FEMA

Latest Posts in FEMA

When Emergency Response is Delayed

What I’ve focused on this month is but one impact that occurs when ignorant cabinet secretaries and DOGE rummage through complex budgets they don’t understand and make decisions that have terrible consequences for the victims of their work. What I’ve not spent much time talking about is the politicalization of decision making as it affects thousands. 


Digging Out

It is hard to know where to begin, after such a seemingly endless stream of weather-related disasters and, most recently, the earthquakes in Turkey and Syria. Only yesterday did the earthquake recovery efforts there begin to move to the next stage of restoration.  


Natural Disasters

It’s hard to look away from natural disasters. We wonder why, after so many years of studying them, their impact has not lessened, and their restoration time has not shortened. The few minutes of attention we give them from the morning newspapers or the evening news is but one type of traumatic information we absorb on a regular basis. It is painful and stress-provoking to take it all in -- school shootings, assaults, property damage, homelessness, and a general uneasiness that we are not safe in public places. Some of our anxiety is surely left over from the worst of pandemic times.


50 Days and Counting

As the 19th anniversary of 9/11 rolled around, I wanted to check whether progress had been made on the four unimplemented 9/11 Commission Report recommendations that I have been tracking since 2004. Unsurprisingly, the answer remains the same. 


Lessons From the Pandemic (of 1918)

We need to stop repeating old, costly, and deadly mistakes.  Will we ever learn? To borrow a line from America’s baseball-player philosopher, Yogi Berra, it’s déjà vu all over again. America has once again done it wrong (on the whole), with tragic consequences.  There are models in other countries for how to do it right.