Two decades after Hurricane Katrina submerged a major American city and exposed fatal flaws in the nation’s disaster response system, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) faces a profound transformation under the Trump administration, one that critics warn could return the country to a state of dangerous unpreparedness.
Weather and climate-related disasters like floods and wildfires cause tens of billions of dollars in damage each year.
When events are granted a presidential disaster declaration (PDF), states are eligible for federal government support to cover a substantial portion of disaster-related costs. However, the Trump administration is proposing changes that would shift more of the financial burden to states.
Announced plans include phasing out the federal agency after the 2025 hurricane season, cutting billions from preparedness programs, and shifting responsibility to states.
The anniversary of the August 29, 2005, storm serves as a somber reminder of its toll: over 1,800 lives lost, a metropolis left underwater, and a damage cost eclipsing $160 billion.
The catastrophe was defined not just by the storm’s force but by the collapse of federally maintained levees.
“The world knows it wasn’t just the storm; it was that these levees should’ve held,” said Sandy Rosenthal, founder of the advocacy group Levees.Org.
In the aftermath, Congress enacted sweeping reforms to prevent a repeat failure.
The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act fortified FEMA, mandating that its leader be an experienced emergency manager and granting the agency greater authority to act swiftly.
This overhaul was a direct response to an agency that had been weakened and demoralized prior to the storm, its expertise sidelined by a post-9/11 focus on terrorism.
Today, that hard-won progress is in jeopardy.
President Donald Trump has declared FEMA “has not been a very successful experiment” and articulated a vision to devolve responsibility to the states.
“We want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump stated in June. “So the governors can handle it. That’s why they’re governors. Now, if they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be governor.”
This philosophy has been followed by deep cuts to staff and pre-disaster mitigation programs.
The administration has eliminated billions in preparedness grants and appointed an acting administrator, David Richardson, whose background in weapons of mass destruction, rather than emergency management, appears to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of post-Katrina laws.
“Trump hired Acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson, despite his lack of qualifications and failed response to the deadly July 4th floods in Texas that killed at least 135 people, including children as young as eight, who washed away in the night while FEMA fumbled,” said progressive New Jersey Democrat Lisa McCormick.
Richardson said he was unaware that the United States had a hurricane season, according to staff who heard him in a meeting on June 2, 2025.
The consequences are already visible.
The response to recent flash floods in Texas was hampered by new bureaucratic hurdles, including a policy requiring the Secretary of Homeland Security to personally approve expenditures over $100,000, creating a bottleneck that slowed critical aid.
For survivors like Darren McKinney of New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward, who endured days stranded in his flooded home and later lived in a FEMA trailer suspected of formaldehyde contamination, the agency’s potential dismantling is alarming.
“You don’t know when you’re gonna have another disaster like that,” McKinney said. “For people that don’t have money, without FEMA, how you going to help them out?”
The administration defends its actions as necessary reform. A FEMA spokesperson said the agency is overhauling “outdated processes,” while a White House spokeswoman claimed “FEMA’s outsized role created a bloated bureaucracy.”
However, a letter of dissent to Congress from 181 current and former FEMA employees warned that the agency is being deliberately weakened, risking a catastrophe on the scale of Katrina.
In their letter, FEMA employees warned that the Trump administration is sending the agency back to a pre-Katrina era, pointing to several concerns, including the lack of a Senate-confirmed and qualified emergency manager at FEMA’s helm; the slashing of mitigation, disaster recovery, training and community programs; and restrictive new policies that curb agency officials’ autonomy.
The letter also demanded that federal lawmakers defend FEMA from interference by the Department of Homeland Security, protect the agency’s employees from “politically motivated firings,” conduct more oversight, and ultimately take FEMA out of DHS and establish it as an independent Cabinet-level agency in the executive branch.
The Trump administration responded by placing more than a dozen of those FEMA employees on leave. FEMA’s administrator sent several people letters informing them that, effective immediately, they were on administrative leave, operating “in a non-duty status while continuing to receive pay and benefits.”
Last month, the administration put nearly 140 Environmental Protection Agency employees on leave after they sent a letter, which said Trump’s changes to the agency “undermine the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” Some EPA employees were physically escorted out of their workplaces after getting a leave notice.
Disaster experts echo this grave concern.
“It has been so demoralizing to realize how closely aligned we have become again to what FEMA looked like pre-Katrina,” said Samantha Montano, a disaster response expert at Massachusetts Maritime Academy.
As the climate crisis amplifies threats, the nation’s last line of defense is being systematically unraveled, leaving communities from the Gulf Coast and beyond increasingly vulnerable to the next great storm.
Discover more from NJTODAY.NET
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.