Beating the Dead Horse Deader: How Do You Solve Perpetual Problems Like FEMA Failures?

President Bill Clinton and FEMA Administrator James Lee Witt. That is who I blame for the plight of North Carolinians and Angelenos after Hurricane Helene and the latest wildland fires in Southern California, respectively. After them, I blame scores of Members of Congress, governors, presidents, and FEMA Administrators for failing for twenty-five years to learn the bright and repeated lessons from history. Starting in Princeville, North Carolina, following Hurricane Floyd and ending in Asheville, North Carolina, following Helene, America has had countless natural disasters in which FEMA has failed miserably. Instead of using a bit of common sense, the answer always is to reform FEMA with more power, more money, and more congressional oversight. Yet, FEMA continues to fail.

I come to the issue from two perspectives. First, as a support player in the failed federal response to Hurricane Katrina, I saw first hand how inept FEMA can be when dealing with natural disasters. I could tell you stories that would blow your mind on those failures. From the erroneous report on the number of people at the Super Dome (they told us there were only 1,000 when there were 25,000 including dead bodies) to the lack of a demortuazation plan on how to handle the dead (none existed so I had to write one overnight), from a debit card benefit for victims whispered in the ear of President George W. Bush (literally didn’t exist so when President Bush mentioned it at a news conference, we had to rapidly bring it into existence) to the lack of basic supplies and RFID visibility needed to care for tens of thousands of victims (whole trucks got hijacked by local sheriffs as we didn’t know what we had, where it was, or where it was going), FEMA was beyond broken.

Secondly, I come to it as someone who likely has written more on FEMA and disaster preparedness, including a book (Homeland Security and Federalism: Protecting America from Outside the Beltway with Foreward by the Honorable Edwin Meese III), than any person alive today. You can see my work at Heritage and the American Enterprise Institute. I also testified to Congress in June 2013 to the Senate Homeland Security & Government Affairs Committee and again in December 2021 to the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. After Katrina, I had to face four U.S. House and U.S. Senate lawyers for several hours as part of their investigation into the failed federal response to Katrina (that wasn’t very fun). Heck, I even appeared on John Stossel’s show on Fox News In February 2015 to discuss the issue. Thus, depending on your perspective, you could consider me an expert or dismiss me as a leaky bag of hot air (my kids frequently do so…).

The punchline of my writing on dealing with natural disasters is that we keep doing it all wrong. Starting with Clinton and Witt, the federal government increasingly federalized natural disasters. The chart above shows a wonderful little curve beginning in 1993 showing that more natural disasters were federalized with each presidential administration. As Witt famously stated, “Natural disasters are inherently political events,” which is why Clinton jumped on Air Force One every chance he got. Bush believed his dad lost the 1992 election due to the failure of FEMA to properly respond to Hurricane Andrew, so he federalized even more natural disasters. Not to be outdone, Barack Obama went ever higher. Unfortunately, I didn’t publish a more recent chart during my Visiting Fellowship at Heritage, but you get the point.

Now, not to elicit howls from the climate crisis crowd, but America didn’t experience a sudden increase in catastrophic natural disasters starting in 1993. Rather, the politics of natural disasters incented presidents and Members of Congress to federalize the kinds of disasters that historically were entirely handled by states and localities. Historically, federal assets (FEMA) were reserved for national catastrophic events like CAT 3+ hurricanes, 7.0+ earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. The vast majority of tornadoes, fires, floods, blizzards, tropical storms, earthquakes, and the like were not considered big enough for federal action. While it might be tragic for a local community or a state if a tornado wiped out a town, it didn’t require federal action or money. Politics changed that calculus. The perverse reality of federalizing more natural disasters is that governors learned that they could underfund disaster preparedness and response because FEMA would foot the bill and take the blame, which allowed governors to divert funds to issues that earned them votes more acutely (like on transportation, education, and crime). It also allowed governors to shift the costs of response and recovery from their taxpayers to every taxpayer in America via FEMA funded by federal taxes.

Yes, many natural disasters have gotten more expensive, but that expense doesn’t come from the severity or frequency of disasters. That expense comes from idiotic local zoning policies that allow more people to build more expensive homes in high risk areas (i.e., on coastal areas prone to hurricanes, in forested areas in SoCal, and in known flood plains) while at the same time states prevent insurance companies from charging those high risk homeowners from paying the actual costs to insure their homes at the same time they fail to do the common sense things needed to keep everyone safe (like remove dry undergrowth, build reservoirs for water, etc.). As with shifting the tax costs from a state to the nation, insurance companies are forced to subsidize high risk homeowners on the coasts and in SoCal with higher rates in places like Ohio and Nebraska, which rarely suffer large-scale natural disasters (versus very bad train derailments). The federalization of disasters encouraged governors to stop putting their hands up to the federal government (“stay out of my state!!!”) and instead put their hands out (“please, sir, may I have more?”).

The fundamental problem, therefore, becomes two-fold. First, states and localities underinvest in disaster preparedness and response assets and capabilities so they are incapable of handling anything more than a low level tornado or flood (excluding Florida starting with Jeb Bush, of course). Equally problematic, due to distance and bureaucracy, a federal response out of Washington, D.C., will inherently be slower, especially with the requirement for it to move assets to wherever in this enormous country the assets are needed. It isn’t as if FEMA can just snap a finger and provide food, water, healthcare, and housing to victims quickly. If America wants to do a better job of responding to natural disasters, it needs to return to the pre-FEMA days and decentralize natural disaster response for all events except those that involve multiple states (Hurricane Katrina) or is so catastrophic a state and its localities will be overwhelmed (September 11). Once governors know the federal government won’t be there to bail them out of every flood, fire, tornado, or storm, they will step up and do what is necessary to protect their constituents.

At some point, we have to stop doing the same thing expecting a different result to occur. If we want better results and political accountability, we need to get the federal government out of the daily disaster response industry.