The future of emergency management starts with the present. And today, emergency management in the United States is in growing disarray. At the federal level, the most recent blow (of a series) was last Wednesday’s announced decision to phase out FEMA after the 2025 hurricane season. You could see this coming. In prior months and weeks, the agency had already been put on notice and under stress. Mass, indiscriminate firings at FEMA eliminated hundreds of jobs in mid-February. In May the acting head of FEMA was removed after mentioning to Congress that in his opinion abolishing the agency wouldn’t be in the best interests of the American people. Meanwhile, backlogs of emergency aid requests have been piling up.
And that’s just FEMA. The majority of U.S. disasters are due to weather, water, and climate hazards, but the National Weather Service and NOAA have also seen similar abrupt personnel and budget cuts, threatening to degrade warning accuracy during the current hurricane season. Other federal agencies, including USGS (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, riverine flooding), EPA (toxic spills, air-quality alerts), DoE (nuclear accidents), and NIH (pandemics), NASA (novel hazard monitoring capabilities) also play roles in monitoring natural hazards and emergency response and recovery at the federal level. They too face cuts in their missions and partial dissolution.
These breakdowns at the federal level have a domino effect. They place an increased emergency response and recovery burden on the states, who are inadequately equipped to handle the load. The funding and personnel needed are not available at the state levels. The ripple effect extends to emergency management at the local level. This is not just a matter of money and people. The need for federal coordination stems from three realities: hazards originate from sources distributed globally, even other countries, not just the immediate vicinity of the resulting disaster; the climactic phases of individual natural emergencies and disasters are themselves no respecters of state boundaries; and the loss of life, property, and the business disruption can be so great for any disaster location that response and recovery efforts have to be orchestrated over much larger areas and across levels of government.
Such emergencies will not end with the 2025 hurricane season. Natural disasters and emergencies are on the rise.
Three closing points:
“A rose by any other name is still a rose.” – Shakespeare (Romeo and Juliet). Even Shakespeare’s lovestruck, teenage Juliet would be wise enough to know that eradicating the label emergency from natural hazards such as hurricanes and earthquakes will not eliminate the future need for coordinated emergency management of those and similar events at federal, state, and local levels. America appears to be choosing to abandon a fully resourced, chartered, publicly-visible all-hazards emergency management system in order to focus what remains of DHS on immigration as essentially the sole national emergency[1]. As natural disasters come up, and they will, remaining DHS employees will continue to respond – but only within that infamously limp frame of “other duties as assigned.”
“Physician, heal yourself.” – Jesus, Luke 4:23 (NIV). FEMA, in company with all other human endeavors, could stand improvement. Every FEMA employee, from boots on the ground to leadership, would acknowledge this. But the path to improvement would not seem to lie in crippling the agency, then demanding that those finding their former responsibilities subsumed within a larger agency do more with less.
Recall that disaster is disruption of an entire community (which can be a community of practice as well as a geographical community), persisting after the hazard has come and gone (in this case, federal budget cuts are still ongoing – the disaster in question remains underway), and exceeding the ability of the community to recover on its own. In most instances, community recovery is largely accomplished with help from the larger unaffected population.
Under ideal conditions, the ravaged FEMA would not be required to improve itself unaided. And yet the simultaneous damage to closely related agencies at federal state and local levels reduces their ability to help.
“You can’t go home again.” – Thomas Wolfe. The challenge is great. For those left behind at FEMA (assimilated into DHS), just as for communities such as Asheville and Altadena still struggling to rebuild, there will be no return to the prior state – to the way things were. Similarly, there’s no moving on – that is, some new beginning with an entirely clean slate. The only choice is to move forward – building a better future founded on the experience and suffering and harsh lessons of the past.
Something very special has to happen. Though rare and difficult, the feat is not impossible. In fact, FEMA itself has seen this movie before. James Lee Witt, the incoming FEMA administrator in 1993, found a FEMA that had been established decades earlier primarily to contend with the Cold War threat of a nuclear attack. Happily (almost miraculously), decades had passed without a single such event. However, the agency remained heavily focused on that single risk. In the meantime, the pressing reality was the multiple natural disasters that were recurring every single year. Under Witt, FEMA reordered its priorities to focus on what had been a glaring blind spot, becoming a much more vibrant, effective force for national resilience in the process.
U.S. government history offers other success stories. One such, on a large scale, was the the recovery and remaking of the US military following the Vietnam War. Some of the key changes? The military transitioned to an all-volunteer force as a means of building a more dedicated, skilled personnel. It focused on more realistic training under battlefield conditions and broadened that focus to cover a full spectrum ranging from counter-insurgency to large-scale global threats. It placed greater emphasis on doctrinal training for officers, and especially on learning from past mistakes. It worked to regain the trust of the American people.
Difficult? Sure. Taking decades? Indeed? Continuous effort versus one-off initiatives? Absolutely. But it has been done and can be done again.
More on that next time.
[1] An update: this week there are (conflicting) hints that the government may be carving out slowdowns in the deportation of farm-, hotel-, and restaurant workers (see also here). This an acknowledgment of the vital role such workers have been playing across the economy in harvesting American crops, etc. Illegal immigration is a problem. But immigration more broadly is also an opportunity.