Twenty years ago, Americans watched in shock as Hurricane Katrina battered New Orleans, as well as other parts of the Gulf Coast. The situation only deteriorated as state and local government officials failed to respond effectively while President George W. Bush and the federal government languished. Hurricane Katrina became one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history, killing an estimated 1,400 people and leaving behind more than $200 billion in damage.
In 2025, the U.S. government is still not adequately prepared to tackle the structural and policy issues necessary to prevent another Katrina. Most recently a group of FEMA workers sent a letter to Congress warning that as a result of budget cuts, firings, inexperienced leaders, and politically motivated appointments, the agency is not prepared for major natural disasters: “Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office, and our mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration.” Despite how damaging the government failure in 2005 was to President George W. Bush’s legacy, the Trump administration has taken a number of steps backward, ignoring the tragic lessons from Katrina and creating conditions that leave cities such as New Orleans even more vulnerable than before.
-
An aerial view shows several people stranded amid floodwaters on the roof of a house.
-
A highway with cars at its end is cut off by floodwaters.
On Aug. 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina ripped through southeastern Louisiana with 125 mph winds. The Category 5 storm, which was a Category 3 storm by landfall, resulted in massive destruction. New Orleans suffered the worst impact. When the levees failed to hold back the floodwaters, huge swaths of the city were deep underwater, along with residents and their property.
In the days leading up to the crisis, the National Weather Service (NWS) and the National Hurricane Center had received warnings about what was going to happen. Officials had shared the information with the White House. Among the messages that they sent were concerns about the levee system that had been designed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Although Michael Brown, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), told the press that “we were all taken aback by the fact that the levees did break in so many places and caused such widespread devastation,” investigations revealed a very different picture. On Aug. 27, for example, FEMA reported that a Category 4 storm could “overtop levees.” The Department of Homeland Security reported that flooding could “leave the New Orleans metro area submerged for weeks or months.”
As water rushed through the streets of New Orleans, help was not on the way. More than 200 police officers left their posts, while local agencies failed to have adequate plans to deal with overwhelming flooding, sustained power outages, and dwindling food supplies. When 30,000 desperate survivors sought shelter from the storm in the New Orleans Superdome, the city’s designated “refuge of last resort,” the people inside encountered severe problems. The backup power generator kept the lights on but little else, resulting in sweltering temperatures, and people did not have access to safe drinking water or food. The massive roof was torn open in areas and leaked badly. At the same time, National Guardsmen would not allow people to leave. Outside the Superdome, New Orleans residents who attempted to flee from the city ran into roadblocks with armed police officers who turned them back as they protected nearby suburbs such as Gretna. According to one woman who tried to get out, “They turned us around with guns. The army turned us around with guns. Policemen.”
The videos and photographs Americans saw on the news were gruesome. As reporters traversed the city in the areas that were passable, they brought Americans images of the wreckage. Despite the polarized news system that viewers were becoming familiar with, even Fox News hosts such as Geraldo Rivera expressed their outrage. Speaking from the New Orleans Convention Center, where another 25,000 people had taken refuge, a teary Rivera, holding a baby, said: “Let them walk out of here. … All you got here is thousands and thousands of people who have desperate, desperate needs six days later. … What the hell!”
Bush, who had been omnipresent in the weeks that followed the horrific 9/11 attacks, was out of the public eye this time around. When the hurricane struck, the president had been vacationing on his 1,600-acre ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he had been for 27 days. When Bush finally decided to fly back to Washington on Aug. 31, he passed over the Gulf Coast area.
The White House photographers took a picture of him looking out the window of Air Force One, which many Americans perceived as his lacking empathy for what had happened. (Five years later, Bush acknowledged that the photo made him look “detached and uncaring” and had been a mistake.) The image was a sharp contrast to photographs from 1965 when another Texan, President Lyndon B. Johnson, flew to New Orleans right after it had been slammed by Hurricane Betsy. After Betsy, the country saw Johnson on the streets, shaking hands and meeting with residents to offer them support.
Brown, a Republican friend of Bush’s and a former attorney for the International Arabian Horse Association, was out of his depth. His inexperience with disaster relief raised immediate questions about why Bush had appointed him to the job. Moreover, criticism mounted about why the administration had cut so much of FEMA’s funding, including President Bill Clinton’s “Project Impact,” which focused on post-disaster mitigation plans, and why so much responsibility had been delegated to private contractors. After 2003, when the agency, which President Jimmy Carter had created in 1979, was folded into the newly formed Department of Homeland Security, Bush had also shifted money away from disaster programs toward counterterrorism.
During a public event on Sept. 2, 2005, Bush praised his FEMA administrator by saying: “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job!” His comments added to the perception that there was a dangerous disconnect between how the president thought things were going and the reality on the ground. Bush’s approval ratings plummeted to the lowest point in his presidency. Not only did Hurricane Katrina weaken Bush’s standing, but it left the entire Republican establishment of which he was a part on shaky ground. Combined with the disastrous Iraq War, even a growing number of leaders and voters within the party were losing faith in their own leaders.
Hurricane Katrina also punctured holes in the viability of a key governing strategy of the Republican Party since President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. After Reagan took office, Republicans realized that dismantling government programs was not easy to do. While it was one thing to attack government in abstract terms, specific policies often commanded strong public support. In response, Reagan had undertaken a strategy, also pursued by Bush, of staffing government agencies with leaders who were not supportive of their agencies’ own missions (such as Interior Secretary James Watt and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Anne Gorsuch) and gradually cutting down spending. When Americans needed government the most, as they did with Katrina in August and September 2005, vital agencies had been rendered incapable of handling their responsibilities.
The fallout from the storm lent support to liberal critics who said free market conservatism ignored structural racial and economic inequality. Most of the people who were unable to evacuate New Orleans were Black and poor, and the Lower Ninth Ward, one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, was also one of the areas hit hardest by Katrina. During an live NBC fundraiser to solicit donations for hurricane relief, rapper Kanye West said directly to the camera, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” News coverage revealed how before Katrina ever hit land, racial and economic inequality had left many parts of the city without adequate and safe housing stock, sound infrastructure, public services, and necessary resources. Perhaps most damning at all, a city where 67 percent of the population was Black did not receive the same kind of attention as other parts of the country even in crisis.
For Bush, Katrina shattered confidence that there was, what he had called, a genuine vision of “compassionate conservatism.” During the 2000 presidential campaign against Democratic candidate Al Gore, Bush had promised that he could deliver a conservative agenda that softened the harsh edges of the Reagan revolution. He wanted to prove that the anti-government, free market, supply-side economic principles espoused by the right did not preclude a government that could still care for those who needed help. As he said during a 2002 speech in California: “We cannot have an indifferent government either. We are a generous and caring people. We don’t believe in a sink-or-swim society. The policies of our government must heed the universal call of all faiths to love a neighbor as we would want to be loved ourselves. … We need a government that is focused, effective, and close to the people; a government that does a few things and does them well.” The problem was that fulfilling this vision required investing in government. New Orleans unmasked the limits of Bush’s promise. While Republicans pointed to the Democratic governor and mayor who had proved incompetent, critics noted that the local failures were just more reason that federal authorities should have stepped in to fill the void.
Over the next decade, elected officials did take several steps to address some of the problems that had been exposed. For instance, in 2015, President Barack Obama signed an executive order that created the Federal Flood Risk Management Standard, which increased the requirements for federal projects to demonstrate that they were prepared for flood risks. “What started out as a natural disaster became a man-made disaster—a failure of government to look out for its own citizens,” Obama said on the 10-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. (President Donald Trump revoked this order in 2017 and again in January.) In 2018, Congress established FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, which provided financial support to state and local governments, as well as tribal nations, in their efforts to lower the hazard risks that they faced as a result of underdeveloped infrastructure. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NWS invested in technology and workers who could vastly strengthen the forecasting capacity of the government to assess risky weather patterns.
Two decades after Katrina, much of that progress has been put at risk. Most important, under Trump, FEMA has been hit hard by budget cuts. Although the president backed away from his promise to eliminate FEMA following the devastating floods in Texas, he has been pursuing draconian staffing and budget reductions. FEMA, for instance, cut funding for the BRIC program. (A judge has granted an injunction on this point.) There have also been funding cuts to the Disaster Legal Services program, which offered free legal assistance to survivors of natural disasters. The Trump-created Department of Government Efficiency shrunk the staff of the NOAA and NWS, though parts of the workforce are being rehired in the aftermath of the Texas floods.
Trump has also waged a war against institutions and government funding that tackle the structural inequalities that were at the heart of New Orleans’s challenges. The administration has been threatening institutions, such as universities, that continue to pursue research and teaching dealing with issues that revolve around environmental justice and race.
Finally, even the thin promise of compassionate conservatism has disappeared from the Republican agenda. Trump has not even tried to resuscitate Bush’s vision. Instead, he has replaced compassionate conservatism with a vision of conservative populism that centers anger and outrage, as evidenced by the program cuts in the “One Big Beautiful Bill.” Congressional Republicans have not done much better. “Well, we all are going to die,” was Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst’s response in May when one member at a town hall raised concerns about the effects of the Medicaid cuts.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina created havoc. In 2025, Trump and the Republican Party are forgetting, if not purposely ignoring, the lessons from that disaster. If history repeats itself—or even rhymes—the nation once again won’t be prepared, and, as in New Orleans, the most at-risk Americans will suffer the worst consequences.
Unless leaders confront these hard truths, the next disaster will once again expose the nation’s failure to protect its most vulnerable citizens.
The post Remembering Hurricane Katrina and Its Political Aftermath appeared first on Foreign Policy.
