The Federal Emergency Management Agency appears to be on life support.
According to recent news reports, Trump administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and acting administrator Cameron Hamilton, are poised to act on President Trump’s desire to drastically reduce the federal government’s role in responding to disasters and to downsize or eliminate FEMA altogether.
This comes on the heels of the administration attempting to freeze over $100 billion in payments FEMA had promised to states for rebuilding and increasing disaster resiliency after Hurricane Helene, and for responding to the California wildfires and other disasters last year.
Eradicating or gutting FEMA would be a disaster. The fact that the conversation is happening at all underscores that we are in a far different era of the politics of disaster than the one that FEMA emerged from during the 1960s and 1970s.
FEMA itself has become shorthand for the larger policy shift of that era, where states, localities and nongovernmental agencies such as the American Red Cross were shuddering under the burden of increasingly costly disasters such as the Alaska Earthquake (1964), Hurricane Betsy (1965), Hurricane Camille (1969) and Hurricane Agnes (1972) — the latter in the same year as devastating floods in Noem’s home state of South Dakota.
These disasters struck landscapes where post-World War II economic growth had brought billions of dollars of homes, businesses and public infrastructure into risky areas, such as coastlines, floodplains and places vulnerable to tornadoes or earthquakes.
The traditional deference to states, localities, the Red Cross and private insurance was simply inadequate in places like coastal Mississippi after Hurricane Camille. Residents of those places, from avowed conservatives to civil rights activists, called for a substantial, and ongoing, federal commitment to construct a disaster safety net under them, and by extension, all American citizens.
As one victim of Camille in Louisiana who decried the spread of public welfare generally, but argued disasters were different, wrote in a letter to his congressman: “I believe that this is an area in which it is proper for our government to extend direct financial aid to those people who suffer losses over which they had very little, if any, control.”
Congress responded first by massive one-off relief bills for these big disasters, generally with near-unanimous support across party and regional lines. By the time FEMA was created in 1978, the federal government had assumed a much more substantial role in disaster relief than it had in earlier decades.
The trends that brought about the expanded federal disaster role in the 1960s and 1970s have only been exacerbated in the intervening years. Development in risky areas, such as the Florida coastlines, has continued more or less unabated. Katrina, as is now clear, heralded the beginning of two decades of increasingly catastrophic natural disasters.
All of this has put increasing pressure on a federal disaster system that is chronically understaffed and relies on year-to-year funding from Congress that has become partisan on these issues in a way that was simply not the case in the 1970s.
Undoubtedly, there are ways to make FEMA more efficient. Indeed, the bipartisan proposal introduced recently to again make FEMA an independent agency merits consideration.
But the fact that the conversation has moved from “FEMA has problems” to “eviscerate the federal role in disaster relief” belies the reality that many states — which would be forced to underwrite a much larger share of the bill — are woefully under equipped to deal with the logistics and costs of responding to more frequent large-scale disasters.
It’s difficult to imagine, for instance, Mississippi rebuilding its coastline after it was once again destroyed by Katrina in 2005 without the massive infusion of federal resources that Congress and the Bush and Obama administrations provided for years after the disaster.
Most states aren’t eager to go back to pre-1960s arrangements, and neither, it seems, are Senate Republicans from disaster-prone states. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) said there’s “no way Republicans and Democrats are supporting” eliminating FEMA. Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said that the federal government is still going to be “distributing disaster money. I mean, just as a practical matter, it has to be done.”
The congressional architects of modern disaster policy were proud of what they had achieved for their constituents. It is incumbent for their successors to remind the administration why we have a FEMA in the first place.
Andrew Morris is a professor of history at Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., and author of “When Natural Disasters Became National Disasters: Hurricane Camille and the New Politics of Disaster Relief” (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2026).