Whither FEMA? Whither Emergency Management?

Whither FEMA? Whither Emergency Management?  

By Jim Mullen

FEMA is about to experience a radical reassessment of its mission, or even its reason to exist.  Such a review is the prerogative of any incoming administration.  It would serve the nation best if the professional emergency management community, as politically and socially diverse as it is, were allowed to conduct a reasoned, professional review process to identify improvements.  But, couched in buzzwords like “efficiency” and “accountability” it is difficult to believe that anything resembling a reasoned, professional approach will be forthcoming.

This proposed FEMA “review” builds on campaign-generated lies about FEMA’s role in responding to multiple disasters (North Carolina, Georgia).  Such falsehoods undermine the trust that suffering folks should rightly have in their governments’ efforts to protect and support them in stressful situations.  It’s an artificially – generated second disaster atop the one just endured.

In the aftermath of 9/11, a panicked, mostly politically motivated reorganization of the federal government created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), folding 22 agencies into a “super department.  FEMA was severely impacted initially; many of its financial and technical capabilities were stripped away to support DHS’s immediate counterterrorism priorities.  This had catastrophic results: the Katrina/Rita Hurricanes highlighted FEMA’s weakened condition.  Belatedly, post – Katrina, significant adjustments were made; competent leaders were hired and sufficient resources provided to strengthen the agency’s capability to support local and state governments when requested.

When political opportunists attacked FEMA post Katrina/Rita, I took pains as Washington State’s Emergency Management Director to seize every opportunity to publicly praise our excellent FEMA Region 10 colleagues, many of whom responded during Katrina.  They deserved our support.  Political opportunism, unfortunately, appears to have achieved “official, even Executive” status in 2025, and with that has come a broad-brush indictment of FEMA and its personnel for mostly imagined shortcomings.  Now, circa the post 9/11period, rational analysis once again seems secondary to a preset agenda carried out by a “review panel that is “just following orders” (see Nuremburg defense argument)!

A clear thrust of this review is to push greater support for disaster management on the budgets of local and state government.  But that concern ignores basic facts.  The Emergency Management Performance Grants that fund many local and state emergency management staff are based on a 50% match requirement.  Ironically, research over the years has shown that local and state governments across the board already contribute more than their share of that 50% match; it is the federal government that has failed to keep pace.

Could FEMA and its collaborating agencies (Agriculture, Human Services, Health, Small Business Administration, etc.  ) improve their performance?  Could those experts and the emergency management community at all levels describe where the system, created largely by Congress, has fallen short?  Certainly.  So, it might be better to ask them how best to institute reforms before entrusting the nation’s emergency management future to a “review council” comprised largely of nihilists, whose conclusions seem already written in draft or perhaps are etched in stone.