chaos in fema's future?
I did an earlier blog post about what might be in the Federal Emergency Management’s (FEMA) future, but I seem to have been a minimalist in some of my thinking. It had been suggested in some quarters that the split in disaster costs should shift more burden on the states, now at 75% federal and 25% state and local. Project 2025 suggested that split should be 25% federal and 75% state and local.
And then…Friday happened with the President making two different trips to disaster sites. The Politico article below provides a brief summary of some elements of that trip, but the NY Times article linked at the bottom has much more detail and analysis. I’ll provide a few thoughts on different elements of what was “tossed out” by the President to promote discussion.
ON THE ROAD AGAIN — Donald Trump is in North Carolina today surveying the damage wrought by last year’s Hurricane Helene. And he’s using the first trip of his second term to float a massive overhaul — or outright elimination — of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.
After landing in Asheville, Trump reiterated his frequent critique of the federal hurricane response: FEMA “has really let us down, let the country down,” he said, per NPR’s Asma Khalid and Deepa Shivaram. Trump indicated he’s examining “the whole concept” of the agency, and suggested that states should handle their own emergency response operations instead of the federal government.
Trump’s words: “I like, frankly, the concept that when North Carolina gets hit, the governor takes care of it. When Florida gets hit, the governor takes care of it. Meaning the state takes care of it ... I’d like to see the states take care of disasters.”
Ahead this afternoon: After departing North Carolina, Trump will head to California, where he’s due to tour the wildfire damage in and around Los Angeles. And Trump cleared up the rumbling that he’d extended something of an olive branch to his longtime nemesis Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) by inviting him to accompany him for the trip: “I didn’t invite him. Someone did,” Trump said, per CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
The formal snub: California Gov. Gavin Newsom was not included in the lineup to appear with Trump for the official briefing on the fires this afternoon, Megan Messerly reports. Instead, Trump will be joined by Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and several California lawmakers. Still, the Democratic governor said yesterday he plans on showing up at the tarmac for Trump’s arrival.
Related read: “Trump Says States Should Manage Disasters. Former FEMA Leaders Agree,” by NYT’s Christopher Flavelle
I watched a news segment on Trump being greeted on the tarmac by Gov. Newsom. It was positive on both sides of that equation. Handshakes, pats on the back, positive words said to the media covering the event. No barbs were thrown by either side.
Now, as to eliminating FEMA. Anything is possible, but it will require action by Congress and there will not be huge support for that action. All those smaller states with small emergency management agencies don’t have the capacity to do what FEMA does and they don’t have the population and financial resources to respond to the types of disasters we are experiencing today. I believe there were well over 100 for just 2024. States will ask for federal assistance, especially for disaster recovery when disasters are really, large scale emergencies.
Only a few states have significant emergency management staff and state resources. California New York and Florida are outliers when it comes to very large emergency management programs and state financial resources. All those “fly over states” scrape by with minimal staffing.
Every federal elected official, representative and senator, will be hearing from their state’s public officials about the President’s comments and prepping them with information on what that could mean for their state. Basically the messages will be, “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
I’ve always favored more of a “block grant” approach versus the individual project worksheets that get put together by the hundreds in some large disasters. Yet, it is the devil you know that many times drives people’s thinking. How would a dollar estimate be established for disaster recovery? Too little and repairs don’t get done. A comment was made in the NY Times article that if it was too much money they could put it towards what we would call disaster mitigation. Some states might start enforcing a state building code. This from the web, “According to available information, no state in the US currently has absolutely no building code; however, several states do not enforce a mandatory statewide building code, allowing local jurisdictions to adopt their own building codes instead, which means there is no single, uniform building code across the entire state. Some examples of states where building codes are largely determined at the local level include Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Mississippi, Missouri, and Tennessee.”
One project I worked on looked at wildfires. It included this one, 2016 Great Smoky Mountains wildfires The major city was Gatlinburg, TN. When doing the research, the fire chief for the city told us that there were no building codes for the areas outside of the city proper. That is the area where the fire first spread.
Disasters have become very complicated affairs. The Los Angeles fire storm will take many, many years to recover from. There will be empty lots in neighborhoods a decade from now.
