The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) faced widespread criticism last year cover its failure to help victims of Hurricane Helene.

While that led some to call for reform of the agency, one senior White House figure says FEMA needs to be eliminated. 

"We're gonna eliminate FEMA"

According to The Hill, that point was made during a cabinet meeting on Monday by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem.

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announces the elimination of FEMA at President Trump’s cabinet meeting today pic.twitter.com/lzipHx6x7L

— Politically Stripped ™️ (@politstrip) March 24, 2025

The Hill pointed out how President Donald Trump brought up the prospect of doing away with FEMA shortly after he took office.

"I’ll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA. I think, frankly, FEMA’s not good," Trump said while visiting victims of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina.

Executive order demands review of FEMA's policies

"I think when you have a problem like this, I think you want to go and — whether it’s a Democrat or Republican governor — you want to use your state to fix it and not waste time calling FEMA, and then FEMA gets here and they don’t know the area, they’ve never been to the area," the president stated.

"They want to give you rules that you’ve never heard about, they want to give you people that aren’t as good as the people you already have. And FEMA’s turned out to be a disaster," he added.

However, The Hill stressed that instead of attempting to abolish FEMA, Trump signed an executive order last week which demanded a review of its policies.

It requires that "state and local governments and individuals have improved communications with Federal officials and a better understanding of the Federal role."

Coast Guard being "repositioned" to combat drug smuggling

Breitbart reported that in addition to her remarks regarding FEMA, Noem also touted the fact that "in the month of March — the last couple of weeks, [we] increased our deportations by 50 percent."

What's more, she explained that the U.S. Coast Guard has been deployed to help stem the influx of illegal narcotics from Mexico.

"The Coast Guard has done phenomenal work — I don’t know if you all have reported on it, but we have broken historic records in the amount of drug interdictions that they have brought in," she stated.

"We’ve repositioned the fleet to go after the fentanyl crisis and go after the southern border and securing it, and they’ve done amazing work as far as that," Noem went on to add.