When Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans on August 29, 2005 – first with heavy rain, then winds so robust they shattered glass in window frames and a flood that washed away all the things in its path — town was ill-prepared.
The waters breached town’s levees, the concrete canals that have been New Orleans’ important defenses. Floodwalls snapped under the stress, spilling Lake Pontchartrain into the streets.
Buildings washed off their foundations; the flood turned poisonous with streaks of gas; lifeless our bodies floated by within the water as those that managed to interrupt via the roofs of their properties waited desperately for assist.
But that was gradual in coming. A bungled native, state and federal emergency response to the hurricane contributed to the almost 1,400 deaths, greater than 1 million folks displaced and over $125 billion in damages. After the storm, it was a second disaster.
Katrina grew to become a watershed second in American catastrophe response and led to an enormous overhaul of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). To tackle the failures, FEMA put in new management, and Congress empowered the company to take extra aggressive, proactive motion to forestall one other Katrina-like catastrophe from taking place.
Twenty years later, these efforts to bolster the nation’s emergency administration system are being undone. In his second time period, President Donald Trump has vowed to dismantle the company and shift the burden of catastrophe response to states to enhance effectivity .
Amid this, some of the identical issues that FEMA confronted forward of Katrina — inexperienced management, low morale and bureaucratic pink tape that slowed down catastrophe response —have returned.
NCS spoke to 5 former heads of FEMA from each administration since Hurricane Katrina, who echoed issues from present staff that latest modifications may depart FEMA poorly outfitted for coping with disasters.
“I’m all for holistic reform. I don’t like how it’s being done,” stated Brock Long, who led FEMA throughout half of Trump’s first time period. “I don’t understand killing FEMA without an identifiable way forward that can be time-phased in.”
While most agreed that the company might be scaled again, many warned that the present shake-up is winding again the clock, discarding classes discovered from Katrina’s aftermath.
“You’ve seen 20 years of progress taken away in six months,” Deanne Criswell, the FEMA administrator under former President Joe Biden, informed NCS. “It’s like we’ve forgotten everything that we learned from Katrina, and we’re trying to go back to the way it was beforehand.”
Two days after Katrina made landfall, Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré arrived in New Orleans to steer the navy response.
“I got out of the helicopter and thousands of eyes were looking at this one person, as if to say, ‘Is this our ride? Is this the beginning of the end?’” Honoré recalled of touchdown close to the Superdome, a refuge of final resort for town’s trapped residents.
He noticed a girl pushing her child in a buying cart via floodwaters almost as much as the kid’s neck.
Tens of 1000’s, with out meals, water, or data. “There were no toilet facilities. There was no running water,” he stated.
“We needed to get the people out of that,” Honoré informed NCS. “This was an evacuation operation.”
But federal support took days to reach, as high FEMA officers appeared unaware of the severity of the disaster. Then-FEMA administrator Michael Brown claimed he didn’t know 1000’s have been stranded on the metropolis’s conference heart, regardless of days of in depth media protection.
This got here after repeated warnings — together with a FEMA-led simulation a 12 months earlier that predicted such a disaster in New Orleans. Yet the administration, FEMA, and its native companions failed to arrange, mobilize, or reply successfully.
Brown largely blamed “bureaucratic confusion” and a dysfunctional chain of command that left FEMA “powerless to act.”
“My requests for necessities − food, water, medical supplies, even buses for evacuation − became mired in paperwork,” he wrote in an op-ed final week. “I deeply regret not walking to a microphone, calling out the systemic failures and embarrassing the administration into waking up and responding.”
Three weeks after the storm, President George W. Bush admitted: “The system, at every level of government, was not well-coordinated and was overwhelmed in the first few days.”
While officers at each degree fell quick, Congress concluded FEMA confronted deeper issues.
In the wake of 9/11, the company had been moved under the newly created Department of Homeland Security, the place its authority diminished, sparking an exodus of senior leaders.
Eroded preparedness, an absence of skilled management, insufficient coaching and weakened organizational construction finally made failure “all but inevitable,” a bipartisan congressional report discovered.
Some noticed FEMA as past restore, and there have been bipartisan talks of dismantling it. Instead, lawmakers opted to strengthen the company.
In 2006, Congress handed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act (PKEMRA), which overhauled FEMA and empowered it with a brand new sense of autonomy.
Given Brown’s lack of expertise, PKEMRA mandated that FEMA’s administrator possess emergency administration experience. The place gained extra authority, and future FEMA administrators served as principal advisors to the president throughout disasters and have been usually seen at their facet.
Brown resigned and Bush changed him with R. David Paulison, a profession firefighter who was main the US Fire Administration.
Paulison’s first transfer was to “clean out the front office,” he informed NCS, reassigning the political appointees and putting in extra skilled emergency managers.
“I needed people that understood disasters, and the folks that were in there did not understand what needed to be done and how fast we had to move,” he stated.
Morale “was in the toilet,” Paulison stated, so he held city halls with FEMA workers to reassure them the company was shifting in a brand new course. He ramped up hiring, rising FEMA’s head rely and filling regional management vacancies to strengthen ties with the communities they serve.
The reforms additionally sparked a tradition shift inside FEMA, prompting the company to err on the facet of doing an excessive amount of, reasonably than too little – an method that continued via Trump’s first time period. These modifications have been woven “into the DNA of FEMA as reasons why we do things the way we do them,” MaryAnn Tierney, who was the quantity two at FEMA within the present administration till this May, informed NCS.
A key change was the power to faucet catastrophe reduction funds earlier than a disaster hit, permitting FEMA to pre-position property like search and rescue groups in order that they might be on the bottom throughout the first 12 hours of a storm .
“I don’t know how many lives you could say we saved, but I know that being proactive means we got there quicker,” stated Craig Fugate, who led FEMA under President Barack Obama.
But now, Fugate and Paulison are amongst these apprehensive that progress is being rolled again.
“I hope there’s a plan in place in this reconstruction of FEMA to put it back where it needs to be,” Paulison stated. “I just hope we don’t go back to where we were pre-Katrina.”
It was simply 4 days into Trump’s second time period when he landed in Asheville, North Carolina to survey the devastation left behind by Hurricane Helene 4 months prior. Flanked by reporters and officers, he first shared a daring plan: abolishing FEMA.
“I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away,” he declared. “I think FEMA’s not good.”
On the marketing campaign path, Trump had relentlessly attacked the company, accusing it of ravenous Republican communities of support and diverting catastrophe funds to undocumented immigrants. He claimed the Helene response was “going even worse” than Katrina.
The FEMA-bashing was a departure for Trump from his first administration, when he had thrust the company into the nationwide highlight by handing it the reins to coordinate the federal Covid-19 response.
“They will come through as they always do,” Trump stated on the time. “We have tremendous people, tremendous talent in FEMA.”
Pete Gaynor, Trump’s FEMA administrator on the time, informed NCS that Trump gave him a transparent mandate: “He told me, listen, don’t worry about people, don’t worry about authority, don’t worry about money. Go do the mission.”
FEMA grew to become the logistical spine for the pandemic, marshaling provides and main a sweeping, whole-of-government effort. Gaynor stated he and Trump had a “wonderful” relationship and that the president “understood the value that FEMA and its employees brought to the fight,” hardly ever second-guessing the company’s choices.
So, when Trump known as for the top of FEMA this 12 months, Gaynor was surprised.
“That was not my impression of what he thought of FEMA,” he stated. “What made him change his opinion about FEMA four years later?”
Whatever the rationale, the present administration has run with Trump’s assertion that FEMA needs to be dramatically diminished.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose division oversees FEMA, seized on Trump’s rhetoric, laying the groundwork to scrap the company with the assistance of Corey Lewandowski, the Trump loyalist turned special government employee.
“We are going to eliminate FEMA,” Noem introduced throughout a televised Cabinet assembly in March.
Behind the scenes, Lewandowski was main the cost. According to a number of sources, he berated Cameron Hamilton – Trump’s choose for appearing head of FEMA – for questioning orders to intestine the company. “You need to be on board to shut FEMA down,” Lewandowski informed Hamilton and his staff, a supply informed NCS .
Administration officers have painted FEMA as partisan, bloated and ineffective, arguing that states ought to shoulder the burden of catastrophe response, with the federal authorities stepping in just for essentially the most catastrophic occasions .
The president has established a FEMA Review Council, chaired by Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, to develop reform proposals for implementation after hurricane season, however the overhaul is properly underway.
From the outset of Trump’s second time period, administration officers have clashed with FEMA’s management and workforce, triggering crises that shattered morale and drove out giant numbers of the company’s workers.
Just three weeks in, Elon Musk — then head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a division throughout the White House tasked with dramatically reducing down the scale of the federal authorities — accused FEMA workers of illegally distributing hundreds of thousands in federal funds to New York City to shelter migrants as half of a program the company operated.
DHS swiftly fired 4 FEMA staffers — together with the company’s extensively revered chief monetary officer – saying the group had “effectively laundered” the funds and lied to management.
But inside communications obtained by NCS revealed a different story: FEMA workers had repeatedly sought authorized steering and believed they have been following the administration’s orders.
“It has instilled a culture of fear,” former deputy FEMA administrator Tierney informed NCS. “People are afraid to make decisions, and that is going to be a problem when we have a large catastrophic incident, and we need lots of people moving as fast as possible to help people.”
Public criticisms, layoffs, and hiring freezes adopted.
Tierney joined an exodus nonetheless underway on the company. Roughly one-third of FEMA’s full-time workforce has departed by some estimates, many via layoffs and DOGE buyouts. Among them: dozens of longtime senior leaders, some of whom helped reshape FEMA after Katrina.
In May, Hamilton, who didn’t assist the administration’s plan to abolish the company, was fired, and Noem changed him with David Richardson – a DHS official with no catastrophe administration expertise — as appearing head.
“FEMA is part of the Department of Homeland Security, and don’t forget that,” Richardson informed workers on his first day. “I, and I alone, speak for FEMA. I am the president’s representative at FEMA, and I am here to carry out President Trump’s intent.”
DHS has also inserted greater than a half-dozen of its officers into vital roles inside FEMA’s entrance workplace, surrounding Richardson with advisors who possess equally little expertise dealing with pure disasters.
This week, Hamilton raised his personal issues concerning the FEMA overhaul.
“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,” he wrote on X.
When catastrophic floods swept via central Texas in July, FEMA’s seasoned groups sprang into motion – however instantly faced bureaucratic hurdles, a stifled potential to ramp up assets, and a pacesetter that some say was lacking in motion.
Inside the company, the episode deepened fears that the administration’s reforms have been crippling its potential to reply shortly.
Less than a month earlier, Noem had enacted a sweeping rule aimed toward reducing spending: each contract and grant over $100,000 now requires her private sign-off. In essence, the order, which is nonetheless in place, ignores the authority granted to FEMA by Congress.
As a end result, FEMA couldn’t pre-position search and rescue groups or fulfill requests for aerial imagery. Thousands of calls from survivors went unanswered after a contract for name heart employees lapsed.
At the identical time, some contained in the company stated Richardson was nowhere to be discovered.
Criswell, who led the company under President Biden, stated her telephone lit up with frantic messages from former colleagues.
“They couldn’t find Richardson,” she stated. “They couldn’t get approval to put a couple of easy contracts in place. They couldn’t get approval to bring in a couple of staff on overtime to start running analysis. They couldn’t get approval to deploy the urban search and rescue teams.”
Richardson told lawmakers he was on trip however jumped in “immediately” to assist lead the response from Washington, “kicking down the doors of bureaucracy.”
DHS defended its response, citing speedy deployment of different property from throughout the division, together with groups from the US Coast Guard and Border Patrol, including that they tapped FEMA assets when the necessity arose.
The head of FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue department resigned weeks later, citing the delays as his breaking level.
A DHS spokesperson dismissed his criticism, saying: “We’re being responsible with taxpayer dollars, that’s our job.”
The Texas floods killed greater than 130 folks — the deadliest pure catastrophe of Trump’s second time period.
Fugate, who championed FEMA’s “go big, go early, go fast, be smart” method when he led the company, stated that mentality seems to be vanishing.
“Having to go back and get permission kind of defeats the purpose of what FEMA is built for,” he stated. “It negates FEMA’s ability to get out ahead of a disaster, which was one of the lessons learned from Katrina. Don’t wait. Don’t get behind.”
Even after the floods, Richardson didn’t make any public remark concerning the response. He was notably absent when Trump visited Texas.
This week, greater than 180 present and former FEMA workers signed an open letter to Congress warning that Trump’s company shake-up is undermining the safeguards put in place after Katrina, citing the response in Texas. One day later, the administration placed several of the signatories on administrative leave.
As the Trump administration weighs long-term FEMA reforms, the president has vowed to “give out less money” and officers are eyeing stricter limits on who qualifies for federal disaster aid.
While gutting the company, tanking morale and imposing excessive oversight has drawn criticism, this concept for reforming FEMA is usually welcomed by many emergency administration leaders.
The post-Katrina reforms aimed for a “whole community” method that empowered native and state governments, however as FEMA’s footprint has grown — largely at Congress’ course — so has state dependence on federal help, even for minor disasters.
“Too many costs are being passed on to the federal taxpayer that really are the responsibility of state and local governments,” Fugate stated.
Some specialists consider FEMA’s obligations needs to be narrowed, with native communities shouldering extra duty for reoccurring danger.
“Emergency management is a team sport, and quite frankly I’m pretty tired of the scapegoating that FEMA has received,” Long stated.
However, many warn that states aren’t ready to stand on their own. For months, FEMA paused key preparedness trainings and collaborations with state and native companions, and the company introduced plans to shrink its response footprint and finish door-to-door canvassing after disasters.
DHS and DOGE have slashed a whole lot of hundreds of thousands from FEMA preparedness and mitigation grants they take into account wasteful, together with a serious catastrophe resilience program established throughout Trump’s first time period that is now tied up in courtroom.
State emergency administration officers – who rely closely on that federal funding — are pleading for clarity on the agency’s future.
The classes of Katrina loom giant over these debates. The catastrophe revealed the deadly penalties of inexperience, poor planning, and a breakdown in coordination at each degree of authorities.
Many argue FEMA needs to be impartial, warning that under DHS, it’s too uncovered to political interference.
Now, as FEMA’s authority is chipped away, its experience hollowed out, and its future unclear, some concern the nation dangers repeating previous errors, at an incredible value.
“The price you pay may be the price that Michael Brown and the Bush administration faced after Katrina,” Gaynor stated. “We haven’t really learned much if we’re repeating the sins of the past.”