Sarah Labowitz and Leonardo Martinez-Diaz
The Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program explores how climate change and the responses to it are changing international politics, global governance, and world security. Our work covers topics from the geopolitical implications of decarbonization and environmental breakdown to the challenge of building out clean energy supply chains, alternative protein options, and other challenges of a warming planet.Learn More
Over the past four months, the administration of President Donald Trump has vacillated on what to do with the U.S. federal disaster aid system. Early on, Trump expressed interest in “getting rid” of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), pushing disaster-related costs to states and households. Then the administration shifted to a vision that would end FEMA “as it exists today” while implementing major reforms. Talk then returned to eliminating FEMA, only to settle again on some kind of reform. Meanwhile, the president created a FEMA Review Council, which is now making plans to meet.
Despite its uncertainty about how to proceed, the administration is right that FEMA and the federal disaster aid system more generally need to change. This is not new. The system is too slow and burdensome for state and local governments and households. It overindulges in micromanagement at the expense of speed and flexibility. It doesn’t do enough to incentivize investments in resilience and risk mitigation. But there are many worthy aspects that shouldn’t be thrown out with the bathwater. The right way to approach reform is in consultation with local leaders, with plenty of runway to implement major changes, drawing on lessons of what’s worked well and could work even better with reform.
Congress is now entering the fray with constructive ideas, and in good time: Hurricane season starts in twenty-six days. A bipartisan group of legislators has introduced a draft bill in the House of Representatives that has three key changes that would strengthen the disaster aid system and improve its responsiveness to Americans.
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