Slingshot News: ‘Claims From Katrina’: Sec. Kristi Noem Reveals Her Department Is 22 Years Behind Schedule On FEMA Aid In House Hearing
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Tag Archives: Federal Emergency Management Agency
Slingshot News: ‘We Will Take A Look’: Sec. Kristi Noem Dodges Questions On Illegality Of Masked ICE Agents In House Hearing
Miami Herald: FEMA’s $64 Million Cut to NYC Sparks Fury
Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has condemned the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s $64 million cut to New York City’s security funding following a Manhattan shooting. Washington, D.C. has experienced a 44% reduction in funding, as cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles are also facing funding cuts. NYC Mayor Eric Adams is reportedly working to maximize federal resources amid the Trump administration’s widespread cuts to federal agency budgets.
Schumer stated that President Donald Trump “treats NY like his personal punching bag in an attempt to settle political scores — and failing to release NY’s critical anti-terrorism funds is stooping to a new low.”
New York Mayor Eric Adams’ spokesperson Liz Garcia said, “We are committed to securing every federal dollar that New Yorkers deserve.”
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) plans to question Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, warning that political motives may risk public safety. She stated, “I would ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem about the funding cuts, adding that it is possible the agency is risking New Yorkers’ safety as a political power move.”
Amid the fight for security funding, NYC Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has come under fire for reportedly spending over $33,000 on private security throughout his campaign. Critics condemned the spending, citing his 2020 calls to defund the police.
In 2020, Mamdani wrote, “We don’t need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti‑queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD. But your compromise uses budget tricks to keep as many cops as possible on the beat. NO to fake cuts – defund the police.” He added, “We need a socialist city council to defund the police.”
Mamdani added, “The New York City Council tried to make the NYPD reduce its overtime budget by half. They simply refused. There is no negotiating with an institution this wicked & corrupt. Defund it. Dismantle it. End the cycle of violence.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/fema-s-64-million-cut-to-nyc-sparks-fury/ss-AA1KyL6W
Slingshot News: ‘Their Boats Are Faster’: Secretary Kristi Noem Reveals Trump Provided Boats Worse Than The Cartels’ To Coast Guard In Senate Hearing
Slingshot News: ‘Not Guaranteed’: Secretary Kristi Noem Insults Puerto Ricans, Says She Can Cut Off Their Federal Aid In House Hearing
The bigoted racist bitch runs her mouth:
‘Not Guaranteed’: Secretary Kristi Noem Insults Puerto Ricans, Says She Can Cut Off Their Federal Aid In House Hearing
Secretary Kristi Noem insulted Puerto Ricans during a recent House hearing, saying that she can cut off their federal aid at any time. She does not have this power, but thinks she does.
Alternet: Trump’s worst crimes and destructions haven’t even happened yet | Opinion
The worst crimes of Donald Trump and dangers to America from the unstable, monomaniacal, lying outlaw in the White House have yet to come. He is not satisfied with tearing apart our country’s social safety net for tens of millions of Americans (e.g., Medicaid and food program cuts); wrecking our scientific/medical systems, including warning people about pandemics. He is, by wrecking FEMA et al, failing to address the impact of mega-storms, wildfires, and droughts; and allowing cybersecurity threats to increase while giving harm-producing big corporations immunities from the law, more subsidies, and more tax escapes. Recall how he always adds to his attacks on powerless people that “This is just the beginning.”
He just took the next step in his march to madness and mayhem by announcing more concentration camps holding immigrants, arrested without due process, for deportation to foreign countries that want U.S. taxpayer cash for each deportee.
Recent immigrants are crucial to millions of small and large businesses. Consider who harvests our crops, cares for our children and the elderly, cleans up after us, and works the food processing plants and construction sites. Already, businesses are reducing or closing their enterprises – a political peril for Dangerous Donald.
If all immigrants to the U.S. from the last ten years, documented and undocumented, went on strike, our country would almost shut down. Yet Trump, who hired 500 undocumented workers for just one of his construction sites in New York, and had similar laborers at his New Jersey golf course, promises deportations of millions more.
Always bear in mind the self-defined characteristics of corporatist Trump’s feverish, hateful, outlaw mind: (1) He has declared he “can do whatever he wants as President,” proving his serial violations of law and illegal dictates every day; (2) He always doubles down when indicted, convicted, caught, or exposed, falsely accusing his accusers of the exact transgressions they are reliably charging him with; (3) He brags about lashing out at criticism with foul defamatory invectives; (4) He never admits his disastrous mistake; (5) He boasts that he knows more than leading experts in a dozen major areas of knowledge (see, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All”); and (6) He asserts that every action, policy, or program he launches is a spectacular success – the facts to the contrary are dismissed.He is gravely delusional, replaces realities with fantasies, breaks promises that are made to defer any reckoning or accountability, and, like an imaginary King, finds no problem with saying “I rule America and the world.”
His ego defines his reactions, which is why every foreign leader is advised to flatter him. Nobody flatters better than the cunning genocidal Benjamin Netanyahu, who at his last regal White House dinner, held up his nomination of convicted felon, woman abuser, Trump for the Nobel Prize. Netanyahu’s preening comes from a politician whose regime has dossiers on Trump regarding his past personal and business behavior. This helps explain why Trump is letting the Israeli government do whatever it wants in its Gaza Holocaust, the West Bank, and beyond with our tax dollars, family-killing weaponry, and political/diplomatic cover.
The approaching greater dangers from Trump will come when he pushes his lawless, dictatorial envelope so far, so furiously, so outrageously, that it turns his GOP valets in Congress and the GOP-dominated U.S. Supreme Court against him. Add plunging polls, a stagflation economy, and impeachment, and removal from office would become a political necessity for the GOP in 2026 and beyond. In 1974, the far lesser Watergate transgressions by President Richard Nixon resulted in Republican Senators’ demanding Tricky Dick’s resignation from office.
Further provocations are not far-fetched. Firing Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell, sinking the dollar, and angering the fearful, but very powerful bankers are all on the horizon. Will the sex-trafficking charges involving Jeffrey Epstein and vile abuses of young girls finally be too much for his evangelical base, as well as for many MAGA voters? This issue is already starting to fissure his MAGA base and the GOP iron curtain in Congress. Subpoenas have just been issued to the Justice Department by the GOP Chair of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky – a close friend of Senator Mitch McConnell.
There is always SERENDIPITY. Trump, the mercurial egomaniac, offers old and new transgressions to stoke the calls for his impeachment. Does anyone believe that Trump would not start a military conflict, subjecting U.S. soldiers to harm, to distract attention from heavy media coverage of unravelling corruption investigations? Draft-dodging Donald has Pete Hegseth, his knee-jerk Secretary of Defense, waiting to do his lethal bidding, despite possible opposition from career military.
If Trump were to be impeached and removed from office, would he try to stay in office? Here is where a real constitutional explosion can occur. He would have to be escorted from the White House by U.S. Marshals who are under the direction of toady Attorney General Pam Bondi. The Supreme Court has held that the Constitution grants “the sole Power” to try impeachments in the Senate and nowhere else. Thus, the courts would provide no remedy to a lawless president wanting to stay in power.
Then what? The country falls into extreme turmoil. The Defense Department, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security are in the Trump Dump. Tyrant Trump can declare a major national emergency, invoke the Insurrection Act, and hurl these armed forces and police state muscle against a defenseless Congress and populace. (Recall the January 6, 2021, assault on Congress.) The abyss would have been breached.
With our society in a catastrophic convulsion, the economy collapsing, what would be the next steps? Like the Pentagon that anticipates worst-case domestic scenarios on possible violent “blowbacks” against U.S. military actions abroad, Americans should start thinking about the unthinkable. Such foreshadowings may make us far more determined NOW to thwart, stop, and repeal the fascist dictatorship which Der Führer Donald Trump is rooting ever more deeply every day. Little restraint on lawless Trump from the Congress and the Supreme Court, and only feeble, cowardly responses by the flailing Democratic Party (and the Bar Associations for that matter) thus far, make for the specter of violent anarchy and terror.
Trump has fatalistic traits. Armageddon shapes his ultimate worldview. Ponder that for a dictator with his finger on more than the nuclear trigger.
Again, Aristotle got it right over 2300 years ago, “Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
https://www.alternet.org/trump-s-worst-crimes-and-destructions-haven-t-even-happened-yet
Guardian: Trump administration cuts New York City’s anti-terrorism funding days after skyscraper attack
Federal Emergency Management Agency says city will receive $64m less this year from its urban area security fund
The Trump administration said it would cut terrorism prevention funding for New York City, according to a grant notice posted days after a gunman killed four people inside a Manhattan skyscraper.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) stated in a grant notice posted on Friday that New York City would receive $64m less this year from its urban area security fund. The amount was listed in a single line of an 80-page Fema notice on the grant program.
US Congress created the program to help cities prevent terrorist attacks.
“It makes absolutely no sense, and no justification has been given to cut NY’s allocation given the rise in the threat environment,” a spokesperson for the New York state division of homeland security and emergency services said in a statement on Monday afternoon.
Manhattan has been the site of two attacks on high-profile corporate executives in the last year. The most recent attack came from a gunman armed with an assault-style rifle in late July, who killed four people inside an office building that houses the headquarters of the NFL and several major financial firms.
New York governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, highlighted the attack in her late July letter to the US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem, asking why the Trump administration had not announced the amounts each city would receive from the program this year. Fema is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Noem’s office did not respond to two messages from Reuters asking why the federal government cut New York’s funding.
In December 2024, the chief executive of insurance giant UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was shot dead on the street in Manhattan in a targeted attack. And security has been particularly tight in New York City ever since the al-Qaida terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, which killed almost 3,000 people in lower Manhattan when Islamist extremists flew hijacked passenger jets into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Fema uses “an analysis of relative risk of terrorism” to decide how much money cities will receive, according to the grant notice posted on Friday. The agency may change the amounts later, according to the notice.
The Mamdani effect: how his win spurred more than 10,000 progressives to consider run for officeRead more
In 2023, the agency considered city visitor counts, population density and proximity to international borders, among other factors, to determine the totals, according to a report signed by then Fema administrator Deanne Criswell.
Fema has been decreasing terrorism prevention money for New York City each year since at least fiscal year 2022. The drop is much more drastic this year at 41% year-over-year.
The New York City police department has used the funding in the past to pay for the Domain Awareness System, a network of cameras, license plate readers and detection devices, according to a 2016 statement from the former mayor Bill de Blasio’s office.
Trump administration cuts New York City’s anti-terrorism funding days after skyscraper attack
Federal Emergency Management Agency says city will receive $64m less this year from its urban area security fund
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/05/new-york-city-anti-terrorism-funding-trump-cuts
Rolling Stone: ICE Taps FEMA Employees to Help Ramp Up Deportation Blitz
Some FEMA employees are being forcibly reassigned to help carry out Trump’s brutal immigration crackdown
The Department of Homeland Security has moved to forcibly reassign a subset of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) employees to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), threatening them with termination if they do not agree.
According to an email obtained by The American Prospect, a “select” number of probationary employees at FEMA were informed that they would be reassigned to positions “located at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Office (ICE).”
“You will receive the position description and information about new position separately,” the email continued. “You may either accept or decline this MDR within seven (7) calendar days from your receipt of this letter. … If you choose to decline this reassignment, or accept but fail to report for duty, you may be subject to removal from Federal service.”
In a statement to The Washington Post, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin confirmed the authenticity of the email and the decision to bolster ICE operations through FEMA. “Through the One Big Beautiful Bill, DHS is adopting an all-hands-on-deck strategy to recruit 10,000 new ICE agents,” she said. “To support this effort, select FEMA employees will temporarily be detailed to ICE for 90 days to assist with hiring and vetting … Their deployment will NOT disrupt FEMA’s critical operations. FEMA remains fully prepared for Hurricane Season.”
The Post reported that dozens of FEMA employees have been reassigned.
The move comes as ICE embarks on a nationwide recruitment effort aimed at intensifying its already brutal crackdown on undocumented immigration. As the agency attempts to access more funds and personnel, FEMA has become a target for ransacking. Last month, DHS reallocated $608 million in FEMA funds to various states for the construction and expansion of migrant detention centers.
DHS is now taking personnel from the disaster relief agency while appealing to the public to join its ranks. DHS posted to social media on Wednesday that prospective ICE agents would no longer be required to hold an undergraduate degree to apply.
“Serve your country! Defend your culture! No undergraduate degree required!” the post read. The agency also announced that it would be removing the department’s age cap for applicants in its quest to hire 10,000 new agents, prompting White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to encourage prospective applicants to “fulfill your destiny.”
In a statement to reporters, Trump Border Czar Tom Homan elaborated on the new policy. “You got a lot of patriots, I think the age limits are decades old,” he said. “If someone comes in and they’re 55, maybe they can’t carry a badge and gun but they can certainly do administrative duties.”
“I’m 63 and I would love to put a badge and gun on and go do these things,” he added.
As previously reported by Rolling Stone, ICE has listed job openings in over 25 cities across the country. “Are you ready to defend the homeland?” one posting read. “Launch a dynamic and rewarding career as a Deportation Officer with Enforcement Removal Operations (ERO) at ICE! Join a dedicated team safeguarding U.S. borders and upholding immigration laws, playing a key role in defending our nation.”
Quasi-celebrities are joining in on the recruitment effort, as well. In a video posted on social media, washed up Superman actor Dean Cain encouraged his followers to “join ICE” to “help save America.” Cain seemingly forgot that his claim to fame is his portrayal of a literal alien often at odds with the federal government.
Hired to aid disaster recovery, Shanghai’d to staff ICE!
Associated Press: Trump executive order gives politicians control over all federal grants, alarming researchers
An executive order signed by President Donald Trump late Thursday aims to give political appointees power over the billions of dollars in grants awarded by federal agencies. Scientists say it threatens to undermine the process that has helped make the U.S. the world leader in research and development.
The order requires all federal agencies, including FEMA, the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, to appoint officials responsible for reviewing federal funding opportunities and grants, so that they “are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest.”
It also requires agencies to make it so that current and future federal grants can be terminated at any time — including during the grant period itself.
Agencies cannot announce new funding opportunities until the new protocols are in place, according to the order.
The Trump administration said these changes are part of an effort to “strengthen oversight” and “streamline agency grantmaking.” Scientists say the order will cripple America’s scientific engine by placing control over federal research funds in the hands of people who are influenced by politics and lack relevant expertise.
“This is taking political control of a once politically neutral mechanism for funding science in the U.S.,” said Joseph Bak-Coleman, a scientist studying group decision-making at the University of Washington.
The changes will delay grant review and approval, slowing “progress for cures and treatments that patients and families across the country urgently need,” said the Association of American Medical Colleges in a statement.
The administration has already terminated thousands of research grants at agencies like the NSF and NIH, including on topics like transgender health, vaccine hesitancy, misinformation and diversity, equity and inclusion.
The order could affect emergency relief grants doled out by FEMA, public safety initiatives funded by the Department of Justice and public health efforts supported by the Centers for Disease Control. Experts say the order is likely to be challenged in court.
Fox News: Trump admin cutting $20M in DC security funding after federal law enforcement ordered to increase presence
‘If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take federal control of the city,’ Trump said
The Trump administration plans to cut millions in security funding for Washington, D.C., despite the president also directing federal law enforcement to increase its presence in the city because of its “totally out of control” crime.
In a grant notice posted last week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) said that D.C.’s urban security fund would receive $25.2 million, a 44% year-over-year reduction.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, said on Friday it slashed funds to multiple cities to be consistent with the “current threat landscape.” Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Jersey City also had their security funds cut, but the decrease in D.C. was the largest for any urban area that received funding from the program last fiscal year.
DHS has “observed a shift from large-scale, coordinated attacks like 9/11 to simpler, small-scale assaults, heightening the vulnerability of soft targets and crowded spaces in urban areas.”
Violent crime in D.C. dropped by 35% between 2023 and 2024, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for D.C. said in December, stating that there were 3,388 incidents last year compared to 5,215 incidents the year before.
Crimes that saw significant drops last year included homicide, which was down 30%, sexual abuse down 22% and assault with a dangerous weapon down 27%. Robberries and burglaries slightly dropped to 8% for both.
The federal funding covers security needs in the National Capital Region, which includes D.C. and surrounding cities in Maryland and Virginia.
FEMA has $553.5 million to spend to support cities across the U.S. to boost security. It is unclear how much of the National Capital Region’s total security budget comes from that program.
In the past, local officials have used federal funds for hazmat training, hiring officers and replacing fiber in their emergency communications network, according to a 2016 report from D.C.’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency.
On Thursday, Trump directed federal law enforcement to increase their presence in the nation’s capital, following a string of violent crimes, including an incident in which former DOGE staffer Edward Coristine, nicknamed “Big Balls”, was beaten in the city’s streets earlier this week.
“Crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Local ‘youths’ and gang members, some only 14, 15, and 16-years-old, are randomly attacking, mugging, maiming, and shooting innocent Citizens, at the same time knowing that they will be almost immediately released. They are not afraid of Law Enforcement because they know nothing ever happens to them, but it’s going to happen now!”
The president said that the nation’s capital “must be safe, clean, and beautiful for all Americans and, importantly, for the World to see.”
“If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore,” he continued. “Perhaps it should have been done a long time ago, then this incredible young man, and so many others, would not have had to go through the horrors of Violent Crime.”
