President Trump has recently announced big plans for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The president called FEMA “a disaster,” and told reporters “I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away,” during a visit to hurricane-ravaged Asheville, North Carolina.
If the elimination of the nation’s crisis management team during a period of never-ending, mind-bogglingly complex crises seems counterintuitive, that’s because it is. We need FEMA now more than ever, and that need will only continue to grow.
Rather than dismantling FEMA, we need to reimagine it as an elite federal agency capable of managing the increasingly complex and severe disasters of a polycrisis age.
The president is right that the massive flow of federal disaster funds to states can be counterproductive and even corrosive. This is because the promise of FEMA money causes the states to under prepare for disasters, creating a cycle of dependency.
Another, even more destructive effect is the process itself. It is a huge administrative burden, for the state and for FEMA. To meet the urgent demands of its individual and public assistance programs, FEMA has abandoned its core mission of emergency management and instead devotes its time and talent to bureaucratic paperwork. We saw this during Hurricane Maria in 2017 when FEMA’s inability to coordinate led to prolonged suffering in Puerto Rico.
The most striking recent example was in December 2019, when a novel coronavirus with no known human immunity emerged in Hubei Province, Central China. In those dark days, the president watched as his most powerful agencies — Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Homeland Security and FEMA — failed to take ownership of the crisis. They all pointed at each other and dithered as the virus began to spread rapidly and invisibly across the nation.
As strange as it may sound, pandemics are among the easiest types of catastrophes to manage. The next black swan event will be worse. It will strike suddenly and with great intensity, with its most urgent problems emerging in the crucial “golden hours” — a time of maximum chaos.
When this happens, we will need FEMA to transform a fragmented federal bureaucracy — along with a vast network of government agencies, private enterprises, nonprofits, voluntary organizations, faith-based groups and academia — into a massive crisis response team, custom-built and battle-hardened for the job.
This reimagined FEMA will eliminate plausible deniability by preparing these organizations in advance to face every crisis head-on. It will keep watch around the clock and size up every threat, so when the White House calls, that massive crisis team of teams will already be activated and able to talk about not only all of the things it is already doing, but all of the things it is not yet doing and when it will be doing these things.
Many believe that the government possesses an innate ability to respond to disasters. Nothing could be further from the truth. As this president knows all too well, his government is a slow-moving creature of habit, ill-suited to the demands of the disaster zone.
A revamped and reimagined FEMA would catalyze an agile, government-led response to the inevitable next catastrophe. It would put the president in the driver’s seat but would own the disaster, so he doesn’t have to.
Kelly McKinney is the vice president of Emergency Management and Enterprise Resilience at NYU Langone Health in New York City and a former member of FEMA’s National Advisory Council.
