Michael Whatley brags about Helene recovery efforts in new ad. Here are the facts | Opinion
As western North Carolina residents continue to wait for relief in the wake of Hurricane Helene, North Carolina’s U.S. Senate race features competing narratives about who is really to blame.
Republicans are trying to pin the rocky response to Hurricane Helene on former Gov. Roy Cooper. A new ad from GOP candidate Michael Whatley accuses Cooper of “[failing] to show up” and says Whatley is “helping President Trump deliver relief for North Carolina families.”
But before blaming Cooper for Helene, Republicans might want to look inward. While Cooper and former President Joe Biden were in charge when Helene hit the state last year, it’s been almost nine months since they left office. That means it’s also been nine months since President Donald Trump promised to make Helene victims his priority, and since Trump tapped Whatley to lead recovery efforts in the state.
That’s nine months in which Whatley and Trump have failed to deliver much-needed aid in a timely manner, creating obstacles to recovery.
Whatley has “rarely, if ever, been visible in Helene’s disaster zone” and has “done little to alter the fundamental trajectory of Helene recovery,” according to Smoky Mountain News. As far as anyone can tell, his participation in recovery efforts has been limited to his attendance at a few meetings
It’s taking a long time for Helene victims to get the relief they need, at least at the federal level. So far, federal aid has only covered about 10% of the total damage caused by the storm, a figure that’s tiny in comparison to the federal government’s contribution to recovery efforts for similar storms. As Gov. Josh Stein’s office pointed out in a recent request for more funding, storms that were similarly devastating, such as Hurricane Sandy, saw 70% of the cost covered by the federal government.
There’s been significant delays even in distributing funds that Congress has already approved, thanks to a new policy that requires Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to personally approve any FEMA expenditure that exceeds $100,000. (Meanwhile, ProPublica reported that Noem recently expedited disaster relief to Florida at the behest of a political donor, and flew down to tour the affected area herself.) Given that nearly every Helene-related expenditure exceeds that amount, it’s had a bottleneck effect that has made reimbursement extremely slow. It took a rare act of defiance from U.S. Sen. Ted Budd to get that process moving again.
Even North Carolina Republicans are left wondering when help will arrive, and why it’s taking so long.
“The feds have been, obviously, slower than anyone anticipated,” state Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, who represents part of western North Carolina, said at a legislative hearing last week. “... We are on every member of Congress, we have all hands on deck on a regular basis, talking to these agencies, to try to get them to move some money.”
Needless to say, many western North Carolina residents are frustrated. There’s a petition calling for Whatley’s removal from the FEMA Review Council, and his speech at the Salt & Light Conference in Marion on Helene’s one-year anniversary, where he praised the region’s “resilience,” was met with protests.
Trump said in January that Whatley would be “in charge of making sure everything goes well, adding that if Michael Whatley does half as good a job for North Carolina as he did for my campaign, we’ll be very happy.”
But things aren’t going well, so where is he? What is he doing to make it better? Perhaps Whatley has been more vocal an advocate for western North Carolina than it publicly appears. But it doesn’t matter if the community can’t even tell if he’s showing up, and to brag about in campaign ads is a slap in the face to residents who feel they’ve been left behind. Rather than playing the blame game and campaigning for the job he wants, maybe Whatley should focus a little more on the job he was already given.
This story was originally published October 6, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
