People who inhabited the wasteland that followed Hurricane Katrina in 2005 can tell you stories about the local government official who criticized the government’s insufficient response by wearing a T-shirt that played on FEMA’s acronym, which read, “Fix Everything My Ass!”
Indeed, it’s hard to think of a federal agency that people in South Louisiana hated more those days than the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Even now, as the 20th anniversary of the deadly flooding approaches, it’s unclear how much the hard feelings toward FEMA have ebbed.
Why do Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s words in a Cabinet meeting Monday that she plans to eliminate FEMA sound so ominous and threatening?
So why do Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s words in a Cabinet meeting Monday that she plans to eliminate FEMA sound so ominous and threatening? Because she serves in an administration that doesn’t appear to believe the American people should have any expectations that their government will help them. And that’s not the mindset that should guide a rethinking of emergency management.
It seems safe to assume that President Donald Trump’s aim in getting rid of FEMA is not to find a better way to help people who suffer weather-related catastrophes but to find a way to help as little as it can — if at all. There’s no reason to believe that an administration that at times appears to harbor a simmering resentment for people drawing Social Security would be openhearted toward people suddenly dispossessed by a storm.
It’s also likely that Trump, as he so often is, is being guided by grievance. “A whistleblower testified that some FEMA employees refused to help people who displayed Trump signs on their properties,” he said in remarks in Fletcher, North Carolina, on Jan. 24 about Hurricane Helene recovery. “That’s not too nice, is it?”
A FEMA supervisor deployed to Florida was fired in November for telling her team to avoid such properties, but her instructions may have been a consequence of incendiary rhetoric from Trump and his supporters. Marn’i Washington, the FEMA supervisor who was sent to the Sunshine State, told CNN she’d passed along the orders she’d received. Her team had “registered Trump supporters” and “given them service as well,” she said, but FEMA was “implementing avoidance and de-escalation and unfortunately that trend ran with those Trump signs.”
It’s important to remember that Trump supporters spread lies that FEMA was an anti-Republican force coming to seize people’s property and not let them return home. That was followed by reports of FEMA officials’ being threatened. In October, in North Carolina, officials got a tip about an armed man who may have been plotting to hurt FEMA employees. The man, who reportedly had a handgun and a rifle in his possession, was charged with “going armed to the terror of the people.” FEMA officials suspended all its door-to-door visits in that state.
Trump, speaking in Fletcher in January, said that during his first term, “we had a pretty good FEMA.” If he believes that, then it seems like he’d want to have a pretty good FEMA again. But what we’ve seen already in Trump’s second term suggests he’s more interested in breaking government than running it well.
A statement Tuesday from the Department of Homeland Security says that the agency is “cutting out wasteful spending and bureaucracy that slows down relief efforts” and that “President Trump and Secretary Noem know that disaster recovery efforts are best led by state and local officials not federal bureaucrats.”
But FEMA is the big government response that many communities need when a disaster overwhelms its resources. Reforming it, improving it, is welcomed. Getting rid of it with not even an expressed concept of a plan is irresponsible and dangerous.
FEMA is rarely as speedy as disaster victims or government officials in disaster zones need it to be.
FEMA is rarely, if ever, as speedy as disaster victims or government officials in disaster zones need it to be. It’s slow, in part, because of the amount of paperwork government officials are expected to complete for funding. And because one its guiding philosophies is that affected people and governments shouldn’t profit from a disaster, the agency generally seeks to put things back as they were and not as they ought to be.
“[Y]ou pretty much are relegated to building it back the way it was,” a Louisiana recovery official said after the hurricanes of 2005. And in a 2022 interview, Justin Dorazio, then a research associate at the Center for American Progress, said it was still true that “a lot of the programs within FEMA, they do require things to be paid for damages that were incurred.” Building back better isn’t the goal. Things that were flooded, burned, blown away or otherwise destroyed are, Dorazio said, “to be restored to as they were.”
Though such a policy is consistent with how homeowners’ insurance often works — depreciation is factored into lost items — it makes little sense to approach the rebuilding of a city hall or fire station that way.
Even so, America needs a FEMA — one that’s more nimble and responsive and less bureaucratic. Two U.S. representatives from Florida, a Democrat and a Republican, filed a bill this week that would again make FEMA a stand-alone Cabinet agency. But it’s unlikely that bill will pass. It’s also unlikely that if the agency does survive, it’ll even meet Trump’s “pretty good” measure of success, given that his administration has indiscriminately fired federal workers in advance of hurricane season.
That “Fix Everything My Ass!” T-shirt worn in the tragic and bitter wake of Katrina worked as a joke because it sounded like something righteously angry people would say to the government. Pretty soon, it could be something the government says to us.