Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Saturday that the federal response to last weekend’s deadly floods in Texas Hill Country showcased the strengthened disaster relief efforts the Trump administration is committed to providing.
The catastrophic Fourth of July floods claimed at least 119 lives and left more than 150 people missing, including 27 girls attending Camp Mystic along the Guadalupe River in Hunt, Texas.
“What you saw from our response in Texas is going to be a lot of how President [Donald] Trump envisions what [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] (FEMA) would look like in the future,” Noem said during a news conference.
She added: “We did things in Texas, in response, very different than Joe Biden.”
In response to the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, the Biden administration determined the chemical spill did not qualify for a FEMA disaster declaration, delaying deployment of a federal response team for two weeks.
During the 2023 Maui wildfires—which killed over 100 people and left historic Lahaina in ruins—survivors were stranded without food, water, or shelter. At the time, FEMA Administrator Michael Brown condemned President Biden’s handling of the crisis as “an abject failure.”
Widespread reports also criticized the slow response and insufficient assistance from the Biden administration following Hurricane Helene’s impact on North Carolina, Georgia, and South Carolina in late 2024.
“I’ll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA,” Trump said in January while visiting North Carolina. “I think, frankly, FEMA is not good.”
Noem pointed out that federal aid was on the ground in Texas immediately after the flooding began.
“We deployed our Coast Guard, helicopters, [aircraft] and swift water rescue teams out of Customs and Border Protection,” she said. “Our [Border Patrol Tactical Unit] (BORTAC) teams, which I like to call the Department of Homeland Security’s ninjas, are specifically trained for situations like that, where the unprecedented is happening.”
Following the floods, Noem said she met with Texas Governor Greg Abbott right away to discuss securing a major disaster declaration.
She noted that within an hour or two of the request, the White House approved it, Fox News reported.
“We pre-deployed dollars right to Texas so that they can make the best decisions responding to their people,” Noem said. “FEMA has never done that before — pre-deployed dollars to a state so that they could use that to save their people, so they could use that to go out and save lives.”
The DHS secretary went on to say that Trump wants states to be empowered in their responses to their own natural disasters.
“Emergencies are locally executed,” she said. “They are state-managed and then the federal government comes in and supports you. [No one] ever wants to sit back and wait for someone from the federal government to show up and rescue you out of your house because that, in the past, has not served people well under the Biden administration.
Under Trump, Noem stated that federal officials promptly assisted local and state authorities in managing the response. She added her belief that FEMA “will cease to exist the way that it is today.”
“We are fundamentally reforming that agency,” Noem said. “President Trump may want to, in his prerogative, as he likes to do, rename things. He may come up with a new name for this agency that reflects the fundamental change that’s going to happen there. But this agency will no longer be the bureaucratic agency where people have to wait 20 years for their claim to be paid.
“It will be an agency that immediately says to that state, and to that local emergency management director, ‘What do you need? How can we support you?’ And then trains them to have the skill set that they need to be serving their people immediately, because they’re always there faster. They’re right there on the streets.”