Noem: Trump’s Texas Flood Response Proves FEMA Reform Is Already Underway
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem delivered a scathing contrast between the Trump administration’s disaster response and the Biden-era failures, praising President Donald J. Trump’s decisive action in the wake of the deadly Fourth of July floods that devastated Texas Hill Country.
The historic floods killed at least 119 people and left over 150 missing — including 27 young girls from Camp Mystic in Hunt, Texas — prompting a federal response that Noem described as “fundamentally different” from anything seen under Biden’s leadership.
“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 at a Saturday press briefing. “We did things in Texas, in response, very different than Joe Biden.”
The contrast couldn’t be clearer. Under Biden, the administration’s infamous delays and ineptitude left Americans suffering — from the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, where FEMA refused to act on a chemical spill, to the horrific Maui wildfires that left Lahaina in ashes with survivors begging for food and water. Even Hurricane Helene in late 2024 saw a sluggish response across three states.
FEMA, once seen as a federal safety net, has been plagued with bureaucracy and inertia. President Trump, long critical of the agency’s inefficiency, signaled a complete overhaul is coming.
“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 declared in January while touring North Carolina. “I think, frankly, FEMA is not good.”
Unlike the delays and excuses that defined the Biden years, Noem said the Trump administration acted immediately when disaster struck Texas.
“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.”
Within hours of the floods, Noem met with Governor Greg Abbott to secure a major disaster declaration. The White House under Trump responded almost instantly.
“We pre-deployed dollars right to Texas so that they can make the best decisions responding to their people,” Noem told reporters. “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.”
Noem emphasized a core principle of Trump’s philosophy: empower the states and cut the red tape.
“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."
Instead of bloated bureaucracy, the Trump administration deployed resources and boots on the ground swiftly, with federal officials working hand-in-hand with state authorities from the start.
“We are fundamentally reforming that agency,” Noem said of FEMA. “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.”