In the days since the Texas flash-flood disaster, the Department of Homeland Security has had a stock response to questions about delays in the federal government’s response, or about a recent rule requiring DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to personally approve FEMA expenditures over $100,000, including rescue teams. The response goes, over and over, like this: “FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens … The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”
The Trump administration has been using this line for more than a month now, in response to criticism of its plans to remake, or perhaps disband, FEMA. And many people who study emergency response agree that, to some degree, the agency needs reform. Yet now the administration’s press to quickly strip down the agency is being tested against a devastating disaster for the first time. And it is violating a basic precept of emergency management: Be prepared.
In any disaster, responding quickly can help save people and salve the harm. Protocols should be well known and well practiced before an event. An active disaster that killed more than 130 people, with more than 160 still missing, is not the occasion to switch up the norms. “This is exactly what many of us are concerned about,” Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Urban Institute, told me. However much FEMA might benefit from change, remaking it in an ad hoc fashion will just result in more devastation, he said: “In the context of a really complicated emergency where lots of people’s lives are at stake—that’s just not where you want to see experimentation happening.”
And FEMA’s response to the Texas flash-flood disaster has not been business as usual. Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of urban-search-and-rescue teams—deployed in the past within hours during similar events—until more than 72 hours after the flooding had begun, per CNN reporting. The agency failed to answer thousands of calls from flood survivors after allowing contracts for call-center workers to lapse one day after the disaster, according to The New York Times. FEMA had fewer than 100 people on the ground in Texas within four days of the disaster, and 311 by day five; within a week of Hurricane Helene, during what Donald Trump deemed a failed response to the flooding, FEMA deployed 1,500.
The situation on the ground in these immediate post-event moments can create a fog-of-war atmosphere, and no complete assessment of the federal government’s reaction will be possible until later. “Like with any really catastrophic event, it’s hard to understand what’s happening at a micro level,” Rumbach said. Several non-FEMA rescue teams from other states and Mexico traveled to Texas to help, supplementing Texas’s own robust emergency-response apparatus. But each of the other state teams waited on FEMA to call them up, as is protocol; FEMA didn’t begin to activate any of them until last Monday, according to CNN. No missing person has been found alive since last Friday. “It’s clear that the initial response was much smaller and more measured than you would expect from FEMA,” Rumbach said. “It’s different from what you would expect a year ago, in terms of the number of personnel and the speed of response.” And FEMA is simply operating with fewer resources: About a quarter of the agency’s staff has left since Trump took office in January, according to the Times. Due to vacancies, there is currently no FEMA regional administrator in any state along the Gulf Coast, just deputies.
Right now, rather than “lean” and “deployable,” it might be more appropriate to describe FEMA as “starved and hobbled.” But ostensibly, a FEMA-review council assembled by the Trump administration is meant to offer a plan to overhaul the agency. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who praised the Trump administration’s response to the flooding as “swift and very robust,” sits on that council. At a gathering of the council on the Wednesday after the floods (at which Abbott was absent), Noem reiterated her desire to see FEMA “eliminated as it existed” and “remade.” The council’s recommendations are due in November.
The administration does seem to understand that its plans to rapidly remake FEMA have real drawbacks. Noem has retained FEMA employees who looked like they’d be let go; Trump said last month that he intends to phase out FEMA only after this hurricane season. But reporting in recent days suggests that the administration is softening its tone on FEMA even further, at least for the moment. The Washington Post reports that the promised dissolution may in fact look more like a “rebranding.” Reality sets in fast in a disaster.
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