MAJOR:
00:02:45
Right there, right where we were. And fortunately, that area-- fortunately for those folks, that area was relatively unscathed, relatively speaking. But when I think it was Noem or somebody who was saying that we should eliminate FEMA, my immediate reaction was that's clearly coming from somebody who's never managed a major storm crisis. Because if you think about why FEMA was created, it was in the aftermath of a horrible response to a massive storm. And we realized that storms have this nasty habit of not honoring state lines and county lines, and they just go wherever the hell they want to go. And in this case, it went through Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, up into West Virginia, the western part of Virginia. That was the footprint of Helene, 250 people dead, $50 billion of damage in North Carolina alone. Do we really want-- when they were originally talking about eliminating FEMA, I asked people, do we really want to play paper, scissors, rock to figure out what state or what county leads a disaster? OK, storm's coming. It's off the Antilles. Not really sure where it's going to go. Everybody pick the straw, figure out who's going to manage this response. You have any idea how inefficient that would be? You pick your model. You pick the European model. You pick the-- That's right. Well, if it goes up that string, you'll be responsible. It makes no sense. Now, if you want to make FEMA leaner, if you want to push the staff out of DC into regional response areas, if you want to actually act on some of the reforms that we proposed over the past couple of years, great idea. But eliminating FEMA as the main convener of other resources-- the other thing about FEMA is it's fairly light in terms of the people that ultimately are on the ground. This is managing state disaster response, local disaster response, the Baptist on Mission, all of the American Red Cross, all the people that come around. They're pre-positioned most of the time. Yeah, moving water. Yeah, can you imagine if every time we have a new game plan-- right now, we know a storm is about to come. There are already assets that were being pre-positioned for the first named storm. Just get ready, guys. May not come. May come. They're ready. They're on the ready. They have that playbook. Can it be more efficient? Of course. Can you cut through red tape and go right down to local government funding of matters? Absolutely. But to eliminate it? That's just naive. It's a lack of experience. As is plainly evident, lunch was very, very good. You can watch my full interview with North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis on our YouTube page and your favorite podcast platform.
