Trump himself had claimed three months earlier that “they’re being treated very badly in the Republican areas … They’re not getting water, they’re not getting anything,” he charged. So when he came to North Carolina early in his presidency, he said he was considering “getting rid” of FEMA. “I’d like to see the states take care of disasters,” Trump proposed. “Let the state take care of the tornadoes and the hurricanes and all of the other things that happen.”
The Trump administration’s talk about shutting down FEMA echoes the most important and most enduring questions about federalism: Why don’t we just get the federal government out of the state and local governments' hair? That’s just what Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint, recommended.
It’s long been the dream of right-leaning reformers from Richard Nixon through Ronald Reagan, and from scholars like Nobel laureate James M. Buchanan to the Brookings Institution’s Pietro Nivola. Sorting out roles would match what James Madison had in mind in designing the American republic, they said.
“We would be better off without FEMA,” the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards contended. “FEMA’s main activity is handing out cash after disasters, but states and private organizations can fill that role.”
If there’s any one enduring truth about federalism, however, it’s that it refuses to be neat. Nowhere has that been truer than in preparing and responding to disasters.
The FEMA we know today is the product of a long historical process. During World War II, the federal government concluded that preserving local communities was too important a job to be left to them alone, so the White House established a national civil defense office to organize air raid drills and prepare for first aid in case of attack.
During the Cold War, the federal government’s role grew even more. School children of the 1950s and 1960s — yours truly included — remember hiding under their desks in air raid drills and spying huge drums in the basement holding emergency drinking water. (Even then, however, the newsreels had convinced us that little desks probably wouldn’t hold up under a nuclear assault.)
But there was a lesson here. The threats were real, and protecting people from big ones would likely overwhelm local capacity. When the Three Mile Island nuclear plant partially melted down in 1979, figuring out what to do was more than the small town of Middletown, Pa. — population 11,000 — could handle.
The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks swamped even New York City’s first responders in 2001. Four years later, Hurricane Katrina’s assault on the Gulf Coast created an enormous disaster for the federal system, one as much political as logistical. When he visited New Orleans days after the storm hit, George W. Bush had little choice but to acknowledge that "when the federal government fails to meet such an obligation, I, as president, am responsible for the problem, and for the solution.”
German military strategist Helmuth von Moltke famously argued that “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” The corollary in homeland security is that no effort to draw neat lines of responsibility in federalism survives the first encounter with a disaster.
When big problems hit, it’s politically impossible for federal officials to shrug off local calls for help because of some notion that it’s simply a local problem. And the bigger the problem, the more likely it is to swamp local capacity. A tornado in a rural area can quickly overwhelm local search, rescue, medical response and debris removal resources. When wildfires swept through Los Angeles in January, even the nation’s second-largest city didn’t have the aerial tankers and ground troops to fight the fires. Support teams quickly came to the area from as far away as Canada and Mexico.
FEMA would be the first to admit it needs much more work to cut down on the red tape involved with the money it gives out and to coordinate responses on the ground more effectively. FEMA, however, is never the first to respond to disasters. That job has always rested with local officials. And FEMA’s planning grants, often criticized as boondoggles, have helped local governments learn — in advance — about how to connect the dots in case of disaster. That was just what happened in the response to the disaster over the Potomac River this year when an American Airlines jet and an Army helicopter collided. Local fire departments from as far away as Annapolis, Md., sent boats and crews to the scene.
Drawing clear lines is an attractive way of cutting down the federal role and saving big piles of cash, but that hasn’t worked in the 85 years since the outbreak of World War II. One thing is for certain: If the Trump administration pursues its plan to push FEMA’s work off to state and local governments, it wouldn’t survive its first contact with a disaster.
Governing’s opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing’s editors or management.
