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Doing away with FEMA would be a disaster
A few months back, President Donald Trump said something that got attention from too few people.
“I say you don’t need FEMA. You need a good state government,” Trump said after he saw Hurricane Helene’s devastating flooding in North Carolina and the damage from the wildfires in Los Angeles.
But the words certainly resonated among some voters, who expressed concerns during recent elections. It’s a terrible idea.
Natural disasters can devastate multiple states, with costs far beyond any state’s ability to pay. Planning for them, as FEMA does when it pre-positions supplies, is a legitimate multi-state function. So is its technical expertise in recovery, which the states could never pay for or efficiently duplicate.
From 1980-2024, there were 27 weather-related disasters each of which cost more than $1 billion, totaling nearly $3 trillion, adjusted for inflation, according to the National Center for Environmental Information.
Climate change will make future numbers worse, despite the fact that the administration has banned the words “climate change” from its own vocabulary and from grant applications.
After Hurricane Ian hit Florida and the Carolinas in 2022, FEMA said it allocated more than $2 billion to Florida alone.
Targeted by Noem, DHS
Trump has also talked about mending FEMA — not ending it. Then he appointed Kristi Noem to run the Department of Homeland Security, which includes FEMA. She said she intends to eliminate it.
FEMA would be rescued from Noem if two Florida congressmen, Democrat Jared Moskowitz and Republican Byron Donalds, can somehow pass their newly filed bipartisan bill to make it an independent, Cabinet-level agency rather than remain one of 30 components of Homeland Security. But it’s unlikely.
“A bigger problem isn’t where FEMA’s at. I’m more concerned that the president doesn’t know what FEMA does,” said Craig Fugate, a Floridian who ran FEMA for former President Obama and served as Florida’s emergency management chief for former Gov. Jeb Bush.
Mend it, don’t end it
Fugate and Peter Gaynor, who ran FEMA in Trump’s first term, published an op-ed in the Tampa Bay Times citing ways FEMA could be improved and warning against simply abolishing it.
“Spreading the risk and cost of disaster around the country is good, efficient policy that makes the whole country strong,” they wrote.
Failure to “fix the system,” they said, would fate stricken communities to “the kind of downward economic spiral that leads to poverty and displacement, forcing families to relocate, businesses to close and entire neighborhoods to deteriorate,” and to “long-term social instability that weakens the fabric of our nation.”
They conceded that FEMA’s customer service and cost control have to be improved and that states, cities and counties have not taken resilience seriously enough to control recovery costs.
A perverse incentive
A major issue is that few state and local governments properly insure their facilities, then rely on FEMA to repair or replace them. The agency covers only uninsured losses, a perverse incentive to purchase no insurance at all.
The political price of saving FEMA will inevitably shift more costs to the states.
States should get serious about forbidding, rather than replacing, structures in seriously flood-prone locales like some barrier islands in Florida or the banks of North Carolina’s French Broad River.
People who can’t afford to buy flood insurance should not be allowed to build there — then wait for FEMA to bail them out.
That doesn’t mean FEMA isn’t needed. In fact, more coordinated disaster response could make communities across the nation stronger and better prepared for the worst, when it strikes.
The Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board includes Executive Editor Roger Simmons, Opinion Editor Krys Fluker and Viewpoints Editor Jay Reddick. The Sun Sentinel Editorial Board consists of Executive Editor Gretchen Day-Bryant, Editorial Page Editor Steve Bousquet, Deputy Editorial Page Editor Dan Sweeney and editorial writers Pat Beall and Martin Dyckman. Send letters to insight@orlandosentinel.com.
