This week, Ali Velshi continues his deep dive inside Project 2025, the nearly 1,000-page authoritarian blueprint for a new Trump administration. As the Southeastern U.S. begins rebuilding from Hurricane Helene, Americans cannot ignore the importance of FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) in disaster preparedness and recovery.
But Project 2025 holds a different vision for the future of disaster assistance in America. The right-wing plan to gut FEMA includes privatizing the agency, ending its National Flood Insurance Program, eliminating the Department of Homeland Security’s grant programs for disaster recovery, eliminating Small Business Administration disaster loans, and shifting costs for disaster preparedness to states and localities, ensuring that poorer communities won’t receive the assistance they do today.
To make matters worse, Project 2025 also outlines the dismantling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and undermining the National Wildlife Service (aka Fish & Game), eliminating our ability to gather and utilize climate data for tracking, predicting, and being prepared for the impact of climate-change-fueled natural disasters.
Right now, the sheer number of FEMA conspiracy theories circulating as the agency works alongside the National Guard and other organizations to help Americans affected by Hurricane Helene has necessitated that the agency set up an entire web page to fight lies put out by the Trump campaign.
The threat to FEMA is not just a threat to the economic wellbeing and public safety of our nation in advance of and after natural disasters. It’s a threat to human lives.
LISTEN: VELSHI ON PROJECT 2025’S THREAT TO DISASTER PREPAREDNESS
WATCH: VELSHI AND GOV. JAY INSLEE ON THE IMPORTANCE OF FEMA
MORE FROM MSNBC’S ALI VELSHI INSIDE PROJECT 2025