As Disasters Escalate, What’s The Future Of FEMA?

IRA FLATOW: Hi, this is Ira Flatow. You’re listening to Science Friday.

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Do we really need FEMA?

SAMANTHA MONTANO: There really is no evidence there that states are going to be capable in their current form of managing major disasters, catastrophic events on their own.

IRA FLATOW: The devastation we’ve been seeing over the past week from the flash floods in Texas, New Mexico, and North Carolina is a stark reminder of how close and how sudden disasters can be for any of us or for those we love. Since it was founded in April of 1979, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, has played a key role in preparing for and helping respond to disasters around the country, providing funds and coordination to help in relief efforts. President Trump has said that he wants to reduce FEMA’s role even faze FEMA out entirely.

DONALD TRUMP: We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level. A little bit like education, we’re moving it back to the states.

IRA FLATOW: Joining me now to talk about how disasters are currently handled, what emergency response might look like without FEMA is Dr. Samantha Montano. She’s an associate professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy in Massachusetts, author of both the book Disasterology and a newsletter of the same name. Welcome to Science Friday.

SAMANTHA MONTANO: Thanks for having me.

IRA FLATOW: You’re welcome. Let’s get into this question how FEMA is supposed to respond to a disaster like the one in Texas.

SAMANTHA MONTANO: So FEMA becomes involved ahead of time as they’re watching forecasts all across the country, monitoring potential disasters, and then when they really become involved is when the governor of the state requests a presidential disaster declaration. Once the president signs that, FEMA is going to become more directly involved in terms of helping cover the costs of response and recovery, providing expertise to state and local governments, helping the public understand what’s happening, and providing just any kind of general support that is needed by local and state officials.

IRA FLATOW: Now when FEMA comes in, is it in charge of a disaster the way like the FBI might oversee a criminal investigation or like the NTSB might lead up to a plane crash investigation, or is it just an advisory role?

SAMANTHA MONTANO: No. Generally FEMA is coming in as a support. Generally, it’s the local government that maintains the primary leadership of managing a response. There are times when local government may become overwhelmed and maybe the state takes on a bigger role. Every once in a while, FEMA may take on a bigger leadership role, but generally the way our system is designed as outlined in our national response framework FEMA is meant to just be a support to local and state government.

IRA FLATOW: When you say it support, does that mean monetary support or does FEMA actually send in construction equipment like a backhoe, or does it mainly provide money for the backhoe?

SAMANTHA MONTANO: Yeah. So money is certainly a major component of what FEMA’s responsibility is here. The other really important thing, though, that FEMA is doing is coordinating the resources of all the other federal agencies. So many federal agencies have some kind of role and responsibility in response or recovery such as the EPA, CDC, HUD, NOAA, National Weather Service, and somebody needs to coordinate all of those efforts so that these federal agencies aren’t just showing up wherever the disaster has happened. So FEMA themselves don’t have a ton of physical resources, but what they do have are the extended resources of the entire federal government.

IRA FLATOW: Is it reasonable to say that responses could be handled at the state levels because I’ve already heard some states saying give us the money. We have the experience. We know what to do.

SAMANTHA MONTANO: I am a disaster researcher, so in these kinds of instances, I always look to our pretty extensive body of empirical research on emergency management. And there really is no evidence there that states are going to be capable in their current form of managing major disasters, catastrophic events on their own. The capacity of state level emergency management agencies across the country is not maybe what it should be. There are many fewer people who work in state emergency management, and those budgets are much smaller than you might expect. This was a lesson that we really learned during COVID where state emergency management agencies were put in a position of leading those responses and quickly found they did not have the staff and the money to be able to do so without federal support.

Part of the very definition of what makes something a disaster is that it has overwhelmed local and state resources. So to eliminate that federal level, when things do get that bad, I don’t know where states would turn for help.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s talk about the future of FEMA. If the Trump administration does go through with phasing out FEMA, give us an idea of what that plan is, what happens next, what happens when there is no FEMA.

SAMANTHA MONTANO: I don’t know. The Trump administration has not told us what their plan is. The president and Secretary Noem have noted several times now this intention to eliminate FEMA or severely scale back FEMA. I would note it would require Congress to act to fully eliminate the agency, but they have not laid out a plan for what exactly that looks like. There has been some mention of perhaps doing recovery block grants, which would be large chunks of money given to an individual state where they would then oversee the full recovery process, but the details of that have not been laid out at all.

IRA FLATOW: So in this phasing out of FEMA before next year, they’re not taking money back yet or they’re not firing people.

SAMANTHA MONTANO: There have been people who as part of the DOGE cuts were removed from FEMA. There are also many people who have left FEMA. There is a pretty significant brain drain happening within FEMA right now. Senior leadership, people who have been there for many decades who have an unbelievable amount of knowledge about not only emergency management but how FEMA specifically operates have left the agency. So even though there’s this discussion of fully eliminating the agency at some point. There’s already been enough damage done in the past six months to leave FEMA as what I see as being a shell of what was once there.

IRA FLATOW: Some of the critics have been saying we realize there should be some kind of FEMA. We don’t like what it is now. We want to make it better without scrapping it. Is that possible?

SAMANTHA MONTANO: Yeah, look, I– you will not find anybody in emergency management who thinks FEMA is perfect. I wrote a whole book about the changes we need to our emergency management system. That is something we all agree on. Where we’re having a disagreement is on how exactly we get to that point. If you want to make changes to FEMA, you want to make some new emergency management agency, that’s fine, but we need to what that is. What is the plan?

IRA FLATOW: What are some of those changes that you propose?

SAMANTHA MONTANO: One of the first ones that I think has really been proven to be especially critical in the last few months is to remove FEMA from with under the Department of Homeland Security. Prior to 9/11, FEMA was an independent cabinet level agency, and there’s widespread consensus in the field that it was a much more effective agency when it wasn’t overshadowed by DHS.

When we hear members of Congress, disaster survivors talk about, what they’re often complaining about is FEMA being too slow, there being too much red tape, not getting enough help from FEMA. So if I were to make changes based on what I’m hearing from survivors across the country and even members of Congress, I would be saying we need to grow FEMA. We need to be giving them more money. We need to be streamlining processes to make it even more easy for disaster survivors to get more money more quickly so that they can get into that rebuilding process.

We’ve heard from communities across the country after the Trump administration took back mitigation funding for flood mitigation projects, other mitigation projects all across the country that they want to be mitigating their risk. They want to try and be minimizing the chance of disasters in their community in the future. So it feels like we’re seeing the Trump administration cut staff, make the agency smaller, take away money feels like that’s the opposite of what people across the country are looking for.

IRA FLATOW: Let’s talk about this preparation for a disaster like mitigation. What kinds of things would money go for, for example?

SAMANTHA MONTANO: So FEMA has been doing this for many decades since it was created in 1979. FEMA has funded mitigation projects all across this country from flood mitigation to earthquake retrofitting to tornado shelters to early warning systems. They’re funding actual salaries for local and state emergency managers across the country, particularly in rural communities who may not have the funding to do that themselves. So there is this massive, massive range of things that FEMA is doing and has done for decades across the country to make us safer that are probably pretty invisible to most of the public.

We may not necessarily about these changes to building codes for earthquakes that FEMA has been involved in, but this is the invisible part of our emergency management system that works to keep us safe. It’s really that proactive prevention mission that is so critical for the country.

IRA FLATOW: We are about a month into hurricane season, but as we’ve seen, there are plenty of disasters beyond hurricanes. So what’s your message to the administration going forward?

SAMANTHA MONTANO: I think– [CHUCKLING]– we are at risk of a disaster happening at any given moment across this country. There’s always this real focus from the media on hurricane season specifically, but there’s wildfires happening all of the time. Out West, we always have the possibility of Cascadia or some other earthquake or some other kind of disaster, and I think that it is a key responsibility of the federal government to prepare us for those disasters and to do everything within their power to minimize our risk.

Certainly there is room for individual responsibility, but when we are talking about events the size of requiring federal assistance, we are limited as individuals. Disasters are collective problems. They require collective solutions.

So the Trump administration needs to clearly communicate what their intentions are in terms of the future of FEMA, the amount of anxiety that is being caused not only within the field of emergency management but among the public with these vague threats of eliminating the agency after hurricane season is creating an environment that makes it even harder to be doing the work of emergency management right now.

IRA FLATOW: Dr. Samantha Montano is an associate professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy in Massachusetts. Thank you for taking time to be with us today.

SAMANTHA MONTANO: Thanks for having me.

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IRA FLATOW: After the break, Flora unpacks the science behind why climate change makes extreme flooding worse.

ANDREW DESSLER: Climate change is steroids for the weather, so it takes what would have been probably a heavy rain event, and it adds to it. It makes it worse.

IRA FLATOW: Stay with us.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: With the tragic flooding in Texas and across other parts of the country this week, some of the coverage has included a nod to climate change as a factor. We know climate change makes extreme weather events more frequent and intense, but what is the link to flooding, and how well do we understand that relationship?

Here to break down the science is Dr. Andrew Dessler, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M in College Station. Andy, welcome to Science Friday.

ANDREW DESSLER: Thank you, Flora. It’s great to be here.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So what is the relationship between climate change and severe flooding?

ANDREW DESSLER: So that’s a really good question. And flooding really requires two things. The first thing it requires is a lot of rain. And we know that as the Earth gets warmer, the atmosphere warms up– and the atmosphere can actually hold more water. You can think of the atmosphere as a sponge. It’s got some water in it, and as the Earth warms, you’re pouring more water into the sponge.

And then what happens is air flows into the storm at– near the ground, and then it starts rising in these big thunderstorm updrafts. And as the air rises, it cools off, and the water in the air condenses and falls out. And so when you have more water in the air entering the storm, you’re going to get more rain.

And this is very simple physics. We teach it in our freshman classes to non-majors. Climate model simulated, it’s observationally validated. We understand the simple physics of it. And so we know that we’re getting more and more intense rain events. And that’s really the connection.

In addition to rain, the other thing just for people to know that you need for a flood is you need the right topography. If 12 inches of rain fell over Houston, it would not be a very big deal because Houston is a big flat city. But the region that flood in Texas last weekend, they call the hill country because it’s very hilly, and when water falls on hills, it tends to get concentrated in valleys. Those then run into rivers you can have extremely fast rising rivers from that.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So it’s a combination.

ANDREW DESSLER: Right, well, basically it’s the fact that climate change is making these rain events more intense.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s interesting. Of course, we also hear about climate change making droughts more intense.

ANDREW DESSLER: That’s right. So climate change actually– and it is paradoxical, but it does make both ends of the extremes more frequent. And the reason is that just by simple physical arguments, we know that the amount of– total amount of rain falling has to basically be conserved. But if you have more intense events happening, then what that means is you also have a longer period between rain events. So when it’s not raining, it’s not raining for a while, and then when it rains, it really pours. So you actually get both ends of the extremes become more frequent. And there’s a term for that, hydrologic whiplash.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I want to parse this a little bit more. This region in Texas has had catastrophic floods in the past. So how do we understand the role of climate change in this event or any one particular event?

ANDREW DESSLER: So every extreme weather event that does a lot of damage or kills people is a combination of weather and a little bit of extra juicing from climate change. The way I like to describe it is climate change is steroids for the weather. This is an analogy lots of people use. I should make that clear. I didn’t think of it.

So it’s climate change of steroids for the weather. So it takes what would have been probably a heavy rain event, and it adds to it. It makes it worse. Now there haven’t been any scientific studies on this event yet. I’m sure they’ll come. But when we look at something like Hurricane Harvey, which dumped an enormous amount of rain on Houston, we can go back and we can say hurricanes exist without climate change, but what climate change did was it added a lot of rain. Maybe 20% or 30% of the rain fell because of climate change.

And in a case like that, that extra 20% or 30% can add a lot of damage to the event because maybe if the Guadalupe River, which is the one that flooded in this event, only rose 18 feet instead of 27 feet, nobody would have died. I don’t of that, but it’s that extra increment that climate change adds. And we talk about a very non-linear system where every unit you add, every foot of flood depth, does a lot more damage than the previous unit does. So climate change can really increase the damage a lot even if it’s only increasing 20% or 30% increase in the amount of rain.

FLORA LICHTMAN: That’s interesting. Are there things that we don’t yet understand about how climate change interacts with flooding? Are there things you want to know?

ANDREW DESSLER: Well, I do think that that’s always a question you need to ask yourself. And I think at this point, I would say that we really understand the science side of the problem quite well.

The National Weather Service actually predicted this event pretty well. It’s hard to fault them for it. The problem was– and I think this is really where social scientists and atmospheric scientists need to get together is to figure out how do you warn people, and we need to do that because the climate’s now warming. It’s a continue warming as long as we’re dumping carbon into the atmosphere.

And so these events are just going to get worse and get more frequent and get more intense. So this is a problem that’s not going to go away. And we owe it to the people whose lives were lost to make sure that we have better systems in place to warn people.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Thank you, Andy.

ANDREW DESSLER: Thank you.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. Andrew DESSLER, director of the Texas Center for Extreme Weather at Texas A&M in College Station.

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Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to rate and review us if you like the show, and you can always leave us a comment on this segment on Spotify. We’d love to hear from you. Today’s episode was produced by Charles Bergquist and Shoshannah Buxbaum. I’m Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.

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