The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s much-criticized response to Hurricane Katrina is a stain on its history.
But at a time when the Trump administration is threatening to overhaul and weaken the agency, Louisiana lawmakers and others who were involved in the storm’s aftermath have a mix of views about what it should look like, with many of them arguing it’s still key to disaster recovery.
August marks 20 years since the devastating storm made landfall as a Category 3 storm, pounding the Gulf Coast with winds as fast as 140 miles per hour. The storm flooded about 75% of New Orleans’ metropolitan area, resulted in nearly 2,000 deaths and caused billions of dollars in damage — defining an entire generation in the South. The period of time that followed exposed cracks in FEMA’s design by showing the agency’s lack of coordination and planning when it came to distributing aid, and it has often been pointed to by lawmakers as an example of bureaucratic red tape getting in the way of federal storm response.
The experience of some of the officials who remember the storm makes them fearful of a federal government willing to dilute its own ability to respond to natural disasters moving forward.
Many of them say FEMA needs to improve. But they also argued that some of President Donald Trump’s proposals would result in an inability to respond to emergencies, and there are concerns that some of those changes would allow some of the mistakes of the past, like those that played out post-Katrina, to repeat.
Rep. Cleo Fields, who was a state senator when Katrina hit, told NOTUS he’s hopeful this “hurricane season won’t be that bad,” but called the administration’s discussions of cuts to FEMA “very scary.”
“It really makes very little sense,” Fields said. “I’ve advocated from day one that when states need the help the most, they are not in a position to help themselves. Like in Katrina, we needed the federal government. We needed all the federal agencies to be on one page to help us. And to say that we’re going to do it through a block grant doesn’t make sense to me.”
Fields was referring to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s suggestion that states receive large disaster recovery block grants rather than tailored reimbursements. Since returning to office Trump has made clear his desire to scale back the agency. In January he said he’d “rather see the states take care of their own problems.” And Noem promised to “eliminate FEMA,” while Trump told reporters at one point that he wants to “wean off” the agency after this year’s hurricane season.
FEMA did not respond to questions from NOTUS about its future, or its response to Katrina. The White House reiterated that disaster recovery response “relies on strong local and state leadership,” and that the agency’s “outsized role created a bloated bureaucracy that disincentivized state investment in their own resilience.”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told NOTUS in a statement that Trump is “committed to right-sizing the Federal government while empowering State and local governments by enabling them to better understand, plan for, and ultimately address the needs of their citizens.”
But after the deadly flash flooding in Texas in July, Trump administration officials say they are no longer planning to abolish the agency. Still, the administration’s broader lack of clarity about what the future of the agency will look like has left Southern states, including Louisiana, in a planning limbo.
Louisiana continues to be one of the states that has received the most direct assistance from FEMA in recent years.
Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, a doctor, told NOTUS that he went to Louisiana State University’s basketball stadium after Hurricane Katrina hit to help conduct initial medical assessments on people who evacuated there from southeast Louisiana. Cassidy said the chaotic scene he witnessed is why he supports Trump’s vision to reform FEMA.
“When I get there, it is overwhelming. There’s not enough resources. There’s some folks in charge, but I quickly realized they might be in charge, but they are overwhelmed and cannot make decisions,” Cassidy said. “We’re going to need federal help for when a state is overwhelmed, or when the resource that a state would need is so specialized that a state cannot keep this on its own.”
Cassidy said he believes Trump’s visit to Texas last month shows his commitment to the agency, which he thinks is a good thing.
“My impression is that related to his visit to Texas after the flooding, the president is acknowledging that there is the need for some sort of federal response, even when we reform FEMA,” Cassidy said.
Others are less convinced about the efficacy of the possible changes.
”While Trump is trumpeting cuts, what we’re talking about is how we band together, so that in spite of those cuts, we still have a city that exists and a city that works,” Oliver Thomas, a Democrat who serves on the New Orleans City Council and helped rescue Hurricane Katrina survivors, told NOTUS.
“What happens at the federal level, you would hope that they would have some empathy and understanding of the uniqueness and the purpose of New Orleans especially. This place is the mouth of the river that sees the 33 state tributary system,” Thomas went on. “But we have to do what we have to do in spite of what the federal government does, period.”
Before Hurricane Katrina struck, there was some uncertainty over whether the levees protecting the city would hold. Those concerns bore out as the levees collapsed, leaving people whose homes sat below sea level stranded. The Superdome was opened as a last-resort shelter but became overcrowded, lacked plumbing and had limited power, making the conditions there unbearable.
The federal government’s response in the days after impact caught the brunt of the criticism. FEMA took days to set itself up and didn’t have a sound action plan. The agency wasted supplies and prevented private entities from assisting in the relief effort and was slow collecting the bodies of those who died in the storm. Local shops in the area sold hurricane-themed shirts, including one saying, “FEMA stands for Federal Employees Missing in Action.”
That September, President George W. Bush took blame for the faulty response after initially deflecting criticism. The lack of resources led to residents breaking into local stores to survive. Upon returning home early from vacation at his Texas ranch, Bush told FEMA’s then-director, Michael D. Brown, that he was “doing a heck of a job,” but that same day said the response was insufficient.
Even though the federal government had completed a stimulation exercise the previous year for a storm of similar strength hitting New Orleans, FEMA wasn’t prepared. Brown, who did not respond to a request for comment for this story, was called back to Washington and resigned soon after, and then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco decided not to seek reelection as her approval ratings sank after the storm.
In September following the storm, members of Congress launched an investigation into the federal response to Katrina. This resulted in the passing of the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act in 2006, which made FEMA a distinct agency within the Department of Homeland Security.
Former Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat who represented the state when the storm hit, told NOTUS that the FEMA that showed up to help respond after Katrina was “unqualified.” She believes the agency needs reform, but that it should still be sufficiently funded.
“We need to have the federal government’s full support, mostly financial support. And then a new FEMA, or a reformed or upgraded FEMA, could be a lot more responsive to being locally led but federally supported,” Landrieu said. “And that model might be a much better model. The other big piece of that is to have a much stronger public-private partnership, where the federal government would use the expertise and knowledge of the private sector to help distribute aid and rebuild communities in a more efficient and effective manner.”
Marshall Pierre, who was a part of emergency management at New Orleans’ Charity Hospital at the time of Katrina and oversaw the emergency response team, told NOTUS he doesn’t believe the agency should see cuts. But if the administration does decide to make changes, it should consult local lawmakers.
“You can always have a roundtable discussion and say, ‘Hey, man, this is what worked and what didn’t work,” Pierre said. He added that making cuts to FEMA without consulting state officials would be “a very incompetent decision on a lot of people.”
He’s not the only responder to Katrina who thinks the agency is critical in times of emergency. Some even think it should be given more agency within the federal government.
“FEMA should go back under the White House as a Cabinet-level position, and take it out of Homeland Security. That just provides another bureaucratic influence,” retired Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honoré, who served as a senior military commander for the Department of Defense and was appointed by Bush to lead the military recovery effort, told NOTUS. “And the improvements I would like to see made is that we improve the ability for FEMA to settle recovery claims quicker.”
“It’s important to have FEMA to coordinate [with other agencies and groups] ... otherwise you wait till after the hurricane, then the governor is asking each agency for help,” he added.
Like Cassidy, other Louisiana Republicans at the state and federal level weren’t anxious about the Trump administration’s plans for the agency.
State Rep. Brian Glorioso told NOTUS that “he’s not overly concerned about the cuts” to FEMA as long as the money is “reapportioned either at the local level or through Homeland Security elsewhere.”
“If it’s not running directly through FEMA, it doesn’t necessarily concern me [much] because in my opinion FEMA has been very ineffective in their organization and response to a lot of the disasters,” Glorioso said, pointing to the agency’s Katrina response as an example.
And Sen. John Kennedy expressed confidence that if the Trump administration overhauls FEMA, the state would be positioned to respond to another Katrina-level storm hitting his state again.
“We’ll be ready,” Kennedy said. “We’ll be ready.”
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This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and Verite News.