Florida’s Governor is expressing some doubt about how much help the state will get when hurricanes hit this year, expressing nostalgia for the Joe Biden administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) along the way.
“We worked with the federal government to get that reimbursement (after Hurricane Milton). I don’t know if we’re going to get reimbursement going forward. Certainly not at that level from what we’re seeing,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said of the Donald Trump administration ahead of hurricane season.
DeSantis added that the Biden administration was “very sensitive on the heels of” Hurricane Helene during Hurricane Milton.
“They bent over backwards,” DeSantis said. “So we were able to get 100% of the debris cleanup, which we think is really, really good.”
The tone shift is notable: DeSantis has offered suggestions about FEMA in recent months, suggesting Florida could go it alone.
“I think if President Trump wants to just block grant money to us and get FEMA out of it entirely, we would do even better because a lot of what we do is in spite of the FEMA bureaucracy, not because of the FEMA bureaucracy,” DeSantis said during a speech to the National Rental Home Council.
DeSantis says Florida has “assumed it won’t get support” from FEMA, and “that’s how we’ve rolled.”
In February, he endorsed Trump’s suggestions that FEMA, as it is now, may be a thing of the past, blasting the agency’s “insufferable bureaucracy.”
“You can look at what’s the typical cost of a Category 4 hurricane or any of these other things that happened,” DeSantis said. “Look to see how much FEMA has actually spent on those throughout the past. And then if a disaster comes, you can take whatever that amount is, send 80% of that block grant to the state, cut the bureaucracy of FEMA out entirely, and that money will go further than it currently does at greater amounts going through FEMA’s bureaucracy. So that’s what he’s talking about doing. And we would be able to administer this so much quicker.”
He echoed that position Friday, saying he wanted Trump to “send us the money and let us administer it,” though he doesn’t believe that will happen “this hurricane season.”
More recently, he said “we would be able to do it far cheaper than FEMA does, and our constituents would actually get a response.”
“Give me $0.75 on the dollar, and that money will go further to help my people than running it through this cumbersome bureaucracy,” he said, via the Irish Times.
On Friday, DeSantis said “80 cents on the dollar” would suffice.
Questions remain, meanwhile, about how much help Florida will get if the storm hits. Trump already scaled back aid promised by the Biden administration to North Carolina, a state DeSantis talked about Friday as well.
“In fact, more people in Western North Carolina in the Summer consider me as their Governor than the North Carolina Governor,” DeSantis said.
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