Blue tarps cover the roof of Paula Bermudez’s storm-damaged house in Galliano on Oct. 5, 2021 — six weeks after Hurricane Ida. (Wes Muller/Louisiana Illuminator)
Since President Donald Trump first suggested “maybe getting rid of FEMA” and letting states manage federal disaster funding, emergency preparedness experts have expressed mixed feelings about the idea.
Those wary of Trump’s direction point to Louisiana’s Road Home program as a cautionary tale, citing tens of thousands of homeowners left without adequate resources to repair or rebuild.
Trump floated the elimination of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during a visit to North Carolina after Hurricane Helene, criticizing it for being too slow and inefficient. Proponents of the idea are frustrated with disaster management bureaucracy and invite changes to the current system, but some believe a complete dismantling of the agency would invite even more problems.
The president ultimately convened a committee to review FEMA and file a report later this year with recommendations on how to improve it.
Disaster experts who spoke with the Illuminator agree the underlying problem is not so much with FEMA itself but with the public’s misconceptions about its role.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
‘They’re not out there handing out bottles of water’
Trump’s criticism of FEMA began last year on the campaign trail when his allies spread lies that the agency, under then President Joe Biden, was diverting disaster money to immigrants without legal status. They also falsely claim federal recovery aid was limited to $750 per person, and support was being withheld from Republican strongholds likely to vote for Trump.
FEMA has also struggled with an image problem mostly because the public doesn’t understand its role, according to several experts.
“I think there’s some misunderstanding about how FEMA works,” said Andrea Davis, a former FEMA external affairs director in Louisiana. She worked for the agency after Hurricane Katrina and now does emergency preparedness consulting.
Many people mistakenly confuse FEMA’s role with that of first responders and local emergency operations officials, Davis said.
Jacques Thibodeaux, director of the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security & Emergency Preparedness (GOHSEP), explained that disaster response is generally organized into three stages – each with a different level of oversight.
Local officials handle the initial response during the first 72 hours after a disaster, according to Thibodeaux. The state then handles the second phase, from three to 14 days after the event, and FEMA’s role typically begins after two weeks, he said.
“They’re not out there handing out bottles of water,” GOHSEP spokesman Mike Steele said. “That’s not [FEMA’s] role.”
Funding and bureaucracy
Chris Boudreaux, emergency preparedness director for Lafourche Parish, agreed FEMA isn’t supposed to be doing his job, though he said he doesn’t like some of the bureaucracy of the agency. Lafourche Parish has had 27 declared disasters in the past five years and relies heavily on FEMA funding, he said.
There’s a common phrase among emergency operations managers, according to Boudreaux: “The disaster after the disaster.”
Boudreaux said he is constantly filling out FEMA paperwork and following agency regulations but rarely ever speaks directly to federal officials. Even though recovery grant money originates from FEMA, Boudreaux said he has to apply through GOHSEP. State officials then have to review and relay funding applications to FEMA. If approved, FEMA gives the grant money to GOHSEP, which then funnels it down to Boudreaux at the parish level.
This setup is not unique to Lafourche Parish. Nearly all of FEMA’s resources are coordinated at the state level before reaching local officials on the frontlines of disasters, Thibodeaux said. This gives state officials flexibility to decide where to focus recovery resources, he said.
Still, it’s a system that can be frustrating to some. Boudreaux said he is still filing paperwork to get the parish reimbursed for expenses incurred during Hurricane Laura in 2020. There are what seems like 15 different people who have to review it at the state level, he added.
“A penny off and they won’t take it.” he said. “I’ll have to spend a half a day correcting it.”
Thibodeaux and Davis said the deep scrutiny for disaster spending is largely a result of the Stafford Act, which Congress approved in 1988. It established strict requirements for the distribution of federal dollars to state and local governments.
Davis said Trump’s suggestion that the federal government can just hand over large sums of disaster funding to the states and then get out of the way is not practical. A version of that idea — Louisiana’s Road Home Elevation Incentive program — didn’t turn out well when some of the money was misspent at the state level, she said.
After the 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the state devised ways to draw displaced homeowners back to Louisiana with federal funding to help with recovery. This included the Road Home Elevation Incentive program, in which recipients received $30,000 grants to elevate their home. However, more than 32,000 recipients instead used the grants on renovations their insurance claims or personal savings didn’t cover, according to a joint investigation by ProPublica, The Advocate and WWL-TV.
The money came from U.S. taxpayers through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), but the state was in charge of managing it.
The state Office of Community Development and the contractor it hired, ICF Emergency Management Services, mismanaged the program based on an internal HUD review.
With prompting from HUD, the state then sued between 3,200 and 3,500 grantees to claw back the misspent funds. The lawsuits were eventually dropped but not before many homeowners paid back the money.
FEMA’s future
Experts tend to agree that reforms are needed to certain aspects of emergency management.
Thibodeaux said there is general consensus that there are problems with areas such as the National Flood Insurance Program’s “50% rule,” which limits claims to damaged structures if repairs cost more than half its market value.
He believes Trump might institute some changes but is confident FEMA will continue to exist largely intact.
“The agency’s not gonna go away,” Thibodeaux said.
Disaster response in Louisiana relies heavily on federal funding as GOHSEP’s budget is roughly $3.1 billion, and about $2.7 billion of that comes from FEMA, Thibodeaux said.
He added that he believes Trump will remove the agency from the Department of Homeland Security and require the FEMA administrator report directly to his office, similar to the way it was originally structured.
President Jimmy Carter created FEMA through an executive order in 1979. Congress placed it under Homeland Security following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
At the local level, Boudreaux said linking emergency preparedness to homeland security makes little sense to him, and he believes the two should be completely severed.
“If we get an active shooter in a school, I don’t respond,” he said. “That’s the sheriff’s office that handles that.”
Justin Kates, who served as a local emergency response manager in New England and was a member of the FEMA National Advisory Council in 2023-24, echoed several of Boudreaux’s points. Emergency management should be completely severed from Homeland Security, he said.
Kates also noted that individual assistance, the money FEMA often provides to families after large disasters, doesn’t need the approval of state and local officials. The multiple levels of scrutiny for FEMA’s grant funding for local governments are also unnecessary, he said
“Sure, there are many questions right now about what this would entail, but an approach that simply provides money to states to get to work would allow great flexibility,” Kates said. “We saw a similar level of this flexibility in how COVID-19 funds were distributed.”
He cited some of the COVID-19 relief programs that distributed cash to states and local governments, such as the American Rescue Plan, as an example.
However, some states took pandemic relief money intended for workers, health care and social programs and diverted it to businesses, tax cuts and construction projects.
Any time taxpayer money is used, every penny needs to be monitored, said Davis, the former FEMA external affairs director in Louisiana,. There should be more transparency and a better auditing process to allow the public to see how states are spending some of their federal funding, she added.
“It’s never bad to look and see if we’re doing things the best that we can do,” Davis said.
YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE.