Unmitigated Disasters
Do we need FEMA? We won't know until it's too late
How you prepare for disasters is a function of your beliefs about their causes and consequences. This is as true for individuals as it is for groups and formal organizations like companies and national governments, which hold their own shared and often institutionalized beliefs. These beliefs are necessarily big, fundamental ideas about the way the world works, what holds things together every day, why (and how) they come apart, who is likely to suffer, and what’s to be done about it1. These ideas and beliefs get contested in society, through culture, religion, scholarship, and politics. Sometimes they are tested and upended by crises — by the damage caused, by the aftermath, and the way all of that is experienced, interpreted, and memorialized.
For decades in the U.S. — arguably since the 1940s — the prevailing set of ideas held that disaster was caused by failures in systems, failures that could be detected, anticipated, and managed through technical expertise, and that it was the federal government’s duty (for reasons of National Security or economic prosperity, if not out of interest for the general social welfare) to do its best to mitigate disasters before they happen, respond when they do, and speed recovery afterwards.
These prevailing ideas were never without their critics, but the second Trump administration is the first group to hold both the ideological commitment and the means to substantially and broadly roll them back. I wrote about this last year as a generalized effort from the White House to “unwind the government’s longstanding efforts to see around corners and plan to meet future challenges.” This campaign has continued with the same populist rhetoric the administration rode in on — that government isn’t simply inefficient and heavy-handed (as Reagan-era conservatives argued) it’s corrupt, preying on the public.
WNYC’s On The Media aired a great four-part podcast this month about the effort to unravel the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and I recommend listening to it. FEMA has under this administration been paralyzed by constant leadership turnover, indiscriminate DOGE cuts, partisan warfare in aid administration, and threats to abolish the agency altogether. And while the President seems to have backed away from actively unwinding FEMA, the agency is likely weaker now than it has been at any point since the G. W. Bush years leading up to Hurricane Katrina2.
The OTM podcast tells one important part of the story about how we got to this point: the undercurrent of conspiracy thinking in the public that has stalked the agency since its early days, and how those fears were leveraged into electoral success by politicians who were more broadly interested in destroying the administrative state for ideological reasons.
Emergency management (along with public health, to some extent) is vulnerable to this kind of attack, and it’s hard to build a public constituency around it, for three reasons, which we can call the Godzilla problem, the control room problem, and the contingency problem.
The Godzilla Problem
There’s a basic mismatch between the public’s perception of what emergency management is for and what it actually does in practice. One emergency manager I interviewed in my research referred to it as ‘the Godzilla problem.’ When you start talking about disaster risk management, people often jump to the extremes — major catastrophes, Godzilla rising unstoppable out of the harbor. Against the imagined, Hollywood-inspired worst case scenarios common among the public, emergency management seems like pure folly. Or, more to the point, given FEMA’s historical roots in Cold War civil defense, like tucking your head under your desk to ride out global thermonuclear war. This disaster imaginary is fed by real-world events, too, including FEMA’s unconscionable failures after Hurricane Katrina. It also grows out of the very real planning work FEMA was ordered to carry out during the Reagan administration to plan for the evacuation of millions of Americans into relocation camps in the lead-up to a potential nuclear exchange with the USSR (this project, abandoned in the late 80s, gave rise to the “FEMA camp” conspiracy memes that are everywhere in certain corners of the internet today, a history the OTM podcast does a masterful job of sketching out).
In its mundane reality, emergency management is about 99% spreadsheets and meetings: mapping out resources, making checklists, building relationships, administering grants, writing reports. Occasionally, there are exercises where people act out potential disasters. The vast majority of emergencies FEMA responds to are relatively minor, in the scheme of things (though of course to the people and communities who suffer them, these events are often life-changing tragedies). The work of responding to these smaller emergencies helps build capacity to deal with larger ones, by making encounters with rare events routine.
Things often go wrong, or get frustrating for the public, even in these smaller responses, which can build distrust. FEMA is, in fact, in serious need of reform. But the agency’s problems are often not of its own making — it’s at the mercy of political forces outside of its control.
The Control Room Problem
Emergency managers, whether at the city, state, or federal level, don’t set the conditions in which they operate. They don’t get to set policy, they try to stay out of politics. That gets tricky, because it means they don’t have much say in the production of the conditions that make the disasters they’re responsible for managing, though they still get the blame when things go wrong. It helps to imagine Ray Arnold, Samuel L. Jackson’s character in Jurassic Park. He spends most of the film in the park’s control room, monitoring systems, trying to keep the park online. He didn’t design the automation systems (thanks, Nedry), and he doesn’t control the incentives driving the park’s construction and operation (that’s up to the park’s billionaire CEO John Hammond, and his ongoing dream of a wee flea circus). But he’s still the one responsible for turning the power back on when glitches, Nedry’s misconduct, a hurricane, and rogue dinosaurs bring the park to catastrophe (for his trouble, spoiler alert, he is eaten by a Velociraptor off camera).
We live in a highly complex technical society, where infrastructure systems, regulations, and the structured daily work of millions of people and countless machines keep things in motion, constantly both producing the possibility of catastrophe and keeping it from happening. All of this goes on, as it were, behind the scenes, out of most of our awareness. When things do go wrong, accountability is of course important. But so is attention to the people who quietly do the mundane work of keeping things from going wrong in the first place.
The Contingency Problem
Finally, it’s quite difficult to make the case that things would have been worse without the intervention of emergency managers. When a flood doesn’t happen because of hazard mitigation efforts, or when people don’t meet financial ruin from a tornado because of disaster aid, there isn’t much to see. When a response goes wrong, the last thing anyone wants to hear is ‘yes mistakes were made but it would have been even worse if we hadn’t tried.’
Scholars have done a great deal of research into the shortcomings of institutional emergency management, or public health, or humanitarian aid. But now we’re on the verge of a very strange period in which these institutions are just gone or nonfunctional, as a matter of policy. We’re rapidly approaching the contingency of finding out what happens when institutions just stop trying to mitigate disasters.
In the case of USAID, which was rapidly disassembled by DOGE, the numbers are clear. Research estimates that the abrupt end of USAID funding has already resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world, a death toll that could rise to 14 million by 2030. The gutting of the CDC’s public health emergency mitigation and response capacity, along with the withdrawal of the U.S. from the World Health Organization, has allowed a new Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo to spread widely.
So far, the consequences of the rollback of disaster risk management have fallen mostly overseas. But we may feel them domestically in the U.S. soon enough. Disease outbreaks that start overseas rarely stay contained there. The Atlantic hurricane season begins June 1 and runs through the end of November. Wildfire season is already under way. There’s the possibility of disaster at the dozens of World Cup games being held this summer. There is the longer term possibility of catastrophes that would have overmatched FEMA even at its peak — major earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest or Southern California. The effects of hobbling FEMA will not show up gradually, but all at once. After all, Michael Brown had been head of FEMA for years before Hurricane Katrina made landfall and his unfitness for the moment was so historic Congress enacted legislation specifically to prevent the appointment of someone like him — an administration flunky with no significant emergency management experience — ever again. President Trump recently nominated Cameron Hamilton to lead the agency, in violation of that statue.
If how you plan for disaster is a reflection of your beliefs about what causes disasters, who bears the consequences, and what to do about it, then what beliefs can we infer from this administration’s approach to disaster risk management? The philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò suggests it’s as simple as the belief in elite impunity: the idea that wealth and privilege is enough protection from disaster, and that when the big one hits, there is always a bunker, always a plane, always a security team waiting. It’s a fantasy, magical thinking. Plenty of rulers have held this delusion in history, and they’ve always discovered its emptiness too late.
In philosophical terms these beliefs get categorized as theodicy, a way of understanding the existence of evil and misfortune in a universe governed by an omnipotent, benevolent deity. In our secular present I think of this as sociodicy, a way of understanding the ways misfortune is generated and distributed by social forces.
A caveat here is that the constant leadership churn has resulted in the agency being temporarily headed by an extremely capable FEMA veteran, Bob Fenton, who will serve until a permanent administrator is confirmed by the Senate, which, given the general dysfunction of the Senate and specifically the growing animosity between the White House and the Senate’s GOP leadership, could be a very long time.