Trump’s Version of Federalism Is a Perverse Death Trap

In April, Trump turned down his own former press spokesperson, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, after her state was hit with deadly tornadoes. (She later persuaded him to change his mind.) Visiting North Carolina at the end of January to gauge the state’s recovery from last September’s Hurricane Helaine, Trump talked about “maybe getting rid of FEMA.” Richardson’s predecessor as acting FEMA administrator, Cameron Hamilton, contradicted Trump last month by telling the House Appropriations Committee that FEMA should not be eliminated. In response, Trump fired him.

FEMA’s still there, but just barely; it’s still reeling from hundreds of staff cuts in February by the White House Office of Personnel Management. Eleven requests to declare this or that state a disaster area have yet to be answered, including two from April; in late May the backlog was 17 requests. Most of the pending requests, weirdly, are from red states—severe storms and flooding in Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky—so you can’t accuse Trump of playing favorites. Citing an internal memo, Scott Dance and Brady Dennis of The Washington Post reported this weekend that those FEMA staffers who remain will no longer go door to door after disasters to find victims who might need aid. That job will be left instead to state governments—those little laboratories of democracy.

MAGA health care has a skewed federalism angle, too. The “Big Beautiful” budget bill currently before the Senate would cut Medicaid mostly by screwing around with eligibility—in addition to its spurious work requirement, the bill would repeal a Biden regulation intended to simplify the process of establishing and renewing Medicaid eligibility—but it would also require states to contribute $72 billion more to pay for coverage. That’s consistent with Trump’s telling the states, during his first term, that they were on their own in dealing with the Covid pandemic. They were, too—but Trump has since threatened to de-fund local schools should they require vaccinations.