- 2 days ago
Curious about FEMA's future plans? The federal response to the recent Texas floods can give you some insight. Learn more about how FEMA is adapting to better handle natural disasters in the future.
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01:15Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast.
01:17I'm Tamara Keith.
01:18I cover the White House.
01:19And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
01:21And NPR climate correspondent Rebecca Hersher is here.
01:24Hello.
01:25Hi.
01:25So today on the show, we are looking at the flooding in Texas and how the federal government has responded to the crisis.
01:35Rebecca, I want to start with how the federal government usually responds to a natural disaster.
01:41Can you just walk us through the process of generally how this works when there's a tragedy like this?
01:47Yes, it is.
01:48It's actually weirdly complicated, but I'll try to make it simple.
01:52So for really big disasters that have some warning, like hurricanes, the federal government actually like pre positions people like it sends people to the region, you know, water and food and medicine as well and rescue teams.
02:04That doesn't apply here because you don't get a lot of warning with flash floods, but it is a big part of a federal response in a lot of cases.
02:11And then after that sort of initial police and fire, you know, local folks on the ground part, the governor or the territorial government or tribal government has to ask the president to declare a disaster.
02:27And in that ask, they have to ask for specific types of help from the federal government.
02:32So like money to help repair roads and public buildings.
02:35Then there's like a pot of money for individual survivors to get like food and clothing, pay for hotels and stuff like that.
02:41And then there's a third pot of money to like upgrade things so the next disaster isn't so damaging.
02:47And then the president can say yes or no to each pot.
02:51And that's when the real federal response starts.
02:54So that's usually actually like a couple of days after the disaster itself, unless you've prepositioned.
02:59So what happened this time in Texas with these floods?
03:02Some of the things I just said happened.
03:04Some of them did not.
03:05There wasn't a lot of warning.
03:07So there weren't any federal resources prepositioned.
03:10The state did do something that happens a lot of the time, which is that they were overwhelmed.
03:15And so they asked for help from neighboring states and they got it.
03:19So like there were rescue teams that came from neighboring states that will actually be reimbursed by the federal government.
03:24So that's technically sort of the beginning of the federal response, sort of.
03:29And then the governor of Texas asked for a disaster declaration from the president, which he got that unlocked money.
03:37There were some weird things that happened, though.
03:39Like there was a federal water rescue and recovery team that wasn't sent right away by FEMA.
03:47Um, it's unclear why the president also initially only approved money for repairing public buildings.
03:53There wasn't any money for individual survivors.
03:55Initially, it took about a week for that individual assistance to be approved, which is a little strange compared to other major disasters, maybe a little slow, especially since the president kept touting all the help that was being sent to Texas.
04:07And then what about the funds to mitigate future disasters that you that you mentioned normally go as part of this?
04:15It's actually unclear whether those have been approved at all.
04:17They certainly haven't started to flow yet.
04:19And I should say there's actually like a huge backlog of that funding for all sorts of disasters all over the country since the president took office.
04:28In general, this White House has not been approving that money.
04:30Domenico, let's talk about the president's response and how the president has been talking about this.
04:36He was in Texas on Friday.
04:38He was clearly very affected by meeting with the families of people who who died in in the flooding.
04:47How is he responding to questions about the federal response?
04:51Well, I mean, it's hard not to be affected when you go and see what's happened in these areas.
04:57The stories that have come out have been absolutely heart wrenching.
05:01Those of us with kids think about sending our kids to camps and, you know, being more concerned about whether they are having a decent time and they're not going to call home to try to have us pick them up.
05:14Right.
05:14This is the last thing any parent would want to be seeing or thinking about.
05:18And, you know, the president went there with the first lady, Melania Trump, who doesn't usually make a lot of these kinds of appearances.
05:25But things sort of went off the rails a little bit when reporters, local reporters are asking about, you know, whether or not there should have been anything done differently in the run up to this, whether there should have been a siren system or better cell service and things like that so that people could be warned more in advance.
05:44And the president essentially just said only an evil person would ask a question like that.
05:49And it makes it difficult because traditionally these things are kind of bipartisan affairs.
05:55You try to figure out what went wrong, try to figure out how to get funding to those states to make things better.
06:00And that's not what happens here.
06:02It all seems to be boiled down to partisanship.
06:05President Trump had previously talked about wanting to phase out FEMA.
06:08We want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level, a little bit like education.
06:15We're moving it back to the states.
06:17Do we know whether the federal response in Texas is indicative of how the Trump administration wants FEMA to work going forward?
06:26I would say it complicates that stated goal of the president, because what's happening is that the federal government is is spending and will spend a huge amount of money on this flood response.
06:40And the Texas leadership, you know, the governor and the emergency manager there are praising Trump for that.
06:47You know, they're giving him this positive feedback that says, thank you so much for using FEMA to help us in our time of need.
06:56And one thing that's really complicated about that is that actually in the president's quest to phase out FEMA, he has appointed this review council that's supposed to eliminate the agency, basically come up with plans to give a lot of FEMA's role back to states.
07:15And Governor Greg Abbott of Texas is on that review council, as is the top emergency official in Texas.
07:23And so I think there's like definitely a lot of tension, kind of a disconnect as well between these Texas officials who on one hand are saying, we are really grateful with what FEMA is doing.
07:36We couldn't do it without you.
07:38And on the other hand, saying this is an agency that's so broken that it needs to be eliminated.
07:42And it's really unclear what comes next after that.
07:45And I will say that from the side of covering the president, he has now been asked several times, do you still want to phase out FEMA or, you know, people in his administration have been asked that.
07:54And the answer is not clear.
07:57The answer is more or less we're working on this disaster right now.
08:01And and so I think we don't know what exactly the vision is and how this plays into it.
08:08And again, I mean, this came back from the campaign in the first place, from the 2024 presidential campaign when he had the flooding in North Carolina.
08:15And Trump really used that as a political cudgel over Joe Biden to say, oh, you know, FEMA is not doing a good enough job.
08:22This is these are pro-Trump areas.
08:24They don't want people who are pro-Trump to get the assistance and created sort of a conspiracy with not a lot of truth behind it that FEMA wasn't trying to help folks in those areas.
08:36And now the shoe's on the other foot because Trump is in office.
08:39There's something that's happening in a red state.
08:41And so you have people in those states, the leadership in those states, Republicans in those states saying that the federal government's doing a very good job.
08:49And, you know, this never used to be the kind of thing that was something that just went through the political, you know, washing machine and spin cycle.
08:58Because it wasn't that long ago, for example, that Ron DeSantis, who couldn't be more opposite of Joe Biden, you know, as governor of Florida, was working with Joe Biden and praising Joe Biden because of what happened in Florida with Hurricane Ian.
09:13And that's what it used to be like and not so much anymore with Trump in the White House and, you know, really making it seemingly all about politics.
09:22How you view how an agency runs seems to be put through this lens of partisanship.
09:29All right. Well, we are going to take a quick break and we will have more in a moment.
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10:49And I want to broaden things out a little bit.
10:52Whether disasters are becoming more and more frequent.
10:55Flooding, hurricanes, wildfires.
10:59Is FEMA and federal funding, as it has worked in the past, designed to handle a constant state of disasters like we've been seeing in the past several years?
11:08I mean, no, not as it currently exists.
11:12You know, that's according to FEMA itself.
11:13You know, the head of FEMA under the Biden administration asked Congress to make changes to help make it easier for FEMA, for example, to get money into the hands of state and local governments more quickly because the agency is dealing with these back-to-back-to-back-to-back disasters every year.
11:29And they're always running out of money.
11:32So I think basically all disaster experts agree that FEMA, as it is currently set up, really doesn't work with climate change.
11:41The question is about how to fix it.
11:44You know, there are two bills in Congress right now that would basically streamline the process for FEMA to push out money.
11:51I think most experts agree that one problem is just that it's too complicated.
11:56There's, like, too much paperwork.
11:57But, you know, what the president has said that he wants to do is sort of take a different tack, which is just get rid of the agency.
12:05Give that responsibility to the states instead.
12:08And I think that's something that gives a lot of state emergency managers some heartburn because the reality is that disasters are too expensive for most states to handle on their own.
12:17You know, just removing debris can cost millions of dollars.
12:21Like, these are really, really big events.
12:23And if you're a really big state, you might be able to find most of the money.
12:27But most of the states that get hit with these things over and over, you know, think of, like, the states on the Gulf Coast.
12:32They do not have the budget to handle this.
12:35And so, you know, people are worried.
12:37If you get rid of FEMA, who could plug that hole?
12:40And honestly, like, could it mean lost lives?
12:42Because if you don't respond to a disaster in a timely way, you don't get to get that back later.
12:47Right.
12:47Yeah.
12:48And, Domenico, we've talked about this, but states have to balance their budgets.
12:52Yeah.
12:52The federal government is often in the position of Congress having to approve emergency funds to replenish the disaster recovery funds.
13:01And I mean, one way that people look at this is, you know, we're talking about multimillion dollars in cleanup costs.
13:05But there have been a humongous increase in billion-dollar disasters.
13:10I mean, if you look back to 1980, there was something like $58 billion in billion-dollar disaster events.
13:17It's an incredible amount of money.
13:18But we're talking, you know, the last couple of years, half a trillion or more in the amount of money that the federal government and local governments have had to spend.
13:28And it's an incredible increase, and it's an agency that just is not funded to that extent to be able to keep up with, frankly, what's happening in climate change.
13:38So, Rebecca, realizing that we are in a situation where there isn't, like, a huge amount of clarity, is there a sense of whether states are equipped to prepare for future disasters, whether states are able to do the mitigation in advance to prevent the loss of life or to reduce the impact of potential natural disasters?
14:01I would say, you know, even though we don't know a lot about what the future holds for FEMA as a whole, this is an area where we'd probably know the most.
14:09And that's just because the Trump administration already cut, like, the biggest grant program that was funneling federal dollars to those kinds of projects.
14:19And that program, it had more than a billion dollars in the pot.
14:24It was pushing money out into basically every state in the country.
14:28It was canceled in the spring, and there has been a huge backlash from places that voted for the president and from places that did not.
14:38These are towns and cities, tribal governments that were planning to do all kinds of things, including things that are relevant to the disaster we just saw.
14:46So, like, communities that are flood-prone who were going to use this money to install warning systems, who were going to upgrade drainage, who were going to build flood walls.
14:55Like, that kind of pre-disaster preparation is something that the federal government has invested very heavily in in the last decade.
15:04And so, cutting that program actually, like, kind of cut people off at the knees.
15:09Texas as a whole was one of the top states that received grants under this program.
15:14It's unclear how much of that would have gone to the Hill Country in particular.
15:18None of it would have gone to the most affected county in particular.
15:21That county was trying to use state dollars to do their flood warning system upgrade.
15:27And I think it's unclear what the future holds for that type of money.
15:31Will the Trump administration create a new program under a new version of FEMA?
15:36I think there's quite a bit of lobbying to try to create something like that.
15:39But so far, that money is gone.
15:42All right. Well, Rebecca Hersher, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us.
15:46Thank you so much.
15:47I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House.
15:49I'm Domenico Montanaro, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent.
15:52And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.
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