Trump Creates Perfect Storm Of Death & Destruction With Cuts To FEMA And Weather Services

There's been reporting that FEMA is not prepared for the upcoming hurricane season. Trump has said repeatedly he wants to get rid of FEMA altogether and the states can just fend for themselves when it comes to helping people after devastating storms. This is a compounded problem when you look at the cuts to NOAA and to the National Weather Service.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

So we see reporting that FEMA is not prepared for the upcoming hurricane season and in addition to the cuts, you kind of got a perfect storm here of lots of problems coming out regarding FEMA and the National Preparedness for weather disasters.

Yeah. And for those of us who live along the Gulf of Mexico, this is a horrible thing right now. We know what hurricane season is. We know what it brings every year. We are glued to whatever our preferred weather app is watching this. Every time we see that little storm start to circulate, we don't know where it's gonna go. But for most of our whole lives, we have known, okay, worst case scenario, FEMA comes in. I've had to stand in FEMA lines plenty of times, more times than I would love to count, but I've gotten the bottles of water, I've eaten the MREs, I have gotten gas cards, I have gotten reimbursed for hotel stays when I couldn't even get physically to my home because of all the wreckage and debris. That's what FEMA does. That's the first thing I should say FEMA does before coming in and helping with the overall rebuilding and funding of that.

This administration, Trump has said repeatedly, he wants to get rid of FEMA altogether and the states, y'all can just fend for yourself when it comes to helping people after these storms, which Florida, on the Gulf Coast, they probably have the money to do that. It won't be as much as FEMA. Texas probably does. Louisiana does not. Mississippi does not. Alabama does not. Georgia over on the other coast does not. We have seen this time and time again. When the funding of something is turned over to the states, it goes to crap. And FEMA right now is telling us we've lost 30% of our staff. We are losing our funding. We, and this is from FEMA's own announcement, we're not ready. We can't do this. And to all of us along the Gulf, this is a horrible thing to have to hear.

And to your point about Florida, I looked up the statistic. 13 cents of every dollar of FEMA aid over the last decade has gone to the state of Florida. And so this is a Republican state that helped put him there and he's talking about cutting 10% of all the recovery that has come to the state. I also want to point out that this is a compounded problem when you look at the cuts to NOAA and to the National Weather Service. So I was doing some research for the show. One of the problems with the National Weather Service is that they're woefully understaffed now, many are catastrophically or closed entirely. Part of that is they're not sending up as many weather balloons on a day-to-day basis. And this is not something I knew before the show, but across the country, they send up a weather balloon at a certain time, and then they do it in the evening at a certain time.

And that allows the 3D weather modeling that we all use on AccuWeather or whatever app we pull up on our phone. That data is free because it's provided by the government, because they're not sending weather data on a daily basis anymore, that those are shut down, the models are becoming less accurate. We are seeing decreased accuracy in the tornado alley, the Midwestern states, rain forecast for farmers. This is having a cascading failure outside of the hurricanes. So I don't want folks thinking, oh, this only affects the people who get hit by hurricanes. This affects all of us. There's a 19% vacancy rate right now at the National Weather Service. There are 52 critically understaffed agencies within that agency around the country that they don't have enough staff to continue operating, critically understaffed.