Exclusive: FEMA Didn’t Sufficiently Staff Disaster Hotline After Texas Floods

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Speaker 5 Everyone's into that, aren't they? Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon.
I cover politics.

Speaker 4 I'm Stephen Fowler. I also cover politics.

Speaker 5 And NPR climate correspondent Rebecca Hirscher joins us also today. Welcome back, Rebecca.

Speaker 3 Hi.

Speaker 5 Today on the show, an NPR exclusive.

Speaker 5 In the days following the disastrous flood in Texas Hill Country last month, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, failed to answer tens of thousands of the calls coming into its call centers.

Speaker 5 These were calls from flood survivors trying to get help paying for things like a hotel room or diapers or food.

Speaker 5 Rebecca, you've reported that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, had let funding for these call centers lapse. And I want to back up just a little bit.

Speaker 5 Can you explain more about what these call centers are and how they're normally supposed to be working?

Speaker 3 Yeah, absolutely. So this is like the hotline that people call after disasters.

Speaker 3 And this is like the way that you would try to get money for your immediate needs if, for example, you were in a flood and you lost everything.

Speaker 3 So like money for food, clothing, diapers, formula, temporary shelter, you know, like hotel rooms, especially if you don't have a lot of money in the bank account, this is like the lifeline that FEMA offers to people.

Speaker 3 You can call this number and you can get help.

Speaker 3 And after disasters, there are a lot of calls.

Speaker 3 Like the reason that these call centers are up and running is because, you know, you imagine there might be thousands of people affected and some people might call multiple times looking for different kinds of help.

Speaker 3 So what FEMA does to staff these things is they use private contractors who are trained to answer the calls. And under normal circumstances at this time of year, the contractors are paid continuously.

Speaker 3 They staff the call centers continuously. And then when people call in after a disaster, the phone will ring for less than 10 seconds before someone picks up.

Speaker 3 And then virtually every call is answered.

Speaker 5 Aaron Powell, is that like a rule? Like, is that a sort of built-in expectation that it should be 10 seconds or less?

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, I don't know what the actual like sort of contractual agreement is with the contractors, but from these call logs that we were able to see, the internal FEMA call logs, you can see that under normal circumstances, it's usually about six seconds is the average wait time.

Speaker 3 So you're really getting like, you're not waiting on hold for a long time, which is good, right? Because you've just been through a disaster. You probably don't want to hang out on hold.

Speaker 3 You might also not have good self-service.

Speaker 3 Sometimes after a big disaster, like in recent years, the wait times will get longer and not a recall gets answered.

Speaker 3 for a few days immediately after Hurricane Helene last fall, FEMA actually put out a report that showed that only about half of callers were getting through.

Speaker 3 So clearly, like the call centers were overtaxed in that situation. But

Speaker 3 in general, these are continuously staffed and people should be able to get through to a FEMA representative reliably.

Speaker 5 Okay, so that's how it's supposed to work. FEMA's acting administrator, David Richardson, testified about this, about the Texas flood before Congress late last month.
And here's what he said.

Speaker 3 When there was a spike in calls, FEMA was there to answer the calls. The majority of the calls were answered at the call centers.

Speaker 5 The majority. I mean, Rebecca, how does that line up with what you have found in your reporting?

Speaker 3 It doesn't line up.

Speaker 3 So we obtained internal call logs that I mentioned from FEMA. These were the details of these logs were actually first reported by the New York Times, and PR also obtained them.

Speaker 3 And what they show is that in the days after the flood, so the flood was on July 4th, on July 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, FEMA answered just over 15,000 calls.

Speaker 3 And that's out of 55,000 calls that came in from disaster survivors. So about 40,000 calls went unanswered.

Speaker 3 So when Richardson says the majority of calls were answered, that really is not reflected in FEMA's own documents. And it also seems that Richardson knew about this problem.

Speaker 3 So on July 10th, five days after the call center funding lapsed, he sent a memo to DHS Secretary Christy Noam asking her to approve funding for at least one call center vendor.

Speaker 3 And in that memo, which and Pierre obtained, Richardson lays out the dire effects of this lapse, saying that survivors were waiting, quote, over 90 minutes to get through to FEMA and that the, quote, call center service level has gone from 99% of calls answered prior to Hang Up to 20% of calls answered.

Speaker 3 So most people were not getting through is what this memo shows.

Speaker 5 Rebecca, we alluded earlier to a funding lapse. Stephen, you've also been covering some of the changes the administration has made to the federal government, including funding cuts.

Speaker 5 What do you know about what might have gone wrong here? Why those calls went unanswered?

Speaker 4 Yeah, taking a look at the public ledger, there's things like the federal procurement data system,

Speaker 4 which is a documentation of all of the federal agencies that have contracts for things like staffing like these call centers or for ordering more paper or things like that.

Speaker 4 So you can actually see looking at the federal procurement database this contract that went to these vendors for the call centers and other services that they have been long-standing contracts and they get renewed they have options that are renewed to go another month another 30 days there's a lapse right when rebecca mentioned that the contract for some of these vendors ended and several days later is when a contract starts up again.

Speaker 4 You can actually see looking at the data that there is a modification made to some of these contracts that say existing service agreement continued or something like that to imply that there was some sort of continued service.

Speaker 4 But what Rebecca found in the reporting and the data and the call logs is that there was no service continued.

Speaker 4 And looking at the financial data and the contract data, there wasn't money paid to those vendors for working because they didn't actually work.

Speaker 4 So there is evidence on the spending side that there was the lapse lapse in funding, which in turn led to the lapse in that crucial service.

Speaker 5 And how does the way that worked, what you just described there, Stephen, how does that compare to the way things were done in previous administrations?

Speaker 4 One of the things that has been a hallmark of the Trump administration this year is this effort of government restructuring, more specifically trying to crack down on spending.

Speaker 4 Now, what that's looked like in reality isn't necessarily saving money, but what it has done is create more bureaucratic bottlenecks in this case the department of homeland security and all of its sub-agencies and parts underneath it have routed all purchases and contracts and things over a hundred thousand dollars to have to be personally approved by dhs secretary christy noam many many things in the government cost more than a hundred thousand dollars or could cost more than a hundred thousand dollars so that has been part of the backlog yeah exactly and you know in this case each month's worth of call center staffing costs millions of dollars.

Speaker 3 It's obviously above that $100,000 threshold. And so these had to go to Christy Norm's desk.
And that's totally different from past administrations.

Speaker 3 Like I talked to the head of FEMA under the Biden administration, and she said, honestly, I can't remember what we did with the...

Speaker 3 call center staffing because it's something we would have handled before this time of the year. So this is peak hurricane season right now.
When these floods happened, it was July.

Speaker 3 That is like, that's what disaster experts call like quote unquote disaster season in the U.S. Like floods, wildfires, hurricanes, like this is the time that FEMA is busiest.

Speaker 3 And what the FEMA administrator under the Biden administration said is like, first of all, she never would have had to escalate something like this to the head of DHS.

Speaker 3 And the other thing is she never would have let it lapse in the first place because you run the risk if a disaster happens at the exact wrong time of not having the hotline up and running at the exact moment that people need it.

Speaker 3 And the other thing that I'll just say is like, I spoke to many emergency management experts for this story, and what they all pointed out is, you know, when there's a disaster, you don't have time to fix it.

Speaker 3 Like, that is not the moment to be filling out contract paperwork. Your hotline needs to be up and running that day, or people aren't getting really crucial help.

Speaker 3 You know, food and shelter are not things you can wait for.

Speaker 5 You know, when I heard that $100,000 figure, I mean, in terms of government, that's such a small number. And it made me wonder, this dollar limit.

Speaker 5 I mean, Rebecca, are you aware of anything anything like that existing or anything comparable existing in previous administrations?

Speaker 3 No, I do know that in this administration, so I cover climate change and so I also cover NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and they are dealing with a very similar thing where they're part of the commerce department.

Speaker 3 They're a bit of an outlier within that department in terms of what they do. And everything that happens inside their agency also has to go to the head of the commerce department.

Speaker 3 And it's really created this bottleneck that makes it hard to do, in that case, you know, science and weather prediction and all kinds of things that people need to know about the climate and the weather, and in this case, to do disaster response.

Speaker 5 All right, we're going to take a quick break. More to talk about in just a moment.

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Speaker 5 And we're back.

Speaker 5 So, Rebecca, you know, if Homeland Security Secretary Christy Noam has to sign off on all of these expenses over $100,000, like we've just said, what does that mean in the future for disaster response?

Speaker 3 Well, there are any number of things in disaster response that cost more than $100,000.

Speaker 3 Even from the Texas floods, there's another example of something that seems like it was a bottleneck where search and rescue teams also cost more than that.

Speaker 3 And there was a delay in sending out search and rescue teams. So that's just another example of the kind of thing that could get caught up.

Speaker 3 It also just really slows down what help can be sent quickly in general. You know, states rely on FEMA.

Speaker 3 to help with evacuation, to stage food, and to stage like supplies that they rely on to respond to disasters.

Speaker 3 And if everything has to go through this bottleneck, it's hard to think of a thing that would flow easily necessarily.

Speaker 4 And it's worth pointing out, too, that for much of the federal government and people's criticism of the federal government, the slowness of bureaucracy is a common complaint and one the Trump administration vowed to take care of by dismantling regulations and making it easier and faster to do things.

Speaker 4 That's not happening in this case when it comes to disaster response and some of the other changes.

Speaker 4 I mean, the Department of Homeland Security has multiple, multiple different high-profile, fast-moving sub-agencies underneath it.

Speaker 4 You've got immigrations and customs enforcement, you've got the TSA, you've got FEMA.

Speaker 4 And if all of those things have to be routed up to one person, there's going to be backlogs and times where there are more immediate needs and responses.

Speaker 4 And that's a bigger picture thing that's happened during the Trump administration so far is that there are people

Speaker 4 holding multiple jobs, holding multiple approval levels. You've got Secretary of State Marco Rubio that holds multiple acting jobs.

Speaker 4 You've got the Treasury Secretary Scott Besson also holding multiple jobs and roles. And what that means in reality is that there are fewer people empowered to make decisions and make them quickly.

Speaker 4 And for many things the government does, that might not be as important. But what we're seeing with disaster response is it makes a big difference.

Speaker 5 You know, Rebecca, you mentioned a minute ago that states rely on the federal government for this kind of help. I have covered a number of natural disasters, things like floods and hurricanes.

Speaker 5 And what you see on the ground, I know you've been there too, you see these local emergency responders, often state officials, and eventually FEMA comes in, usually as soon as possible, to try to work together and respond and rescue people, but then deal with this sort of cleanup and the long-term response.

Speaker 5 So how does this uncertainty from the federal government affect the ability of states to just think about how to prepare for these disasters?

Speaker 3 I mean, it's hard to overstate, to be honest.

Speaker 3 Like, when you see all those local and like your city's emergency manager and police, and then you see the county's folks, and the sheriff, and you see people from the state,

Speaker 3 all of those people have planned for a disaster with the federal government in mind and with the understanding that the federal government is going to come in and they are going to reimburse them for a lot of this work.

Speaker 3 So, for example, FEMA reimburses state governments for most of the costs of removing debris after a disaster.

Speaker 3 If there is uncertainty about whether the federal government is going to follow through on that promise, then that slows everything down, right?

Speaker 3 Especially if you're a place that doesn't have a ton of tax base, right? Like a rural area, or a place where the budget is really tight right now.

Speaker 3 It just may not be financially viable for places to spend, you know, a ton of money upfront to help people in their moment of need if they don't know that the federal government is going to be there to reimburse them later.

Speaker 5 So I wonder about the politics of this. I mean, are Republicans pushing back at all to the way that FEMA and the administration as a whole have handled this flood response?

Speaker 3 I mean, not really.

Speaker 3 So what we saw at the hearing where acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson testified was that the Democrats were really asking some tough questions, but for the most part, the Republicans did not have concerns that they voiced, at least, about the response to the Texas Texas floods.

Speaker 3 So I have not seen that kind of pushback from the right.

Speaker 4 And this is something, Sarah, that we've seen with just about everything else that's happened since Trump has taken office.

Speaker 4 There is almost zero daylight between what Trump says and does and thinks should happen and what Republicans in Congress and elsewhere across the country say and think.

Speaker 4 It's also worth noting that on the campaign trail and when the Hurricane Helene disaster happened last year, there were calls to eliminate FEMA from Republicans.

Speaker 4 We also haven't seen very much movement for now on this idea of eliminating FEMA, but it does show that when something like this happens, it's ultimately back to what President Trump says and does and feels about how things should happen.

Speaker 4 And by extension, DHS Secretary Christine Nilhm.

Speaker 5 So, as you said, Stephen, you know, President Trump's message to his base has been about cutting the federal government.

Speaker 5 Is there a risk, though, that at some point, if more of these kinds of events unfold, if there are more disasters like this one and the response is insufficient in places, even like Texas, that

Speaker 5 Trump has a lot of support? At some point, does it become a political liability for him?

Speaker 4 Well, maybe, maybe not. I mean, there is the ability to hold multiple ideas at the same time.

Speaker 4 One, there's the belief that government should be smaller as a whole, things should be moved back to the states like disaster response. But for Trump's priorities, there's enthusiastic support.

Speaker 4 I mean, the Department of Homeland Security is getting more funding in Trump's budget proposal and the budget bill that passed for things like immigration enforcement.

Speaker 4 And so there is a will to support causes and support spending and support things that the president says and feels and needs.

Speaker 4 So far, there's nothing to suggest that the Trump administration is going to treat one area better or worse because of their political ideology when disaster strikes.

Speaker 4 But the bigger picture thing to watch as we get more into hurricane season and as there continue to be more disasters that strike is how that inefficiency that has been added to the process might end up playing out and might end up exacerbating some already terrible situations.

Speaker 5 Lots to watch. All right, well, let's leave it there for today.
Thanks for being with us, Rebecca. Thanks for your reporting.

Speaker 3 Thanks so much.

Speaker 5 I'm Sarah McCann. I cover politics.

Speaker 4 I'm Stephen Fowler. I cover politics.

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