What Does The Federal Response To Texas Floods Indicate About FEMA's Future?

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It's the NPR Politics Podcast.

I'm Tamar Keith.

I cover the White House.

And I'm Domenico Montanero, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent.

And NPR Climate Correspondent Rebecca Herscher is here.

Hello.

Hi.

So today on the show, we are looking at the flooding in Texas and how the federal government has responded to the crisis.

Rebecca, I want to start with how the federal government usually responds to a natural disaster.

Can you just walk us through the process of generally how this works when there's a tragedy like this?

Yes, it is.

It's actually weirdly complicated, but I'll try to make it simple.

So for really big disasters that have some warning, like hurricanes, the federal government actually like...

pre-positions people like it sends people to the region you know water and food and medicine as well and rescue teams that doesn't apply here because you don't get a lot of warning with flash floods but it is a big part of a federal response in a lot of cases.

And then after that sort of initial police and fire, you know, local folks on the ground part,

the governor or the, you know, territorial government or tribal government has to ask the president to declare a disaster.

And in that ask, they have to ask for specific types of help from the federal government.

So like money to help repair roads and public buildings.

Then there's like a pot of money for individual survivors to get like food and clothing, pay for hotels and stuff like that.

And then there's a third pot of money to like upgrade things so the next disaster isn't so damaging.

And then the president can say yes or no to each pot.

And that's when the real federal response starts.

So that's usually actually like a couple days after the disaster itself, unless you've pre-positioned.

So what happened this time in Texas with these floods?

Some of the things I just said happened.

Some of them did not.

There wasn't a lot of warning.

So there weren't any federal resources pre-positioned.

The state did do something that happens a lot of the time, which is that they were overwhelmed, and so they asked for help from neighboring states, and they got it.

So, like, there were rescue teams that came from neighboring states.

That will actually be reimbursed by the federal government.

So, that's technically sort of the beginning of the federal response, sort of.

And then the governor of Texas asked for a disaster declaration from the president, which he got, that unlocked money.

There were some weird things that happened, though.

Like, there was a federal water rescue and recovery team that wasn't sent right away by FEMA.

It's unclear why.

The president also initially only approved money for repairing public buildings.

There wasn't any money for individual survivors initially.

It took about a week for that individual assistance to be approved, which is a little strange compared to other major disasters, maybe a little slow, especially since the president kept touting all the help that was being sent to Texas.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And then what about the funds to mitigate future disasters that you mentioned normally go as part of this?

Aaron Powell, it's actually unclear whether those have been approved at all.

They certainly haven't started to flow yet.

And I should say there's actually like a huge backlog of that funding for all sorts of disasters all over the country since the president took office.

In general, this White House has not been approving that money.

Domenico, let's talk about the president's response and how the president has been talking about this.

He was in Texas on Friday.

He was clearly very affected by meeting with the families of people who died in the flooding.

How is he responding to questions about the federal response?

Well, I mean, it's hard not to be affected when you go and see what's happened in these areas.

The stories that have come out have been absolutely heart-wrenching.

Those of us with kids think about sending our kids to camps and

being more concerned about whether they are are having a decent time and they're not going to call home to try to have us pick them up right yeah this is the last thing any parent would want to be seeing or thinking about

and you know the president went there with the first lady Melania Trump who doesn't usually make a lot of these kinds of appearances but things sort of went off the rails a little bit when reporters local reporters are asking about

you know whether or not there should have been anything done differently in the run-up to this, whether there should have been a siren system or a better cell service and things like that, so that people could be warned more in advance.

And the president essentially just said only an evil person would ask a question like that.

And it makes it difficult because traditionally these things are kind of bipartisan affairs.

You try to figure out what went wrong, try to figure out how to get funding to those states to make things better.

And that's not what happens here.

It all seems to be boiled down to partisanship.

President Trump had previously talked about wanting to phase out FEMA.

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.

Do we know whether the federal response in Texas is indicative of how the Trump administration wants FEMA to work going forward?

I would say it complicates that

stated goal.

of the president because what's happening is that the federal government is spending and will spend a huge amount of money on this flood response.

And the Texas leadership, you know, the governor and the emergency manager there are praising Trump for that.

You know, they're giving him this positive feedback that says, thank you so much for using FEMA to help us in our time of need.

And one thing that's really complicated about that is that actually in

the president's quest to phase out FEMA, he has appointed this review council that's supposed to eliminate the agency, basically, come up with plans to give a lot of fema's role back to states and governor greg abbott of texas is on that review council as is the top emergency official in texas and so i think there's like definitely a lot of tension kind of a disconnect as well between

these texas officials who on one hand are saying

We are really grateful with what FEMA is doing.

We couldn't do it without you.

And on the other hand, saying, this is an agency that's so broken that it needs to be eliminated.

And it's really unclear what comes next after that.

And I will say that from the side of covering the president, he has now been asked several times, do you still want to phase out FEMA?

Or, you know, people in his administration have been asked that.

And the answer is not clear.

The answer is more or less, we're working on this disaster right now.

And so I think we don't know.

what exactly the vision is and how this plays into it.

And again, I mean, this came back from the campaign in the first place, from the 2024 presidential campaign when you had the flooding in North Carolina.

And Trump really used that as a political cudgel over Joe Biden to say, oh, you know, FEMA's not doing a good enough job.

These are pro-Trump areas.

They don't want people who are pro-Trump to get the assistance and created sort of a conspiracy with not a lot of truth behind it that FEMA wasn't trying to help.

folks in those areas.

And now the shoe's on the other foot because Trump is in office.

There's something that's happening in a red state.

And so you have people in those states, the leadership in those states, Republicans in those states, saying that the federal government's doing a very good job.

And, you know, this never used to be the kind of thing that was something that just went through the political

washing machine and spin cycle because it wasn't that long ago, for example, that Ron DeSantis, who couldn't be more opposite of Joe Biden

as governor of Florida,

was working with Joe Biden and praising Joe Biden because of what happened in Florida with Hurricane Ian.

And that's what it used to be like, and not so much anymore with Trump in the White House and really making it seemingly all about politics.

How you view how an agency runs seems to be put through this lens of partisanship.

All right.

Well, we are going to take a quick break and we will have more in a moment.

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And I want to broaden things out a little bit.

Weather disasters are becoming more and more frequent.

Flooding, hurricanes, wildfires.

Is FEMA and federal funding, as it has worked in the past designed to handle a constant state of disasters like we've been seeing in the past several years?

I mean, no,

not as it currently exists.

You know, that's according to FEMA itself.

You know, the head of FEMA under the Biden administration asked Congress to make changes to help make it easier for FEMA, for example, to get money into the hands of state and local governments more quickly because the agency is dealing with these back-to-back-to-back-to-back disasters every year, and they're always running out of money.

So I think basically all disaster experts agree that FEMA, as it is currently set up, really doesn't work with climate change.

The question is about how to fix it.

You know, there are two bills in Congress right now that would basically streamline the process for FEMA to push out money.

I think most experts agree that one problem is just that it's too complicated.

There's like too much paperwork.

But, you know, what the president has said that he wants to do is sort of take a different tack, which is just get rid of the agency.

Give that responsibility to the states instead.

And I think that's something that gives a lot of state emergency managers some heartburn because the reality is that disasters are too expensive for most states to handle on their own.

You know, just removing debris can cost millions of dollars.

Like these are really, really...

big events.

And if you're a really big state, you might be able to find most of the money.

But most of the states that get hit with these things over and over, you know, think of like the states on the Gulf Coast, they do not have the budget to handle this.

And so, you know, people are worried if you get rid of FEMA, who could plug that hole?

And honestly, like, could it mean lost lives?

Because if you don't respond to a disaster in a timely way, you don't get to get that back later, right?

Yeah, and Domenico, we've talked about this, but states have to balance their budgets.

Yeah.

The federal government is often in the position of Congress having to approve emergency funds to replenish the disaster recovery funds.

And I mean, one way that people look at this is, you know, we're talking about multi-million dollars in cleanup costs, but there have been a humongous increase in billion-dollar disasters.

I mean, if you look back to 1980, there was something like $58 billion in billion-dollar disaster events.

It's an incredible amount of money.

But we're talking, you know, the last couple of years, half a trillion or more.

in the amount of money that the federal government and local governments have had to spend.

It's an incredible increase, and it's an agency that just is not funded to that extent to be able to keep up with, frankly, what's happening in climate change.

So Rebecca, realizing that we are in a situation where there isn't like a huge amount of clarity, is there a sense of whether states are equipped to prepare for future disasters, whether states are

able to do the mitigation in advance to prevent the loss of life or to reduce the impact of potential natural disasters?

Aaron I would say, you know, even though we don't know a lot about what the future holds for FEMA as a whole, this is an area where we'd probably know the most.

And that's just because the Trump administration already cut like the biggest grant program that was funneling federal dollars to those kinds of projects.

And that program, it had more than a billion dollars in the pot.

It was pushing money out into basically every state in the country.

It was canceled in the spring.

And there has been a huge backlash from places that voted for the president and from places that did not.

These are towns and cities, tribal governments that were planning to do all kinds of things, including things that are relevant to the disaster we just saw.

So like communities that are flood prone, who were going to use this money to install warning systems, who were going to upgrade drainage, who were going to build flood walls.

like that kind of pre-disaster preparation is something that the federal government has invested very heavily in in the last decade.

And so cutting that program actually like kind of cut people off at the knees.

Texas as a whole was one of the top states that received grants under this program.

It's unclear how much of that would have gone to the hill country in particular.

None of it would have gone to the most affected county in particular.

That county was trying to use state dollars to do their flood warning system upgrade.

And I think it's unclear what the future holds for that type of money.

Will the Trump administration create a new program under a new version of FEMA?

I think there's quite a bit of lobbying to try to create something like that.

But so far, that money is gone.

All right, well, Rebecca Hirscher, thank you so much for sharing your reporting with us.

Thank you so much.

I'm Tamara Keith.

I cover the White House.

I'm Domenico Montanaro, Senior Political Editor and Correspondent.

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