President Donald Trump sent Democrats into a tizzy last week while meeting with Hurricane Helene victims in North Carolina. While there, he mused that it may be time to get rid of the Federal Emergency Management Agency entirely. The executive order Trump signed is much more circumspect about the future of FEMA, a relatively new entity that is in desperate need of reform.
The latest FEMA failures have been widely reported but are worth reviewing. According to data from the agency itself, FEMA failed to answer nearly half the calls for aid and assistance received during Helene. It also had failed to deliver much needed temporary housing to Helene victims in North Carolina while dozens of mobile housing units sat unused behind a guarded FEMA fence. A FEMA manager in Florida told FEMA employees not to provide aid to homes that visibly supported Trump. As bad as these recent failures were, they pale in comparison to the well-documented, decadeslong history of FEMA red tape delaying reconstruction efforts across the country.
First created by an executive order from President Jimmy Carter in 1979, FEMA has since been authorized, funded, and empowered by Congress, most prominently through the Stafford Act of 1988, which set criteria for national emergency declarations and for the system FEMA must follow when financing rebuilding. Both processes are horribly out of date.
The current formula for triggering a national disaster declaration is when estimated damages for an event reach $1.89 per capita of the state where the disaster occurs. For some states, that means any disaster with just $1 million in damage could be declared a national disaster. This loose standard has led to excessive declaration of national disasters, which stretches FEMA personnel and federal taxpayer resources. It simultaneously encourages states to spend too little on disaster prevention and preparedness because they assume the federal government will come to their aid even when only tiny things go wrong.
On rebuilding, FEMA’s system for assessing disaster damage, estimating how much money is needed to rebuild, and awarding the money is hopelessly slow, bureaucratic, and lacks expertise. When a big city experiences a disaster and many destroyed buildings need to be replaced, FEMA doesn’t have the experience or knowledge to analyze the variety and numbers involved. After it finally does make its assessments, it can take years to push through the money, especially if initial estimates are off. One official said while trying to rebuild New Orleans, “Using the Stafford Act in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is like bringing a donkey to the Kentucky Derby.”
Trump’s executive order on FEMA signed last week creates a FEMA Review Council tasked with issuing recommendations inside 12 months. We hope Congress will consider the council’s advice seriously and include it in bipartisan legislation delivering much-needed FEMA reform.
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Reforms should include tightened disaster declaration criteria so that not every heavy rainfall becomes a national issue. Drought and freeze damage to crops should be eliminated entirely. This would free FEMA staff to concentrate on truly national disasters. Congress should also consider getting FEMA out of rebuilding and putting states in charge of allocating money for disaster recovery, and Trump has already hinted that this is his intention.
For over 100 years, into the 1960s, natural disasters were entirely a state responsibility. Things changed when scenes of disaster on television put pressure on presidents to make things better and rescue suffering communities. That pressure is increased in an age when everyone has a video camera in their pocket and a social media account to distribute grim footage. Trump needs to respond to this continued pressure prudently.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
