DHS Secretary Noem: Time to Cut ‘Red Tape’ in the Way of Hurricane Recovery

SWANNANOA, NORTH CAROLINA—Four months after Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem says the federal government will continue to provide support but also needs to get “out of the way” of recovery efforts and cut much of the red tape involved in getting assistance.  

“I think that the federal government would do a much better job, much like [President Donald Trump] does, if we got out of the way,” Noem said to Wanda Harvey and her mother as they spoke outside what used to be the Harvey’s home in Swannanoa, 10 miles east of Asheville, on Saturday.

Noem was in western North Carolina to see the progress of the recovery efforts and the damage that still remained from Helene.

Rev. Franklin Graham, president of the Christian humanitarian aid organization Samaritan’s Purse stood beside the secretary as she spoke with Harvey. Samaritan’s Purse continues to provide help and assistance to hurricane victims in the region.

Standing on the cement slab by the little single-story house that was flooded during the September hurricane, Harvey told Noem that dealing with the paperwork after the hurricane was a “nightmare”— a common refrain that Noem told press she heard from multiple hurricane victims during her visit Saturday.  

The Federal Emergency Management Agency “can often be slow and confusing and a lot of paperwork,” Noem said, pledging, “We’re going to fix that.” 

The response structure to natural disasters includes state and federal resources, but begins with local officials, the secretary said. “They know their communities, they know the help that is necessary.”

Noem visited one such effort—The Blessing Project, a small nonprofit that is providing food, clothing, furniture, and other necessities to hurricane victims in Buncombe County.  

The secretary spoke with a young family at The Blessing Barn, a resource center of The Blessing Project, who lost almost everything in the hurricane. Mere feet away, the Army Corps of Engineers worked heavy machinery to pull out debris that had been swept into the river during the hurricane.  

After one of the equipment operators pulled a load of logs, sticks, and other debris from the river, Noem donned a vest and hardhat and hopped into the machine with him as he explained how it worked. A former rancher, Noem appeared quite at ease in the large machine.  

Cameron Hamilton, FEMA’s acting administrator, accompanied Noem on her visit to western North Carolina and told the media that FEMA is “dissecting every avenue to ensure that the response” to disasters is “faster [and] more efficient” than it has been.  

Under the Trump administration, FEMA “is taking a new approach on ensuring that everything we do comes from the survivor perspective,” Hamilton said. “Everything and every effort that we engage in has to have that focus at the forefront.” 

FEMA, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, received intense criticism for its response to Hurricane Helene, including for at least one report that FEMA workers were directed by a supervisor to avoid homes with political signs supporting Trump.  

“I promise you one thing,” Noem said, “President Trump has committed, and I’m committed with him, to bringing FEMA into the 21st century, to becoming a people’s agency.”  

On Jan. 24, Trump signed an executive order establishing the Federal Emergency Management Agency Review Council to review FEMA’s effectiveness in responding to natural disasters and to recommend needed changes to the agency.  

Trump wants to “streamline” the work of FEMA, Noem told the press. “He wants it to be much less bureaucratic,” adding that Trump has made comments that he might even discontinue the agency and instead have “a process where the federal government sends block grants, or sends the dollars, to the state or to the local communities, and they decide how it’s spent so that the federal government can get out of the way of picking and choosing winners and losers and how those processes go.”  

“We’ve always found a lot of times government is not the best solution,” the secretary said, noting that victims of disasters like Hurricane Helene require help and “the federal government should help, but it shouldn’t get in the way and slow that help down.”  

The future of FEMA may include “eliminating a lot of what FEMA is at the federal level and giving the authority, the dollars, and the money to the states so that they can deploy that,” the secretary said.   

Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer, a Democrat, gave brief remarks to the media and thanked Noem and Hamilton for their visit.  

“It means a lot to us that even as we see an administration change, we’ve already had a visit from our new president here,” Manheimer said, “and that we already have leadership on the ground to be able to see what we’re working with and how our community’s coming together.” 

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