Donald Trump vs Kamala Harris on Hurricane Helene disaster relief

The devastation across the southeastern United States wrought by Hurricane Helene has brought the federal government’s emergency response apparatus into focus ahead of the November election as authorities work to pick up the pieces.
With rebuilding in North Carolina, Georgia and elsewhere likely to take months, if not years, the responsibility will eventually fall to either Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump, one of whom will replace President Joe Biden in January.
Still reeling from Helene, the United States is also now bracing for Hurricane Milton, showing how frequent extreme weather conditions have become.
Under Biden, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has taken significant steps to promote resilience ahead of disasters and streamline the federal disaster aid process – policies that could well continue should Harris get elected.
During his first term, Trump’s decisions on disaster relief were widely controversial. He tried to steer federal disaster funds toward other priorities, like border security, and famously shot paper towels into a crowd of residents in Puerto Rico impacted by Hurricane Maria in 2017.
“(Trump’s) mantra is drill, drill, drill – not protect, protect, protect,” said Stephen Eisenman, director of strategy at advocacy group Anthropocene Alliance, referring to the Republicans’ promise to “DRILL, BABY, DRILL” with the aim of making the United States “energy independent.”
“I think it’s a matter of night and day between what the two administrations will do.”
Under Biden, FEMA has sought to make disaster relief more equitable – including streamlining red tape to try to get rapid cash awards directly to people affected by disasters.
Amid criticism that the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) effectively subsidised premiums for wealthier homeowners on the coasts, FEMA under Biden dramatically changed its methodology for calculating insurance premiums with the aim of more closely marrying flood insurance rates to risk.
But lawmakers and consumers have expressed concerns about the changes, which could fuel a spike in insurance rates for some policyholders.
Harris, who has long highlighted the dangers of climate change, acknowledged during a debate with Trump in September that climate-driven disasters are having an impact on the availability of home insurance.
Major insurers have started pulling out of disaster-prone areas or drastically raising home insurance premiums in the face of increased climate-fueled disasters like wildfires and hurricanes.
Biden has recognised that climate change disproportionately impacts the marginalised and has taken steps to address this, said Eisenman, adding “much more” needed to be done.
“We’re hoping that (Harris) will be at least as proactive as Biden and hopefully more so,” he said, pointing to the fact she had spoken “quite dramatically” about the need to address climate change during the 2020 presidential campaign.
When Trump was president, FEMA and disaster relief were in the spotlight a number of times – often for controversial reasons.
An inspector general’s report concluded in 2021 that the Trump administration blocked an investigation into a delayed $20-billion aid payment for Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria in 2017.
As Hurricane Dorian was barrelling across the southeast in 2019, Trump showed a map of the hurricane’s projected path which appeared to have been altered with a sharpie pen to include Alabama, after the then president had wrongly claimed the state had been projected to be hit.
The Trump campaign did not respond to questions about his plans for FEMA and disaster response.
Trump’s approach notwithstanding, conservatives have long argued that FEMA, which sits in the Department of Homeland Security, has become too large to effectively carry out its mission, and it would be better to empower state and local first responders to help pick up after disasters like Helene.
“Maybe after this disaster here, there’s going to be some federal airlift capabilities or other sorts of things, military assets that may be useful … but I think it’s a real problem for the federal government to encroach too much on the state responsibilities here,” said Chris Edwards, an expert on tax and budget issues at the Cato Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank.
“I think the main thing they ought to be doing is staying out of the way of rapid state and local response.”
The Republican Party’s 2024 platform makes references to energy independence for the United States, but does not delve into specifics on climate change or disaster relief – leaving others to try to fill in the blanks for what a Trump administration might do on those fronts.
In Project 2025, a detailed policy blueprint for a would-be Trump administration produced by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, authors propose that the National Weather Service “fully commercialise its forecasting operations.”
Trump and his campaign have formally disavowed Project 2025 after it started receiving unwanted political attention, but the document’s listed authors include a number of people who served in his administration and the Harris campaign has been working to tie it to the former president.
“The idea that you’re going to private the National Weather Service – there’s no profit motive that I can sense for anyone to pick up that reporting and alerting service,” said David Kieve, president of EDF Action, the advocacy partner of the nonprofit Environmental Defence Fund.
Eisenman held out some hope that Trump could change course from his first term – when he did not make climate change a priority – but possibly not for the most honorable of reasons.
“He could, because … he has convictions about what gains him strength politically,” he said.
“Unfortunately, the Democrats haven’t pressed that strongly enough to make the public demand for it powerful enough to change him. So do I expect him to change his spots on it? No.”