00:00This year, the Trump administration has made cuts, wants to get rid of FEMA, has done job freezes when it comes to the National Weather Service, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association, etc.
00:10Can states manage these disasters effectively without the help that has traditionally come from the federal government?
00:16Last night, I was talking with two linemen that we recognized for their heroic work, trying to get power reestablished to the Veterans Hospital out in western North Carolina.
00:30And I was also talking with two disaster response coordinators who were a part of that.
00:35And I said, can you all imagine if all of a sudden we've got a storm forming off of Africa coming this way, maybe it's moving over, it's a Category 1, that the southeastern states are going to have to get together and do paper-scissors-rock to see who's going to manage this regional impact?
00:53I mean, the last time I checked, storms have a really bad habit of crossing state and county jurisdictions.
00:59They don't care.
00:59So, to me, anybody that's advising the president we should get rid of FEMA has clearly had no experience with disaster response.
01:06We have a lot of experience with disaster response in the southeast.
01:11We've got a number of recommendations to modernize FEMA, to shift more responsibility down.
01:17But the federal government has to be the convening authority.
01:20I mean, FEMA was actually, its birth was out of a disastrous response in the past.
01:27But if we're talking about changing the execution, that's fine.
01:33But the federal government has to play a role.
01:35There are no major storms that you could possibly have a coordinated, solid response to if it's a pickup game by states.
01:45Right.
01:45And so it's just absurd.
01:47Whoever recommended that clearly is out of their depth on disaster response.
01:51President Trump went after you while you guys were fighting about that.
01:55He said, Tom Tillis has hurt the great people of North Carolina, even on the catastrophic flooding.
01:59Nothing was done to help until I took office.
02:01Then a miracle took place.
02:02Tillis is a talker and a complainer, not a doer.
02:05Well, President, I get to Western North Carolina and see if his view of the work that I've done there fits with the view of Western North Carolinians.
02:12I think that they're pretty happy with how much I leaned into it, even advising the Trump campaign to probably not land in Asheville during the campaign when we were trying to use the airport to evac victims.
