Trump tweets support for FEMA church reimbursement

A church flooded by Hurricane Harvey — (Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

President Trump sent out a tweet Friday evening advocating Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reimbursement for religious institutions.

While FEMA did reimburse some churches for disaster relief efforts in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, it is agency policy to only provide reimbursement if less than half of the organization's facilities are used for religious purposes. Three churches are suing FEMA for relief aid to repair structural damage from Hurricane Harvey; all three provided hurricane relief, with one sheltering 70 people and serving some 8,000 meals in Harvey's aftermath.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.