By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
Every state and locality faces extreme weather events and some, like New York City, are large enough to build and maintain the capacity to deal with emergencies. But many Americans live in towns and states that are relatively small and cannot bear the financial burden of developing comprehensive emergency response capacity. The logic in our federal system has been local first, states second, and when the emergency is too great for both, the federal government is asked to help. There are some functions of government that belong at the federal level and some elements of emergency response and reconstruction that need to be national. This enables places that aren’t in immediate peril to help pay the costs for those in danger today. The idea is that we help you today, knowing that you will help us when it’s our turn to suffer. That way, the costs are reasonable and, most crucially, predictable.
But that logic eludes the amateurs and incompetents running America’s national government. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been decimated, and its top professionals are fleeing the agency as fast as they can. According to a recent article by Lisa Friedman in the New York Times:
“Jeremy Greenberg resigned as the top official at FEMA’s National Response Coordination Center on Wednesday…His resignation came after other senior staff members have left and a day after President Trump said he would wind down the federal agency by November. “We want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Mr. Trump said on Tuesday during a news briefing in the Oval Office. “We think after the hurricane season we’ll start phasing it out.” Mr. Trump also warned states to expect “less money” from the federal government for disaster recovery. And, he said, the money would come directly from the president’s office…If a state gets hit by a hurricane or other extreme weather, “the governor should be able to handle it,” Mr. Trump said. “And frankly, if they can’t handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn’t be governor.”… Since the start of the Trump administration, FEMA has lost about a quarter of its full-time staff, according to a former senior official. Last month, the head of FEMA was dismissed, and several senior officials have left, including MaryAnn Tierney, who was second-in-command.”
The system of funding disaster response that President Trump is envisioning is one in which the President personally allocates funding. Under the current system, the President decides where emergencies should be declared, but then professionals allocate funds according to carefully constructed standards. While FEMA has never been known for extreme speed and competence, the proposed “system” will be slower and wildly politicized. Disaster relief as personal patronage is a prescription for disunity in the face of catastrophe—the very opposite of what we need at those times.
There is a management concept called economy of scale, which the folks in charge of our federal government may not be familiar with. This enables response capacity to be developed centrally, with the costs shared among many. Leaving emergency response to the states will result in redundant capabilities and gaps in expertise. If a state agency uses an expensive piece of response equipment twice a year, they will learn less about its operational issues than a federal agency that uses that same equipment 25 times a year.
In Trump’s world of macho management, if a governor can’t handle an emergency, that governor is incompetent. The sheer recklessness of that way of thinking cannot be understated. Some emergencies are overwhelming. Some are beyond anyone’s capacity to address. Those are the times when community and empathy are critical. It is not a question of competence but of maintaining a system of mutual assistance. With our federal government being dismantled outside of homeland security and the military, we will need to develop alternative means of mutual assistance during emergencies.
There are other models that can and must be followed. We see this with the mutual agreements in place with electric utilities around the nation. When one state loses power, other states send their utility repair teams to help out. States will need to develop formal compacts to render mutual assistance during emergencies. These will need to be detailed and accompanied by training exercises and other measures to coordinate actions. While this function should be played by a federal emergency response agency, after November, we won’t have one, so we’d better get something up and running by then.
I am amazed that Congress is again allowing the President to dismantle an agency that they authorized and funded. I’m a little confused about why these legislators bother to come to work and why they are so concerned about reelection since they obviously have no role in decision-making these days. Perhaps they should look for more meaningful or at least more lucrative work. They are wasting time and space in our nation’s capital. I was shocked when AID was dismantled but assumed that was due to a lack of public concern about people outside the United States. But dismantling FEMA is ending an agency that serves Americans at their most vulnerable. Americans call on FEMA when they have lost their homes, businesses, schools, and even communities. Given the impact of climate change on extreme weather, the odds are that Congressional constituents will experience a weather emergency sometime in the next decade or so. I did during Hurricane Sandy, as did all my neighbors here in Long Beach, New York. Not only is this group of amateurs destroying FEMA, but they are also destroying the Weather Service’s ability to predict and warn Americans about dangerous weather conditions. According to a New York Times piece in mid-May by Judson Jones:
“Through layoffs and retirements, the Weather Service has lost nearly 600 people from a work force that until recently was as strong as 4,000. The reductions cut across two vital functions of the agency: the work of collecting the data used to make forecasts, and the people who turn that data into crucial warnings when extreme weather is on the way. Weeks ago, as people began leaving the agency, some offices curtailed the regular weather balloon launches that send back data to feed forecast models… Now the cuts have led to a staffing crisis so dire that at least eight of the department’s 122 offices will soon no longer have forecasters working overnight…”
Commercial services such as AccuWeather and the Weather Channel rely on government forecasts, and Project 2025 proposed further commercialization of this function. I suppose private companies could develop their own weather satellites and weather balloons and sell those forecasts to the public. But it seems to me that information about a tornado heading your way should be freely available to everyone.
There is nothing sacrosanct about FEMA or the Weather Service. Both agencies, along with many other federal agencies, require modernization and reform. The Project 2025 model of reform assumes that government interests are so entrenched by a supposed “deep state” that agencies must be destroyed before they can be reformed. That is nonsense. When Bill Clinton was President at the end of the 20th century, there was a determined and partially successful effort to reinvent government. According to Charles S. Clark of Government Executive:
“The reinvention gospel called for importing private sector efficiency techniques to make government more results-oriented and less costly. After an initial six-month canvass of agencies, the National Performance Review proposed 1,200 changes to “serve customers better,” relieve businesses of unneeded regulations, exploit technology to widen access to federal services and information, encourage plain English documents, improve coordination with state and local governments, cement community relationships, build new labor-management partnerships and empower front-line workers… After two-thirds of the recommendations were adopted in the first Clinton term, the history says, the staff “assigned a ‘champion’ in the agencies to follow through on the implementation of each recommendation.” What also unfolded during that seven-year period of deficit reduction and a post-Cold War defense drawdown was the elimination of 426,200 federal positions, according to a summary on the NPR’s archival website.”
This careful, methodical effort to reform government was effective and quietly important work but would not play well on today’s superficial and performative social media. It was difficult, painstaking work, behind the scenes, and too boring for the nightly news of that time. The Trump team is about image and attention. Performance is secondary. The Secretaries of Defense and Homeland Security prioritize image and parroting the president. But the agencies they run are critical to the safety of the American public. If that safety is endangered, reality will become more important than image, and if this president’s past is prologue, they will find themselves out of their government jobs before the mid-term elections.
Views and opinions expressed here are those of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Columbia School of Professional Studies or Columbia University.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
