The state has become a testing ground under an eviscerated FEMA and a missing-in-action “recovery czar,” Michael Whatley, with big political ambitions.
Broken promises: The aftermath of Hurricane Helene in October 2024 in Swannanoa, North Carolina. Two years later, the state’s recovery remains painfully slow and uneven.(Mario Tama / Getty Images)
In late January 2025, President Donald Trump took his first trip outside of Washington, DC, after returning to office for his second term. His destination: North Carolina, which four months earlier had been devastated by Hurricane Helene—the deadliest storm to hit the United States since Hurricane Maria in 2017. Helene battered communities in six states, killing hundreds and displacing tens of thousands, but western North Carolina was hit the hardest, and in a series of stops in the region, Trump pledged to rebuild after the storm. “I promised that I’d come back to western North Carolina to help the people of the state, and today, here I am to deliver on that promise,” Trump declared in Swannanoa, 10 miles east of Asheville. “Under the Trump administration, the days of betrayal and neglect are over.”
But Trump delivered two other messages during his visit that seized headlines and may have surprised those assembled for the photo ops. Trump had proposed “getting rid of” the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) altogether, saying during his stop in the town of Fletcher, “It’s very bureaucratic, very slow.” He doubled down in Swannanoa: “If it was up to me right now, I’d end it right now.”
He also announced that Michael Whatley, a GOP operative and Trump ally, would lead the administration’s recovery effort. “I’d like to put Michael in charge of making sure everything goes well,” Trump said in Fletcher. In Swannanoa, he added, “Michael Whatley is going to be very much in charge.”
But two years after Helene, North Carolina’s recovery remains painfully slow and uneven, hampered by a federal response that has been starved of money and hobbled by turmoil inside Trump’s FEMA. Western North Carolina has become a testing ground for what happens when increasingly destructive disasters collide with a weakened response system—and whether the US government can still deliver when catastrophe strikes.
The troubled recovery after Helene could also become a political reckoning. Whatley, Trump’s handpicked “recovery czar,” is now in a close race for a critical US Senate seat in North Carolina, which has put his record on Helene—and the administration’s handling of disasters more broadly—under new scrutiny.
Helene slammed into Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 4 hurricane on September 26, 2024, and careened through Georgia and into southern Appalachia, unleashing a record rainfall and historic levels of flooding. North Carolina’s western counties took the brunt of the disaster, with 100 deaths occurring there out of Helene’s more than 250.
The storm damaged or destroyed more than 70,000 homes in the state. Water systems in two dozen cities and towns broke down because of flooding and fast-moving debris; Asheville, the biggest city in western North Carolina, didn’t have potable water for almost two months after Helene.
The region’s steep mountain terrain made Helene especially destructive, and recovery especially difficult. More than 2,000 landslides damaged homes and roads; in Fairview, southeast of Asheville, 10 landslides converged, killing 13 people. Entire communities were cut off as 5,000 miles of state-maintained roads and some 8,000 private roads, culverts, and bridges were damaged. The disaster zone also included 138,000 mobile homes, leaving poor and working-class residents especially vulnerable to wind, flooding, and falling rocks.
North Carolina has made remarkable progress in Helene’s aftermath. As of July 2026, the state’s public-recovery dashboard reported that all but one of the 1,588 storm-ravaged public roads have been reopened, and 625 of the 880 damaged public bridges have been fixed. Officials say that 99 percent of public drinking-water and 93 percent of wastewater systems are back online.
Other issues are taking more time. Of more than 3,000 sites targeted by the state’s Private Road and Bridge Program, which was set up to reimburse owners of property damaged by Helene, only 145 had been completed by late July. In a letter to Congress that month, North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Josh Stein said that 1,000 homes have been repaired or rebuilt and another 2,800 are in progress, but some 56,000 homes remain damaged or destroyed.
Part of the slow recovery is simply the challenge of rebuilding after a major disaster. “You’re not going to get back to where you were in three or four years,” Stein said in July. “You have to be committed to this work for the long haul.”
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But western North Carolina’s recovery has also been hindered by a federal response that many local leaders describe as inadequate, delayed, and chaotic.
The main problem is that Trump and Congress haven’t provided enough resources. Stein said the total amount of federal funding that had been allocated to the state as of July was about $9.3 billion, less than 16 percent of the estimated damages of $60 billion.
That’s glaringly out of step with the federal government’s response to past disasters. After Hurricane Sandy stormed up the Atlantic coast in 2012, federal aid covered 78 percent of the estimated $88 billion in damages. In the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Maria, federal dollars accounted for 73 percent of costs.
To plug the shortfall, North Carolina has put up more than $4 billion of its own money. That includes $175 million to repair private roads and bridges, utility assistance for more than 10,000 households, and more than $100 million for small businesses affected by the storm. Trump hasn’t asked for, and Congress hasn’t appropriated, any new funding since Helene hit.
“Too many projects in western North Carolina have stalled due to insufficient funding,” North Carolina Republican Senator Ted Budd testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee in July, urging Congress to add Helene aid to Trump’s $87.6 billion supplemental request, largely for the Pentagon and the war in Iran. “When I visit western North Carolina, I see the impacts the delays in recovery have caused. Debris still clogs the waterways. Facilities that provide drinking water and manage wastewater have yet to be rebuilt. Most concerning, some homeowners are paying mortgages on properties that are still unlivable or yet to be rebuilt.”
Jon Council, an organizer for the grassroots group Down Home North Carolina, said the state’s progress was remarkable given the paltry level of federal support. “I’m really happy with what the state has done, particularly the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina,” Council told The Nation and Facing South.
The meager federal spending on Helene may signal something bigger than a momentary bout of stinginess. In June 2025, Trump renewed his call to end FEMA and said he plans to push the responsibility for responding to natural disasters “back to the states”—just as he’s done in North Carolina. “The governors can handle” these disasters, Trump told reporters. “If they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be governor.”
The Trump administration has backed away, for now, from abolishing FEMA outright. But much of the agency has been eviscerated during Trump’s second term.
Since January 2025, FEMA has lost more than 4,300 personnel because of terminations and resignations; that includes over half of its senior executive staff. The agency has churned through five administrators, and only one, the previous leader Bob Fenton, had notable disaster-management experience. As of June of this year, seven of FEMA’s 10 regional-administrator positions were vacant.
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Under Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, who was fired in March, FEMA was dogged by reports of power struggles, political favoritism, and sheer incompetence. Noem hired Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, as a special government employee to be her “de facto chief of staff.” Lewandowski in turn hired an outside contractor, Kara Voorhies, an accountant who agency sources say became FEMA’s “shadow administrator,” with unusual control over access to the agency and how and where funds were spent.
Lewandowski’s and Voorhies’s influence over spending was especially notable because Noem had instituted a controversial rule that all DHS expenditures over $100,000 had to be approved by her office. A Senate investigation found that the burdensome requirement held up more than 1,000 FEMA grants and contracts for disaster-relief projects in one three-month period in 2025. The head of FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue division, Ken Pagurek, resigned in July 2025 after Noem’s office delayed funding for call-center response and other relief in the wake of historic flooding in Texas that killed more than 130 people.
As the expert staff left, unqualified leadership moved in. In December 2025, the White House installed the far-right conspiracy theorist Gregg Phillips to head the Office of Response and Recovery, FEMA’s biggest division. Phillips had no disaster-management experience, but he championed Trump’s false allegations of widespread election fraud. Phillips came under scrutiny when it surfaced that he claimed to have once been involuntarily teleported into a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia; he left FEMA in June.
FEMA’s willingness and ability to quickly respond to disasters has deteriorated. Andrew Rumbach, a disaster-policy expert at the Urban Institute, found that in Trump’s second term, the agency has denied 30 percent of states’ requests for disaster declarations, almost twice the rate of the four previous administrations. Declarations have also taken an average of almost 70 days to decide; before, it took just 22.
Trump removed Noem from the DHS after congressional hearings highlighted what one administration official called “many unfortunate leadership failures,” including her handling of Helene. Lewandowski and Voorhies left with her, and the DHS is conducting an investigation into their roles. Noem’s replacement, the former Oklahoma senator Markwayne Mullin, has reportedly ended her $100,000 spending-review policy. And in August, the Senate confirmed Cameron Hamilton, a former Navy SEAL, to head FEMA; he had briefly served as the agency’s interim leader in 2025 before being fired after publicly opposing Trump’s call to abolish it.
The administration’s failures in western North Carolina are especially glaring given Trump’s elevation of Michael Whatley as “recovery czar” after Helene.
Born in Michigan, Whatley and his family moved to the mountain resort town of Blowing Rock, North Carolina, when he was in high school; there, he got his start in politics volunteering for the state’s archconservative US senator, Jesse Helms. After law school and stints in Washington, Whatley began a 12-year career as a lobbyist for oil and natural-gas companies, including a multiyear campaign to expand offshore oil drilling in the Atlantic.
In 2019, Whatley was elected chair of the North Carolina Republican Party. He earned Trump’s appreciation when, after the 2020 presidential election, Whatley organized “Stop the Steal” rallies across North Carolina and amplified Trump’s false claims that “massive fraud” had changed the race’s outcome. In recognition of his fealty, and with an eye toward North Carolina’s battleground status in the upcoming presidential contest, Trump endorsed Whatley’s successful bid to serve as chair of the Republican National Committee in February 2024, with North Carolina native (and Trump daughter-in-law) Lara Trump serving as co-chair.
Whatley and the RNC’s success in helping Trump win the 2024 election made him, in the president’s eyes, an ideal pick to lead the post-Helene recovery. “If Michael Whatley does half as good a job for North Carolina as he did for my campaign, we’ll be very happy,” Trump said during his January 2025 visit.
But according to sources who spoke with The Nation and Facing South, there’s little evidence that Whatley has done much for their communities in his role as recovery czar.
This past July, The Nation and Facing South interviewed four mayors of North Carolina cities and towns hit hard by Helene, and all of them said that Whatley hadn’t contacted them to discuss relief and recovery after the storm.
In Boone, the location of Appalachian State University and home to about 20,000 residents, Helene’s floodwaters collapsed roads and caused more than 140 housing units to be condemned. Boone’s mayor, Dalton George (who was mayor pro tem when Helene struck), said he’s worked with many Democratic and Republican officials since the storm but has never heard from Whatley. “I would welcome a call from Michael Whatley right now if he has some solutions [for] the ongoing recovery,” George said. “But I’ve not had that opportunity.”
Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer says Whatley has never called her either, even though she contacted him after getting his phone number during a chance encounter at an event. She’s not sure what he’s been doing in his role as recovery czar: “As far as I can tell, it’s a title to hold so he can run for office with a job title.”
In the small river town of Marshall, where floodwaters crested at 27 feet and swept away 10 buildings, Mayor Aaron Haynie speaks with pride about the community’s bipartisan rebuilding effort. But he says Whatley has never reached out to help.
Mayor Zeb Smathers of Canton, a town 20 minutes west of Asheville that was still rebuilding after 2021’s Tropical Storm Fred when Helene hit, is more scathing. “Whatley, do your job,” Smathers said. “He was going to be the recovery czar but hasn’t been here, hasn’t done anything.”
There is also scant evidence that Whatley worked on Helene recovery with county governments, where much of the disaster response is coordinated. The Nation and Facing South sent public-records requests to 17 western counties heavily impacted by the storm, asking for e-mails and other documentation of Whatley’s involvement from January 2025 to June 2026. Of the 14 that responded, 11 had no record of Whatley reaching out about Helene. In the three counties that reported contact with Whatley, there appear to have been one-off meetings, with no record of any follow-up steps.
His absence earned him the “Where’s Waldo?” award from the Smoky Mountain News in December 2025. “Whatley’s critics say he’s rarely, if ever, been spotted in the disaster zone he’s supposed to lead,” the paper wrote, adding that records show he had only one conversation in 2025 with Matt Calabria, the head of the Governor’s Recovery Office for Western North Carolina.
Even as money failed to move and FEMA sank into disarray, Whatley was praising Noem’s leadership at the DHS and her role in the response. In September 2025, he said on a radio program that Noem was “doing a great job” helping North Carolina after the storm. Two months later, he posted on X: “Thank you, President Trump and @Sec_Noem, for your steadfast leadership and commitment to helping North Carolina communities rebuild after Hurricane Helene.”
At the same time, Whatley has distanced himself from the “recovery czar” label, focusing instead on his role with the FEMA Review Council—a body that Trump created to shut down FEMA but which, after months of delays, proposed smaller reforms this spring. According to audio obtained by The Assembly, a North Carolina online magazine, when Whatley was asked at an event in May whether he’d get rid of FEMA, he replied, “I’ve suggested the president do that.”
Asked to comment for this story, Whatley’s campaign spokesman D.J. Griffin e-mailed a statement (which he prefaced by saying, “Thanks for checking in dude. A lotta Libtards wouldn’t be so courteous…”): “Michael Whatley served on the FEMA Review Council Board. If you look very very very very closely, you’ll notice there’s no czar in that description. Not a czar of any sort.” Griffin also said Whatley had worked with Republicans to “deliver more than $10.75 billion in federal hurricane relief for North Carolina—more than any natural disaster in state history. But the job is not yet done and Michael will continue speaking with local leaders about what they need help with.” (A state official involved in the recovery told The Nation and Facing South that Whatley’s funding estimate likely includes $1.5 billion set aside for hazard-mitigation projects; however, the precise amount and timing of the money is still uncertain.)
Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper, Whatley’s Democratic opponent in this year’s Senate election, has led in recent polls—and has made Helene recovery a central line of attack.
“The president named Michael Whatley as the recovery czar for western North Carolina, and so far, he has failed miserably,” Cooper said in January. “We have the most damaging storm in the history of North Carolina; billions of dollars are going to be needed to recover. Yet the federal government has written checks for only a small percentage of it.”
Two years after Trump promised that the “days of betrayal and neglect are over,” western North Carolina’s troubled recovery looks like a warning for communities around the country facing the next climate-fueled disaster.
“Folks need to pay attention to how [the Helene] recovery has gone,” Jon Council says. “Because this may be the playbook that we’re looking at for a lot of future disasters.”
Chris KrommChris Kromm is the executive director of the Durham, North Carolina–based Institute for Southern Studies and publisher of its online magazine, Facing South.