IS THIS A CHAINSAW I SEE BEFORE ME?

“IS THIS A CHAINSAW I SEE BEFORE ME?”  

By Jim Mullen

A serious policy review to improve the nation’s disaster system should include a holistic analysis of the nation’s emergency management strengths and weaknesses. That isn’t what’s happening. The “FEMA Review Council’s” actual assignment seems limited to reducing the federal government’s financial (and political) responsibility for participating in disaster planning, mitigation, response and recovery, at the expense of local and state governments and public safety.

You want evidence? Even before the FEMA Review Council convenes, draconian cuts were inflicted on programs that contribute materially to mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery efforts. Federal agencies, integral to the national emergency assistance ecosystem, like the Small Business Administration, US Forest Service, Health and Human Services, the Center for Disease Control (!), the National Weather Service, and others are targeted for cuts in research and development and key personnel. The Administration even announced the elimination of its own innovative first-term program, Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) despite its highly praised mission to incentivize local and state pre disaster investment (BRIC might yet survive due to significant pushback coming from “red state” Congressional delegations). But that raises an additional red flag: witness the number of other administrative actions the DOGE folks have had to reverse, under pressure, because they either didn’t know, or didn’t care what they were doing. This “process” if one can charitably call it a process, calls to mind the doomed Shakespearean plot from Macbeth. The mantra of Shakespeare’s conspirators was “If it were done when tis done, then ‘twere well it ‘twere done quickly…” Their fatal flaw was failing to consider the long-term impacts of a drastic, irreversible action taken in haste. The Administration’s pursuit of “reform” of FEMA absent consideration of the adverse immediate and long-term impacts on jurisdictions and agencies around the nation, and on the safety of the nation’s population, is breathtakingly dangerous.

What to do? State and local officials must reassess local and state priorities where emergency management is concerned. They need to educate/warn their populations that the abrupt federal decisions with little or no analysis or justification has undermined their personal safety. Critical gaps will have to be filled by local/state investments even if it’s inconvenient given current economic uncertainty, because disasters aren’t fair: they happen whether we are ready or not.

Emergency managers cannot allow their concerns to be drowned out by the DOGE-induced din over the deconstruction of many domestic and international federal programs. When politicians lose elections, it is often rightly attributed to the failure to convey a “winning” message to the voting public. And emergency managers are not particularly practiced in political messaging. Wherever they reside hierarchically within their respective jurisdictions it is important that they assure that this DOGE-induced undermining of public safety is not obscured. Elected leaders of government typically focus on emergency management primarily when a threat or incident captures their attention; the federal budget cuts to the national system are worthy of their notice now.