The Executive Branch is talking about doing away with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which operates under the Department of Homeland Security. This would probably require Congressional action, given that the current version of FEMA was set up under the Homeland Security Act of 2002.
While most people know FEMA from the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, or the short-term support they give to disaster victims, often in the form of funds for food and housing, they do a lot of the "grunt work" behind the scenes. After Katrina, they took a long, hard look at themselves and the co-ordination process, and adopted, expanded and trained for the National Incident Management System, a flexible, modular command framework for disaster response -- and one in which FEMA officials rarely get the top job. They also got handed the ugliest part of the EAS system: working out who initiates alerts, how the system passes messages, what the data codes are, and running periodic national-level tests. FCC does the enforcement; FEMA has to make the thing work when needed. That was a job that didn't get done at all before it was handed to FEMA; there was hardware in place, but it had never been tested and there was a lot of resistance to testing it. When it finally did get tested, surprise: the national-level system mostly didn't work. It does now: they ran the tests, found the weak spots, and fixed 'em.
They're the agency state Governors call up when major disasters strike, and they're the ones who get the blame if response lags. Congress sets their budget and they've got to go back to Congress if a string of floods, bad weather and wildfires run it dry.
So set among DHS's super-spies, decorated soldiers and counterterrorists, FEMA is the agency in work clothes, rumpled and sweaty. Could other parts of the government do their job? Sure -- but history tells us that didn't work very well in the past and I see no reason to believe it would be any different next time.
I was always told conservatives were all about keeping the stuff that worked, conserving it, and eliminating wasteful flash. I'm not sure the present crop of 'em believes that.
Update
5 weeks ago
7 comments:
Conservatism isn't about conserving things.
Conservatism is about making careful, measured, incremental progress to prevent making radical, disruptive, and destructive mistakes.
Radical, disruptive, and destructive changes are often made by the more exuberant, less cautious Left. Then conservatives have to prune this back.
I'm not sure the people in North Carolina, impacted by Hurricane Helene think FEMA is working for them, especially if they had Trump signs in their yards.
Is FEMA perfect? Of course not. It is conceived and staffed by humans. However, as one who dealt with them during disaster responses from 2006 to 2018 (as a volunteer member of a preeminent NGO) I have nothing but admiration and praise for the agency and its people. The felon occupying the White House should soon learn (if he is capable of learning) that states (especially the Red States) are not capable of handling their own huge disasters. Day-to-day, states can do it. Katrinas, 9/11s, Sandys, and such are beyond the resources and staffing of individual states.
It looks like I'm going to have to be Speaker to the Deluded again. I'll probably be publishing a couple of comments that are either factually wrong, or that distort and misrepresent real events.
There are plenty of good search engines, multiple news networks, wire services, etc., and even "horse's mouth" information. Please don't get all your news from a single source.
Zendo Deb: can you cite a source for that assertion? Other than, say, Newsmax or headline-hungry members of Congress?
There's a blog post coming. It looks into how much there might be to your implications, and the answer is, not much -- and someone got fired over even that.
Anon: does your definition of "pruning back" include abolishing an entire Federal disaster response agency, and leaving states to fend for themselves? How about the abrupt and unlawful dismissal of the non-partisan Inspectors General who are charged with monitoring Federal agencies for waste, crookedness and bias? Were civil rights rules from the 1960s that have ensured Federal contractors cannot discriminate on the basis of race, religion or national origin "radical, disruptive, and destructive mistakes" to be pruned back?
Today's GOP is not conservative. It is authoritarian and many of its actions appear to be racist and discriminatory. If you're pale, male, the right kind of Protestant and hale, you're probably gonna be okay -- but the majority of your fellow citizens miss ticking one or more of those boxes, and we've all got reason to worry.
As a former local Emergency Management Operations Officer, I have a lot of areas where FEMA can be improved (and a few areas that need to be pushed back down to State and Local control).
IMHO they sometimes can get too much into running disaster responses and not enough time just backing up the local authorities. Of course that is balanced out by scenarios like Katrina where they took a lot of the blame for the failures of State and Local officials. As usual, sometimes you just can't win.
But we will have something like that at the Federal level. So it might as well be the folks that have some clue, and now some poor schleb in another department that gets it dumped on them as an "additional duty".
And as Roberta said, they get some things right. "Encouraging" (you don't have to adopt ICS/NIMS, but you also don't have to apply for Federal EM grants. Your choice) the states and localities to adopt the Incident Command System/National Incident Management System was a major good thing IMHO.
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