesses reckoning with extreme weather events and searching for a semblance of control in their lives during a period of significant instability. One such resource is the SmallBusiness Administration’s (SBA) disaster loan program—the federal government’s largest source of disaster recovery fundsfor survivors, which provides low-interest direct loans tosmall-business owners and households who need to repair and rebuild their properties. Southern states on the Gulf Coast, such as Texas, Florida, and Louisiana, are often hit the hardestby extreme weather events; and new analysis from the Center for American Progress finds that the disaster loan program also disproportionately aids affected individuals in those states.
Even still, Project 2025—a far-right road map that would gut the country’s nearly 250-year-old system of checks and balances—proposes, on page 750, an “end to SBA direct lending,” the only instance of which is the disaster loan program. Project 2025 suggests privatization as one potential solution and claims, without evidence, that loan availability “reduces individuals’ incentives to purchase disaster-related insurance.” However, it makes no mention of the skyrocketing costs for families in these situations.
From 2021 to 2023, home insurance rates rose nearly 20 percent nationally. And in states particularly vulnerable to disasters, such as Florida and Louisiana, it was even worse. In 2023, Florida homeowners saw the highest average home insurance rates in the country, paying, on average, $10,996 a year. Meanwhile, Louisiana homeowners, who pay the country’s second-highest insurance rates, are projected to see a rate increase of as much as 23 percent from 2023 to the end of 2024. Homeowners aren’t alone; the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index finds that 27 percent of small businesses report being one crisis away from closing.
If successful, far-right policies such as those proposed by Project 2025 would force families and businesses facing some of the hardest moments of their lives—including those in Hurricane Debby’s path —to bear even more of the costs associated with natural disasters.
Fox "news" has been doing their best to undermine the agency and pretend it isn't needed while lying about the amount of aid people are entitled to.
Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream, with the help of Project 2025's Kevin Roberts were more than happy to continue spreading those lies this weekend:
BREAM: Let's start with this whole FEMA situation here because Semafor is reporting that there will be an executive order. At last check of the White House website, it is not up. We haven't heard that there's anything official about FEMA.
They say "The order will establish a group whose members will include the Secretaries of Homeland Security and Defense in addition to private sector subject matter experts."
It says the task force is going to be issuing a report to Trump on how "the federal disaster response agency currently functions and ultimately recommend changes which could include reorganizing or getting rid of FEMA."
Kevin, what happens with disaster relief if FEMA went away?
ROBERTS: If FEMA goes away, disaster relief becomes a lot more efficient, and I say that as someone who grew up on the Gulf Coast.
I remember Hurricane Andrew in 1992, all of us waiting for the power to come back for the supplies to arrive, and the only thing that could provide those things, Shannon, were local people.
FEMA is a microcosm of what's wrong with the federal government. It's bloated. It's bureaucratic. It's inefficient. It is outdated.
And I applaud President Trump for doing this on behalf of disaster relief for everyday Americans.
It would be a great update to the federal government.
Roberts got a small amount of pushback from Richard Fowler, who reminded everyone that disaster relief works best when there are local, state and federal governments all working together, and the fact that some of the blue states experiencing natural disasters are just trying to get some of the money back their states contributed to the federal government.
No one bothered to point out that the plan Roberts was touting was the same one Trump continually pretended to know nothing about. They allowed Roberts to sit there and pretend he's 'just some observer' rather than an active participant in trying to destroy FEMA.
Trump's supporters in red states prone to hurricanes and other natural disasters are in for a rude awakening if Trump follows through on this.
