2025 A Look Back: Where’s Waldo award
Found him!
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If there were an award for being hardest to find while holding an important job, Michael Whatley would have no competition, because he’s the only entry.
President Donald Trump named Whatley Western North Carolina’s hurricane recovery czar at a Jan. 24 briefing, saying he wanted Whatley in charge of making sure “everything goes well.” Trump praised Whatley’s work and assured folks Whatley would be the one to fix it.
To be fair, Trump made a rare political mistake when he pinned this unfixable problem on Whatley — America’s laughably and historically poor disaster recovery apparatus that’s been ridiculed over decades because of good ol’ fashioned ineptitude alongside a stupefying reliance on outdated systems and inefficient bureaucracy. Trump dispatched Whatley on this fool’s errand just ahead of Whatley’s run for a U.S. Senate seat that’s also being pursued by a political juggernaut who’s never lost a race.
Nearly 15 months after Hurricane Helene’s floods tore through the mountains on Sept. 27, 2024, leaving roughly $60 billion in damage and thousands of families displaced, local officials, homeowners and small business owners are still waiting on meaningful federal aid. At the six-month mark, only about 4% of the need had been met. Near the one-year anniversary the state reported about 9%. Today, it’s not a whole lot more.
Whatley’s critics say he’s rarely, if ever, been spotted in the disaster zone he’s supposed to lead. Records show he’s had only one conversation this year with Matt Calabria, head of the state’s recovery office.
So raise a glass to the Where’s Whatley … err, the Where’s Waldo award — for the recovery czar who’s been harder to find than federal help and whose biggest disaster still lies 11 months down the road.
