Kristi Noem Says Texas Flood Response Is Model for Future Disasters

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says that Americans should expect future natural disasters to be handled similarly to the recent deadly flooding in Texas—and no, she wasn’t being ironic. 

During a press conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Thursday, Noem was in denial about just how badly she’d managed the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s response to flooding in Texas earlier this month. 

“What you saw happen in Texas was much more how FEMA will look in the future. It won’t look like the response to [Hurricane] Katrina, or the response to even [Hurricane] Helene, and what happened in North Carolina, where people waited weeks and weeks and months and months for help,” she said.  

But Noem had severely botched FEMA’s Texas response by failing to renew contracts with companies staffing FEMA call centers, resulting in a majority of calls going unanswered for days as the flood waters raged. The secretary dismissed the reporting as “fake news.”

Noem also reportedly delayed FEMA’s initial response by instituting a policy that required her to personally sign off on all DHS expenditures exceeding $100,000. FEMA officials, who were unaware of the new rule, didn’t receive Noem’s go-ahead for 72 hours. 

Last month, Donald Trump said he plans to “phase out” FEMA after this year’s hurricane season, and future disbursements would come straight from him. “We’re going to give it out directly. It’ll be from the president’s office. We’ll have somebody here, could be homeland security,” Trump said at the time. Clearly, putting Noem in charge of personally approving decisions in a disaster comes at a cost, and the Trump administration’s mismanagement of relief is more far-reaching than just the flooding in Texas. 

Twenty Democratic-led states sued the Trump administration Wednesday, claiming that the White House had acted illegally when cancelling FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, which funds infrastructure projects such as levees, shelters, and seismic testing to protect people against extreme weather.