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President Donald Trump is eyeing the Federal Emergency Management Agency for his chopping block (at least, his slimming block) as California continues to recover from wildfires and North Carolina from Hurricane Helene. Since Trump visited both states in week one of his presidency, his comments on FEMA have teetered between cut-down reforms and complete elimination.
Heaped upon these comments, his recent executive order to review FEMA leaves a big question concerning the federal government’s role in responding to future disasters: Where do we go from here? And what’s important about this question is that it isn’t just one for the two coasts. The West and the Southeast may make the most news, but disasters don’t read the Sunday paper.
Consider Bloomington, where, when it rains, it pours (and it doesn’t drain). I don’t know about you, but personally, I’ve trudged through inches of sitting water on campus after downpours this year — but it could be worse. And it is throughout Indiana, a state that was once more than a quarter wetland. Drainage and flooding are problems that cities across this state have had to look in the eyes, including Indianapolis, South Bend and Gary. All face heightened risks of substantial flooding. Each has had one, two, three, four and many more water disasters in recent memory.
As a result, FEMA has doled out $281 million in insurance payments to Hoosier homeowners since 1980 — a miniature amount compared to California or North Carolina but gargantuan in its impact on the lives of those who receive it. What those lives would have looked like in a FEMA-less world is at the core of the question we posed earlier. Vice President and could-have-been-President Hubert Humphrey offered this wisdom in 1977: “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life...the twilight of life...the shadows of life.”
While eliminating FEMA would require Congress’s cooperation, so would eliminating the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — and there, Trump has been working to side step Congress as Elon Musk foretells a fate for the agency "in the wood chipper" on X.
What FEMA needs is reform, not elimination, as Vermont Senator Peter Welch recently argued in a guest essay for The New York Times, “Don’t Kill FEMA. Fix It.” Welch critiques the agency for its failures after flooding in his state, but he concludes that it was better to have FEMA than not. Trump has not said in certain terms he will kill FEMA, but doing so would follow from the logic of the Department of Government Efficiency, where “efficiency” can serve as a code word for deregulation and dismantling. Thus, the Department of Education, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and USAID all now sit with FEMA in four precarious seats beneath the gallows’ shadow, awaiting their fates.
What Trump suggests is shifting FEMA’s responsibilities onto states, and the local-looking core of this idea isn’t a bad one. The nearer you are to a situation, the less red tape spans the distance between you and it, the faster you can respond and the better you know the people you’re responding to. However, a lot of states just lack the money and resources necessary for responding to disasters when they happen. In 2005, for instance, Hurricane Katrina resulted in $125 billion worth of losses for Louisiana, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. Now, 20 years later, the state’s annual budget is only $49 billion.
Sharing the burden of common welfare is part of the genius of our federalist system. Some disaster events, like certain toxic waste spills, are rare enough that maintaining a 24/7, expert response team for them would prove burdensome even for large states like New York. In 1978, that's why President Jimmy Carter established FEMA to clean up waste from a nuclear generator spill in New York. State and local governments like New York’s can then focus on the public planning and infrastructure that exacerbate disasters — or not.
Human creations face the inevitability of age. Of course, FEMA needs reform. Like a ship, anything accrues barnacles in the wind and water of time, including FEMA. And sometimes, these things really need to be scraped, but not scuttled.
Eric Cannon is a freshman studying philosophy and political science and currently serves as a member of IU Student Government.
