Russel Honoré to Newsmax: Trump Must 'Fix' FEMA, Not 'Get Rid of It'

Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who commanded Joint Task Force Katrina in the wake of Hurricane Katrina's deadly strike 20 years ago, on Saturday urged President Donald Trump on Newsmax to elevate the Federal Emergency Management Agency to Cabinet status and warned Americans to always be ready to evacuate in the face of disaster.

"Please, Mr. President, bring FEMA as a Cabinet member," Honoré told "America Right Now." "Have it work directly for you. We need FEMA. Don't get rid of it. Fix it, Mr. President. Bring it under you."

His comments echoed an MSNBC opinion piece he wrote this past week, in which he said that FEMA is now "in worse shape than any agency."

In the article, he wrote that much of the institutional knowledge gained after Katrina "has been lost and our best practices for disaster response destroyed," and noted that under Trump, "a third of FEMA's workforce has been slashed."

Honoré also argued in his article that "emergency management is a mission on its own, not a part-time function of Homeland Security. Every family must be prepared to evacuate themselves and their neighbors before the storm, not wait for the government to arrive."

On Newsmax, Honoré recalled that during Katrina, he self-deployed from Atlanta to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, before being formally named commander.

"When I got there and took a look at the coast of Mississippi, I called my boss in Colorado," he said. "He called me back a couple of hours later and told me I would be the commander of Joint Task Force Katrina. And on Wednesday morning at 9:47, I landed at the Superdome. It was a sight to behold to see our fellow citizens outside the Superdome, maybe 15,000 of them standing, waiting to be evacuated."

Inside, he said, "I talked to the mayor, and he said the priority is evacuation. We need your help in getting the evacuation done. I talked to the governor. She said the same thing ... and [we] worked with the National Guard to get the evacuation started."

When asked what moment stands out most, Honoré said it was "the look in the eyes of the people when we landed. The look of desperation."

He described seeing "a lady pushing her toddler in a shopping cart, trying to make her way to the ramp to get into the Superdome. And that gave me chill bumps that we had to move, and we had to move fast. I told them, I said, 'y'all looking at a calendar, I'm looking at a watch. We got to get this done within hours.'"

Honoré credited forecasters and the White House for early action before the storm hit.

"We had good early warning. The National Weather Service did a good job on Friday and Saturday," he recalled. "The president did a pre-landfall declaration on Saturday, which was only the second time it had been done. That helped evacuate 80% of New Orleans before Katrina struck."

But the failures of the levees changed everything, Honoré said.

"Everything was working good with Katrina until the levees broke," he explained. "The federal government was overmatched because the city flooded with maybe 60,000 to 70,000 people in water."

Looking back, Honoré said federal investments after the storm gave New Orleans "a magnificent storm protection system" and spurred growth in hotels and restaurants.

But, he cautioned, "what has remained is there's still a large poor population in and around New Orleans that basically work in the hospitality industry. And there's still poverty in New Orleans, and there's still work to do there to raise those people out of poverty because the people didn't evacuate. Well, generally speaking, the poor people. And we got work to do there in that part of town."

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