President Trump can reform or rebuild FEMA into the world-class emergency management agency that it can, and must, be.

On January 24, while visiting North Carolina to gain insight into the arguably not-well-managed crises in North Carolina and California, President Donald Trump ruminated on the role and the future of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), America’s premier federal agency for disaster management. “This is probably one of the best examples of it not working,” Trump told reporters, of FEMA’s efforts in North Carolina. “FEMA’s turned out to be a disaster,” he said. “I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away and we pay directly, we pay a percentage, to the state, and the state should fix it.”

He’s not wrong to see big issues with FEMA. It definitely needs to be fixed, and a case can be made for replacing it and starting afresh, but eliminating it entirely goes too far.

As an emergency management and continuity of operations expert with the Department of Transportation (DOT) and working closely with the Department of Homeland Security, I feel well qualified to weigh in on the good, the bad, and the ugly as regards our national performance during dramatic and sometimes traumatic incidents. I can be objective about FEMA; we coordinated many of our activities with them and I know the people and system well, but I never worked for them.

Unlike most other countries, which tend to take a much more top-down approach, in the United States, we already proceed from the assumption that disasters are initially a local issue, to be dealt with locally—the approach Trump is now advocating for as new. And indeed, that approach has important strengths—as well as some consequential weaknesses. The concept is that local responders address the crisis immediately. If they require more help, they reach out to the county or parish. If county resources are then found to be insufficient, they can reach out to the state which, in turn, can reach out to the Federal government. This doesn’t mean that the higher-level entities do nothing to help until they get an SOS. If the disaster was predicted and expected to be a major event, there would be significant “just in case” preparation at all levels.

Problems arise when the local, county/parish, or state is reluctant to ask for help, which happens more often than you might think, for a range of psychological and political reasons. During Hurricane Katrina, which was confidently expected to be a major disaster, the Federal government had correspondingly major resources staged to help. But we were waiting, based in part on the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, (commonly known as the Stafford Act), for the state to ask. When Louisiana finally asked DOT to help open the airport in New Orleans to evacuate residents, we determined that this would take too long, so I coordinated with AMTRAK to begin evacuations by rail while the airport was being readied. The state, however, came up with a multitude of reasons why it didn’t want that—all basically boiling down to the fact that it wasn’t as dramatic and “sexy” as an air bridge, even if that meant that far more people could be evacuated far faster. Plus, politicians can be loathe to admit that they need help, especially if the federal government is held by the opposite party or if the mayor or governor wants to remain front and center as the hero of the day. This delays aid, undoubtedly costs lives, and creates undue hardship.

Learning from previous mistakes can also run into resistance. There is a required after-action report following every disaster to identify what worked and what didn’t, but it runs up against a reluctance to highlight things that went wrong because it makes the entity look bad. Trump is right on two counts: sometimes it’s necessary to start fresh because otherwise there are too many entrenched interests and egos, and sometimes it’s good to create an independent body to ensure objective evaluations and appropriate consequences. DOGE, meet FEMA.

With disaster management, it’s also essential to eliminate the interference of politics and ideology. The example of the individual who thought it a good idea to withhold assistance from households that had posted pro-Republican campaign posters is a small-scale instance. The fact that the National Fire Academy and the U.S. Forest Service, both of whom have state-of-the-art recommendations on how to prevent, control, and redirect forest fires, were blocked by California politics and ideology, illustrates the damage this causes on a large scale. Funding decisions need to be made on the basis of pragmatic objectivity. I suspect that full implementation of the best practices in wildfire prevention would have been far less costly, and a much better way to protect the environment, than the carnage resulting from woke policies in California.

Trump correctly sees the need for federal agencies to refocus on their core missions, reduce mission creep and redundancy, and be funded appropriately. FEMA will make an excellent test case. Just look, for example, at their website where we find a confusing multitude of offices unrelated to the core mission of Response and Recovery and with obvious overlap among themselves. Tellingly, the most important ones such as the U.S. Fire Administration, are listed last.

Plans, policies, and procedures need to be clear and not written in “governmentese.” FEMA has a National Preparedness Goal, a National Preparedness System, a National Planning Framework, and a ballooning host of other documents. The National Preparedness Goal is a twenty-nine-page document of which only the first sentence of the conclusion is actually necessary:

“The Goal is designed to prepare our Nation for the risks that will severely stress our collective capabilities and resources.”

That follows paragraph after paragraph of fine sentiments and cliches. And while it’s great to mention coordination, planning, and cooperation, where is the document that clearly and simply spells out who does what?

So yes, the federal government is rife with redundancy and bureaucracy that often increases costs and creates inefficiencies, but the basic architecture of how the United States manages disasters—on a graduating scale from local to federal—is sound. Trump shouldn’t “throw out the concept of a federal disaster management office with the stormwater,” but reform or rebuild FEMA into the world-class emergency management agency that it can, and must, be.

About the author: Charles Benard

Charles Benard was the Associate Director for National Security and Continuity Programs at the Department of Transportation. In that role (and in a later role in 2024 with the Department of Homeland Security – Office of the Inspector General – DHS/OIG), he worked closely with FEMA during numerous major disasters from 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, and many others.

Image:  Chip Somodevilla / Shutterstock.com

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