Speaker 1: We've been watching President Trump at a hurricane recovery briefing in Asheville, North Carolina, saying he intends to pass an executive order to overhaul or get rid of FEMA. He says the system might work better if the federal government pays states directly instead. The president also criticized the Biden administration's response to Hurricane Helene, calling it the disaster after the disaster.

Speaker 2: 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 is not good. I think when you have a problem like this, I think you want to go, 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, and they want to give you rules that you've never heard about. They want to bring people that aren't as good as the people you already have. And FEMA has turned out to be a disaster. And you could go back a long way. You could go back to Louisiana. You could go back to some of the things that took place in Texas. It turns out to be the state that ends up doing the work. It just complicates it. I think we're going to recommend that FEMA go away.

Speaker 1: After North Carolina, Trump then heads to California to survey the wildfire damage and the response there. I want to bring in ABC's Jay O'Brien on Capitol Hill for more on all that. Jay, how significant is this from Trump? Not only talking about overhauling FEMA, but the accusations he's launching against the organization for some of the things he says he's seeing in Nashville.

Speaker 3: Well, it's certainly vague as to exactly what his plans would be. The terminology there that the president used was that he would want to, quote-unquote, get rid of FEMA or overhaul it. And we just don't know what form that would take. Largely, FEMA's job is to do a few different things on the ground during a disaster. One is to provide direct relief to people, both a dollar amount that comes immediately after the disaster, and then to process claims from people who say, my home was damaged, my business was damaged, et cetera. They apply for disaster relief assistance from FEMA. FEMA adjudicates those claims and vets them and reviews the damage in some cases, and then cuts a check to the individual who made the claim. They also give money directly to various state emergency management departments who both prepare for disasters and respond to them. And so cutting FEMA out of that process, as the president just talked about, would certainly be tricky. And there are some state emergency management departments that are not built to do the kind of disaster relief that FEMA is. They handle search and rescue. In some cases, they handle preparation for disasters. And the immediate aftermath, like clearing debris. But cutting checks, assessing damage, those things that FEMA also does, there are certain states that just haven't built apparatuses that would be prepared for that. And so this idea of, quote, unquote, getting rid of FEMA, giving the bulk of the responsibility to the states, it's really unclear how that would pan out. And what the president is thinking here in terms of a timeline, is this an executive order that he wants to write and sign tomorrow? We've seen this administration move very quickly when it comes to executive orders and exerting the president's will on the functions of the federal government, Diane.

Speaker 1: Mary Alice, he also was asked about essentially strings attached to federal aid and whether that would happen in North Carolina. And he drew a distinction between North Carolina and California, saying that no, it wouldn't happen in North Carolina because essentially they were just hit with a natural disaster and nothing of their doing. Where it sounds like he's blaming California in some ways for the fires and the response to them. What did you make of that part of this briefing?

Speaker 4: Yeah, exactly. He has long blamed California for forest management issues, water management issues. Look, people on the ground in California admit that there have been challenges, but they also say they had faced an unprecedented historic drought this last year, that they had never seen fire conditions like they did this last year. We saw hurricane force winds in downtown Los Angeles blowing embers and debris and frankly wildfires into a city and urban population they had never encountered something like that. And it led to such a historic, devastating wildfires that took down entire neighborhoods like we saw. So look, people on the ground in California saying that that he's not basing his comments in fact, they've encouraged him to come. And I think there's a lot of folks in California that are telling us that they are glad the president is making the trip, but they are very worried that he's going to play politics with this funding. You know, on the tarmac earlier when he was talking to reporters, he also talked about everything from California's policies around voting. Of course, a lot of states don't want the federal government anywhere involved in telling them how to conduct their own elections and how to write their own voting laws in their states. So a lot of questions from Democrats, from people in California about whether Trump and Republicans here in DC are going to try to put conditions on aid, try to strong arm California into changing other policies unrelated to disasters or wildfires as a part of a condition of getting help from the federal government.

Speaker 1: Jay, how much would it take for him to implement some of the changes that he's floating here? And does he need Congress on board to do it?

Speaker 3: I mean, yes and no. FEMA has allocated line items in the federal budget. And so moving some of that money around, it's unclear how much Congress would need to get involved in that. But because FEMA is a sub agency of the Department of Homeland Security, the president can instruct DHS to do essentially what it would need to do to execute the president's will with its various sub agencies. You probably can't get rid of it entirely, but you could overhaul it, as Trump is saying here. And again, what form that takes is very much unclear. It's somewhat of an off-the-cuff comment. It's a comment that Trump first made earlier this week in his first television interview as president on Fox News with Sean Hannity. He's obviously continued it here at this gaggle with reporters. It's unclear how much this comment has been put to paper, meaning if there's an executive order ready to go to be signed by the president that would overhaul the agency or, quote-unquote, do away with it, as Trump has continued to say.

Speaker 1: All right. Mary Alice Parks, Jay O'Brien, thank you.