WASHINGTON – Most people who lived in south h 20 years ago can’t help but recall what they were doing, what they saw, and what they experienced when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans.
Neighbors stranded on their roofs; people shepherding children and the elderly through filthy waist-high water; thousands awaiting evacuation without water and food at the Superdome and Convention Center; police and the National Guard brandishing weapons at fellow citizens; it was all part of the tapestry of a storm that claimed an estimated 1,833 lives, left millions homeless, and caused approximately $161 billion in damage.
Then-President George W. Bush said, “The system, at every level of government, was not well-coordinated and was overwhelmed.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency was created in the 1970s to help local and state governments. FEMA is supposed to coordinate search and rescue efforts, evacuations, and help set up emergency shelters.
For a time, Republicans, even some Democrats, wanted to do away with FEMA. Instead, Congress in 2006 made adjustments. During President Donald Trump’s first administration, Congress in 2018 made further changes.
These days, FEMA’s chief must have emergency management experience. Federal authorities, on their own, can preposition resources without local permission. Money is set aside to strengthen infrastructure — flood controls, levees, and the like — long before the storm.
In his second administration, Trump said FEMA’s responses were too slow and its costs too high. He called for changes, perhaps even elimination of the agency.
The Trump administration cut billions of dollars from disaster preparedness and seeks to cut billions more in the 2026 budget. About a third of the agency’s staff have quit or been fired. And the new director has no emergency experience — he replaced one who ventured to tell a congressional committee that FEMA shouldn’t be dismantled.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who oversees FEMA, adopted a policy that requires her direct approval of any expenditure of $100,000 or more.
Invoking Katrina’s landfall anniversary, 191 FEMA employees signed a letter Monday to Congress warning that the changes had weakened the agency.
“The diminished response and recovery capacities of partner agencies due to this administration has cascading effects that reduce FEMA’s ability to carry out its mission,” read the five-page letter they called the Katrina Declaration.
Thirty-five of the FEMA employees signed the letter in their own names. On Wednesday, they were suspended with pay by the agency.
on Fox News Digital: “I am not surprised that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform; including many who worked under the Biden Administration to turn FEMA into the bureaucratic nightmare it is today."
Noem continued: "That’s why I am working so hard to eliminate FEMA as it exists today, and streamline this bloated organization into a tool that actually benefits Americans in crisis.”
Cameron Hamilton, who Trump tapped to lead FEMA but was fired for supporting continuation of the agency, : “FEMA staff are responding to entirely new forms of bureaucracy now that is lengthening wait times for claim recipients, and delaying the deployment of time sensitive resources.”
Since Congress created FEMA, legislation is necessary to eliminate the agency or make major changes in operations. Trump set up the FEMA Review Council to study procedures and make recommendations.
The task force held its third meeting Thursday but did not directly address the FEMA employee insurrection. Still, Texas officials thanked the Trump administration, though not FEMA, for help after a flash flood on the Guadalupe River killed about 138 people.
The meeting’s chair, former Mississippi Gov. Phil Bryant, said the panel has reached the “real core” of their report. They are looking at minimum standards for individual assistance and direct funding to the states.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, another member of the task force, said that, after questioning emergency response personnel across the country, the consensus of opinion was the need to streamline the process of funding direct assistance.
“I will use that word again, direct assistance. Not assistance that is migrating through a myriad of bureaucratic processes,” he said.
What was the takeaway Mark Cooper, who worked for both Republican and Democratic governors in h, had from the failed Katrina experience?
“We realized how important it was to have FEMA and other organizations to support state and local governments,” he told the task force.
