Quin Lucie: [00:00:00] There were still an office of 67 people that did nothing but mobilization. In 93, there was much larger office of Civil defense, and that was all completely wiped away at that point.
Again, I mentioned Larry Hall. Uh. He was, that surviving member was a collateral duty. He eventually rebuilt the DPA office of FEMA to four people,
in the case of the voluntary agreement, which we really needed in March and April, but took us seven months to get it done because we needed as direct support of the Attorney General himself. And by the way, the last one that they did after the first Gulf War for military Sealift, that took seven years.
it comes down to one question and then everything comes from that. Are we talking about emergency management? Are we talking about disaster relief?
Kyle King: Hi everyone, and welcome back to the Crisis Lab podcast. I'm your host, Kyle, and today we have a fascinating episode that will challenge how we think about fema, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and its role in America's next big crisis. Over the years, many of us have come to know [00:01:00] FEMA as the organization that I.
Steps in after hurricanes, wildfires, and floods. But my guest, Quin Lucie offers a different perspective. What if FEMA's real foundation was less about disaster relief and more about wartime mobilization and civil defense? Now in an era of looming poly crisis, or we might even say perma crisis these days, climate extremes, pandemics and even geopolitical tensions.
And Quin argues that FEMA's older capacity for national resource coordination may be exactly what we need. Yet he also questions whether FEMA is too focused on short-term disaster response as opposed to how we manage the next big war or protracted emergency. So over the course of this episode, I'll play highlights for my conversation with Quin and then unpack some of the implications.
So could we really be ignoring the deeper meaning of emergency management? And how might that affect us if we face a global pandemic plus a major geopolitical crisis simultaneously? So let's dive in and find out. But of course, before we begin, just a quick [00:02:00] reminder that any opinions expressed in this podcast are personal to the speakers and not reflective of any official government positions or agencies.
We're just doing this for the conversation and working to unpack some complex topics that face our society these days. And so with that said, let's jump right into our first segment where Quin shares how FEMA's real origin story. It looks nothing like you might expect. Now at the start, I asked Quin to walk me through his 2019 article on how FEMA could lose America's Next Great War, and what exactly motivated him to explore FEMA's history rather than focusing on the day-to-day disaster relief, he stumbled upon what he calls the mobilization side, the older capacity to muster and direct national resources in a time of crisis.
And so let's hear this in Quin's own words.
Quin Lucie: So I wrote it in 2019, but it really goes back to my master's thesis at the Center Homeland Defense and Security that I wrote around 20 11, 12.
And so I actually start the thread. I was speaking with a very senior member of the White House [00:03:00] during Katrina, and I was trying to figure out what, write my thesis on. He mentioned that President Bush had decided very early on I need to have someone in charge of the whole thing.
So all three major states, I need a single federal representative. And he says the lawyers, which I assume were the NSC or up in the White House, OGC, said you can't do that. And I remember saying, that's bs. Thank you for helping write my Master's thesis. So I wrote my master's thesis. Unity Command for Federal Consequence Management, which was essentially the idea was the Attorney General North Commander and whoever's designated as a federal coordinating officer in the act, which does not have FEMA by way be any federal official.
Between those three positions, you can have unity of command rather for federal. As opposed to unity of effort across the federal response, which of course is the way we've all been raised through the National Incident Management System and ICS, et cetera, because so much is based on federal, state and also within the state having co-equal and peer partners.
But as part of that, back in 20 11, 20 12, I started reading these [00:04:00] executive orders and things, and I saw all these references to wartime contingency planning or civil defense, or more importantly, to what I do now mobilization, which I didn't even really realize was a separate. And sometimes overriding complimentary program to civil defense, even though the perception is fe is roots are from civil defense, which I've found out subsequently really isn't so much as true as the mobilization side, especially for emergency management.
So I'm reading all this stuff and it's this is really fascinating. As you said, I had been a marine judge advocates, and of course the war is still going on pretty well still at that point in Afghanistan. So I'm like, this is interesting stuff. The back of my mind, until I taught at the Army War College in 20 16, 20 17, and so when I left in 2017, or as I was leaving, a couple big things were happening.
One North Carolina was going nuclear. And secondly, there were some exercises going on with Russia. Of what would happen if something happened. Essentially, they would create an impenetrable sand bubble so our planes couldn't get through and their [00:05:00] artillery, which shoots farther than ours, was just gonna blow us back into Poland.
So those weren't going well. And I realized at that moment I said, that world is back. That world that I remember reading about five or six years ago. That's back. And we don't have some of the advantages that we had even in the Cold War where outside of nuclear weapons there weren't, wasn't a whole lot the Soviet Union could do to us domestically.
And so I spent my last month there really starting to dive into civil defense. We didn't even realize at the time mobilization, which is essentially, you know, coordinating the nation's resources in a resource constrained environment, pointing on a problem in that case, preparing for war, the Soviet Union.
But as I would learn subsequently, as I read the executive orders, they were always dual use, which is. One of the perceptions that people have, it was only for military use, and that was never true. Even back to the original office for emergency management in 1940. Very explicit. So I come back to my office again, I was a lawyer at the time, so this is not reflective at all [00:06:00] of the wider agency or certainly the people I spent the last several years working with and still have.
But my particular leadership, because of the early nineties, essentially saw emergency.
They were not friendly to the information I was digging up eventually running into net number of dead ends. I did what I had done previously fema, and went ahead and wrote an article. So my first one was on creating a fraud program at fema. Which was used to create platform and fema. I had another one about the role of attorneys in FEMA in an operation organization.
That was the reason we have regional attorneys now, for instance attorneys in the NRCC and that program, which I helped start up. So really had an impact on the way the lawyers in FEMA work. I wrote another one on how history goes round and round at fema. Specifically how in Hurricane Sandy, it turns out we had, without any idea, completely replicated a number of programs down to the actual names from Hurricane Agnes in 1972 under the [00:07:00] Office of Emerge Preparedness.
Imagine. As we were sitting there trying to figure out how to get electricity from the wire to the home, that there was actually an entire program that did exactly the same thing. I think they called it Powder the people back then in 1972. And they even had a operation clean sweep to do accelerated debris removal just as we were doing in 2012.
It was absolutely amazing how much we replicated what we. They'd come up with independently. And again, we had no ability to recall that and save all that time and effort. So I had written several times before at fema, which luckily did not have any professional writing policy, I think, to this day, which is fun for someone like me.
And so in 2019 I went ahead and wrote that article and how FEMA could lose America's Next Great War. And even though it says fema, I was never really talking about FEMA per se. Rather what FEMA used to represent, which was the emergency management, not necessarily disaster relief, but the emergency management [00:08:00] locus within the federal government that has always existed since May of 1940, and in some ways existed before that, in which, even depending on which way.
The future of FEMA goes, there is always going to be a requirement for some kind of coordinating function across the federal government for crisis. And to again, pull that together and again to help, provide some umbrella for the states and certain circumstances. So there are a number of functions related to the true meaning of emergency management.
Are necessarily part of the disaster relief family. so that's one of the strings I've been pulling really ever since I learned all that. So that's. That's very a three minute version of how I ended up writing an article in 2019. And since that time, it's gotten, some publicity.
I've been lecturing on it at the Eisenhower School since I was just at a big panel of over a thousand people on Monday on the future defense industrial base, where I talked sly about it. But the mobilization side, we can talk about that [00:09:00] more about what do you do when you fight a conflict with a peer?
You don't do it with three to 5% of your economy. 15 it's 13% in Korea, 40% World War ii. That transition of the economy from the civilian to the military side is one of the core tenets of what emergency management truly is or was, and that's always been a civilian function. So those are the kind of things as we get back into potentially planning that way, that even with FEMA going or not going, there's gonna have to be a place somewhere in the federal government.
So anyway, yeah, that's the story how I wrote the article and really I think where it's starting to take me afterwards.
Kyle King: Now, that's quite a revelation. Many of us only see FEMA's involvement in domestic disasters. So stepping in with relief checks after wildfires or sending response teams to hurricanes. But Quin says, FEMA's deeper roots were entwined with wartime mobilization, a mission less about giving grants, and more about orchestrating the entire economy in a crisis.
And so let's put this into a little bit of context here. So. In 1940, for example, Roosevelt recognized that a war in [00:10:00] Europe could become America's concern. So the Office of Emergency Management existed to unify industrial output and civil defense, and then in the 1950s, the Cold War ramped up, and so civil defense programs evolved and told families to duck and cover.
While simultaneously the government tested how to shift factories to weapons production. And so whether it was bombs or floods, emergency management meant coordinating across agencies, states, and the private industry. Now today. That broad concept is still around, but can often feel quite alien. We think of FEMA as trucks handing out water bottles or federal teams assisting states after a tornado and delivering federal assistance.
But Quin's research suggests it used to be about a far bigger scope, and if you're listening and wondering why is this even matter that consider how fragile modern supply chains prove to be during COVID-19, a single crisis, a pandemic. Can spawn ripple effects in global shipping, manufacturing, and health sectors, and we lived through this.
Now imagine something even bigger [00:11:00] involving potential conflict, and that's exactly where these older frameworks like the Defense Production Act, could come back into play.
So how did we go from this broad national security driven emergency management to the FEMA that we know today, which is largely overwhelmed with disaster relief operations? Now, Quin shares some insights here, especially from the 1980s and nineties when disaster relief became front and center. Now in this next segment, so Quin explains that for about a decade after 1979, FEMA was still heavily nationally, security oriented, and then events.
These large scale events like Hurricane Andrew trigger a pivot toward what we now recognize as what we might call the modern fema. So let's listen in here
Quin Lucie: All of that played into the creation of FEMA in 1979. In fact, you could even go back, and I mentioned this, I think some of my article, nifty Nugget 1978, so parallel to the creation of fema, very similar world to what we're in today, we're fighting an insurgency for well over a decade. Changed the force to do that, [00:12:00] and in the late seventies, in the current administration, at the same time as they're looking at disaster relief and emergency management.
Which specifically back then included mobilization, civil defense. They do this nifty nugget 78 exercise. It's huge muff, long sec death is involved and they realize, holy cow, we cannot fight a war in Europe. We are. Basically the president's gonna probably have two options. You can either start a nuclear war or you can lose Paris.
Although subsequently we found out that maybe the French were gonna nuke the heck outta West Germany and make sure that they didn't Chrysler Ryan. But that's another story, right? So anyway starts under Carter, give them credit. Carries over the Reagan. And I actually have the briefing that gave Reagan in 80 of Hey we've got a problem here, sir.
We have this middle ground between nuclear conflict and kinda the low level conflict that we're seeing now in the Cold War. We got this middle ground and if the Soviets figure it out, they make lots of war. And again, provide you President Reagan with two options. Start nuclear war. Or lose Western Europe, either of which are [00:13:00] completely unacceptable to President.
And so FEMA at this time, when you go back to Nifty Nugget in the after action, it literally says We have all these issues on the civilian side, but they're all gonna be fixed because they're creating this brand new agency called fema. That's going to handle them and it's a really good data point to understand that FEMA was a national security agency in its first decade.
I have the force lay down from 85, the congressional justification. It's almost an eight to one ratio of national security employees as there's disaster because again, we're still under the 74 Act. And even though there's been changes like. It's a, the states still have a very large responsibility, and quite frankly, we weren't having the number of disasters and the size events that we have now and the level of development just simply a smaller country.
And that's again, whole other story of disaster leave that you could go down for another podcast. But the bottom line is fema, the Emergency Management Agency for the United States. Federal Emergency Management Agency, not the Federal Disaster Relief Agency is primarily a national security agency in its first decade, and [00:14:00] it is very much focused on helping DOD rebuild this middle ground to prepare for a potential conflict.
And again with Able Archer and 83 and others turned out closer than we thought to something kicking off. But that's the main focus of FEMA during that time period that starts to change finally, actually in the Bush administration 88 for instance, the MERS teams are, that we know of now are declassified, and the federal response plan, the direct res predecessor to the NRF, right?
That is issued just in time for the first Gulf War, which is, by the way, the last time we fought a war with an actual civilian mobilization system behind it. But there's a lot of focus. Again, it's a security agency. I have. General ton's mission statement for FEMA from the mid eighties. That was its focus, but we also find, but disaster relief is still important.
We have a growing office for that. And of course the modern FEMA all arises at the beginning of the Carter administration. So at the end of Bush administration, hurricane Andrew hits, and I actually write about this a lot in my master's thesis. [00:15:00] You. Cut and paste Andrew and Katrina. The same issues, the same problems.
I, to this day, I'm still surprised that no one brought up Andrew Moore, considering it was only 13 years before Katrina, but it's a mess. Stick gets sidelined. They bring in, I think Johnson Nunn to run it. Bush does obviously perception of the countries. It didn't go well. So James Lee Whit comes right, who is the first emergency manager to, to run, and he essentially, the FEMA we have today is a direct result of the changes he made.
And again, that's, that is now the culture of FEMA that I arrived in 2000, beginning of 2006, and the one that for the most part exists today. Although I think there have been a lot of changes in the last few years, but that's when fema. Transition from a national security agency fully to one that did disaster relief, regional natural hazards and specifically and of course did a fantastic job.
Project mitigation. There was a lot of things, not just response, not just recovery, but a lot of good things that [00:16:00] were done. But he completely refocused that whole system essentially on regional natural hazards, which is the FEMA that we have today. Whether it's EMI, doing stuff on the very, very front end, whether it's mitigation programs, you look at the federal mitigation.
Framework. It's not about mitigating everything. It's about mitigating wind and waters, essentially. That is the department, that is the agency that we got. And of course it was an independent agency for a time like its predecessors way back in the national security era, which the real reason FEMA was on, the NSC was not because of disaster relief.
And I think this is an important thing for people to understand. It's not a comfortable one for a lot of people. It wasn't there for disaster leave. It was there because of its national security responsibility, specifically for national mobilization directing the nation's resources, the FEMA director and his predecessors in a war under the plans that the have.
Would've been responsible for the nation's resources, much like the Jimmy Burns position in 1943, where he was the assistant president. That's why FEMA was on NSC, [00:17:00] not disaster leave. And then we have the modern era. Everyone's familiar, we have, Bush administration comes in 2000, there's a change.
Brown Katrina doesn't go well. We have the camera. FEMA has its position within DHS, which is specifically created on the model of the Coast Guard. I have some great four debate from Trent Lot or essentially Trent lot Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman basically made FEMA's position in DHS the way it is now, specifically based on the Coast Guard's role of you're in DHS, but there are only things that the Coast Guard and FEMA can do that the DHS secretary can't touch.
And then you roll into essentially, Sandy and everything else.
Kyle King: So you can hear how disasters began dominating FEMA's culture, especially once James LeWitt reorganized it in the 1990s. Public outcry after Andrew and Katrina essentially forced FEMA to prove it could handle major storms. And to be fair, FEMA improved significantly at that specific job. But in Quin's view, the old civil defense powers like swiftly [00:18:00] converting factories to produce ventilators or orchestrating mass evacuations of a nuclear threat arises fell by the wayside in turn.
And so think about the implications really, because on one hand, focusing on hurricanes and floods is sensible because it is the daily threat that we live with within many states. And recent storms are even showing us in 2025. The agency must handle that as well. And on the other hand, a crisis like the pandemic showed that large scale emergencies can quickly outstrip normal supply lines.
Governors scramble for PPE, for example, states bid against each other in competition for supplies. And without a robust national mobilization framework, we lack a unifying method to allocate critical goods and even services. And so this tension resonates with a key theme in, governance, especially during a crisis, which is balancing localized solutions for routine events, the day-to-day things and the seasons we live through versus a centralized approach for s.
Large scale threats, and as Quin puts it, if we face something [00:19:00] bigger than a category five hurricane, like a multi-year pandemic with global supply chain breakdown, or even an actual conflict with a peer nation who coordinates the entire economy and civil society, if FEMA doesn't, do we invent a new agency or do we revert to older models that we have long forgotten?
So our next segment zeroes in on a prime example of resource constraints, which is from the Pandemic Quin, explains how the pandemic forced a scramble reminiscent of old civil defense days, except the frameworks had mostly disappeared. Now, here Quin reflects on his own experience. He says he helped set up a voluntary agreement under the Defense Production Act for the first time in decades.
And let's hear how that went and unpack that just a little bit.
Quin Lucie: And I will say I think the change to where we are now, really beginning Covid, I supply chain, task force working directly for ic. I wrote the first voluntary agreement in 30 years. The second one in, gosh, we don't even know, 56 years, who knows.
But we [00:20:00] started to realize, at least I did. Wow. Why did we get rid of a lot of those dual use national security requirements to focus the nation on a problem specifically for national resource management? Boy, it would've been really incredibly helpful to have those in place in February and March of 2020 and not recreating them.
Like in the case of the voluntary agreement, which we really needed in March and April, but took us seven months to get it done because we needed as direct support of the Attorney General himself. And by the way, the last one that they did after the first Gulf War for military Sealift, that took seven years.
So there were a lot of things, including the DPA being more. Efficient at that and understanding as well would've been fascinating. Again, going back to that transition, there were still an office of 67 people that did nothing but mobilization. In 93, there was much larger office of Civil defense, and that was all completely wiped away at that point.
Again, I mentioned Larry Hall. He was, that surviving member was a collateral duty. He eventually rebuilt the DPA office of FEMA to four [00:21:00] people, which was the size. It was when? When, throughout that time period. I think even when it was being run in. Covid, I think it was still four to six.
Now Abe Gunn has got that office to maybe a dozen, but again, just barely large enough to handle the DPA A. This idea of being able to, quite frankly the fema, I'm sorry I've talked so long, but the FEMA of 1980 looks a lot more like CISA potentially now with a national resource management center and these other things.
Then FEMA does, looks like its version of 1980, and so all that is wiped away and I think in Covid was the first time we realized, boy. Maybe it would've been really good to have kept some of those things and that gets our current era. Obviously the on Ukraine rise of China and its. The specific guidance that we have now been told open source, that they are looking at 27 and 28 to have options available to Z outing.
We're now back into a multipolar world. One of my friends at fema, Brian Applebee, called it a strategic pause. I always like to give him credit for that. I thought it was a really great way to say it. That era's [00:22:00] over and so I think we are in a good place, even if disaster relief is really probably driving the train on what FEMA will look like in the future.
I think we're in a really good place to really talk about, are we really talking about disaster relief? Are we talking about emergency management? Which is essentially everything I've been talking about for the last several minutes, which is much broader and larger in that even if the federal government says we are out a long-term disaster relief, we're gonna only go back to that 1950 diversion of response only and very short term help.
These emergency management requirements to focus and coordinate across the USG in a crisis National security emergencies, one of the executive org calls it like, those things are never going away. You can get rid of them tomorrow, but in two, two days, two weeks, two years, you're gonna realize, boy, we gotta have a place in the federal government somewhere for that.
So I talked a lot, but that is essentially, as I know it, and been able to learn the history of FEMA from 1940 all the way up to [00:23:00] 2025.
Kyle King: Now, to me, Quin's story underscores a core tension in modern crisis management, which is really what do we do when the entire system is strained or even when the entire system is failing. We're used to local and state agencies asking for federal help from FEMA and other organizations and even mutual aid, but in a truly national scale event, like a pandemic that goes across all 50 states at once.
There's a finite supply of, for example, ventilators or protective gear. The old civil defense approach had ways to allocate scarce resources. Today we mostly rely on the market or ad hoc deals. The pandemic times taught us how messy that can become. Now this challenge extends beyond PPE. Of course, picture an earthquake, for example, that devastates a major region or a multi-state wildfire scenario, or consider a peer conflict scenario that disrupts major shipping routes.
And we've seen this with the Red Sea events in recent months. Now we might [00:24:00] discover we can't simply order more stuff. We face a supply shortfall. Now, Quin argues that's when the older version of emergency management. And those tools like the DPA or a robust mobilization staff become invaluable.
Now what's striking is how he says it took months to implement a single voluntary agreement. And a crisis months can be the difference between relative stability and chaos. Now, historically, the US overcame a big crisis like you know, world War II mobilization because we had advanced planning, bureaucratic structures and legislative frameworks, and over time.
we have let those structures gather dust or even just fade away completely, assuming we wouldn't need them for anything short of a nuclear war. And then along comes a pandemic to show us that resource constraints are no longer hypothetical. Now, from a governance standpoint. That suggests we need a consistent strategy for large scale resource coordination.
If not fema, then some other entity must do it. Should it be the Department of Homeland Security, or do we recreate a [00:25:00] quote, office of Emergency Management like in the 1940s? Now, ultimately, it's a policy question that merges local, state, federal, and private interest, and the answer could shape the next catastrophic response.
Now given all this, how do we define FEMA's future? Is it primarily a disaster relief agency or does it revert to a broader emergency management approach? Now let's listen as Quin spells out the dilemma and calls for a deeper conversation about the agency's mission. And in this final clip, Quin puts the question quite plainly, is FEMA essentially a response and relief agency, or is it meant to coordinate the entire nation under a crisis.
Quin Lucie: In this space, I think it comes down to one question and then everything comes from that. Are we talking about emergency management? Are we talking about disaster relief? The council, and again, whatever executive order comes out on Monday, which seems like it's focused on disaster, that they have to decide that fundamental question.[00:26:00]
How are we approaching this? Is it emergency management? Which as I mentioned, it pulls in a whole lot of stuff and quite frankly, some of that stuff, you need to get rid of it tomorrow. Eventually you're gonna need it again. It's just the way the world works. It's just a fundamental question of, having a government.
Or is it disaster relief? Which of course is again, that's driving this ship, right? That's the response to Helene and others. Clearly there's unhappiness. And I'm actually very positive about that because again, the last time we looked at disaster relief, at that point, not really.
Emergency, massive disaster relief was in 1988. We haven't had fundamental hearings on the role of the federal government and how disaster relief should look since 1988. We've had discussions in 2000. We had discussions after Katrina, but we were, Katrina's an example of FEMA's broken, we gotta fix it.
But there was never a discussion about, wait a minute, was the mix right between the federal government and the state? It was just assumed that the federal government had to be doing more and there wasn't competent things going on, and we have to fix that. It was just assumed. I [00:27:00] think the value here is hopefully we can have a really constructive conversation going back to the roots of, again, really start in 1950, there's a model from there. There's a model that grew up post 1970. There's a model even post 1988, and we didn't even talk about it, but when FEMA tried to make objective standards for disasters, declarations and Congress revolted, a lot of that was led by Tom Ridge himself had a lot to do with the Stafford Act.
He's really the father of that 1980 agreement. But they specifically put in section three 20 Stafford Act to basically stop objective standards. And so of course, only the president. And again, honestly, this would be something I think would be good to be brought up in that conversation. I get it from a political standpoint, but every disaster declaration I used to teach in my class, I'd say going back to Truman in 1950, how many disaster declarations under disaster relief authorities statutes since then, how many have been approved or denied by the president and by FEMAs predecessors and the and when it comes to FEMAs predecessors, the answer is zero.
No president has ever delegated that, but [00:28:00] yet politically, and I understand why we all do, it's approved, comes from the president. It's denied, comes from fema, but only the president can approve or deny disaster declaration and the president cannot, and FEMA cannot set objective standards essentially because of that.
That gearing in 1986, that led to the, to that particular part of Section three 20. Again, that was a decision made in that political environment. That would be maybe something very interesting for this council to approach and say, is that still the right approach? Do we link win start to have these things come from the presidency because it just provides more clarity to people who's making the decision.
Again, I understand why that's not the easiest thing for any president or any party, right? I get that, but maybe the long-term effects of that. Isn't positive American people, right? They're not really understanding what's going on. Maybe we do need to have some objective standards. This disaster deductible whole side story that came up in under Fugate that actually came from a blog post I wrote [00:29:00] that the Democratic administration was not happy with.
But I pointed this stuff out and said, now you know, there are no objective standards. That's the way Congress created 1988, specifically wanted it set up that way. That might be a really good conversation to have and say, is that the right way forward? Maybe it is, maybe politically across the spectrum.
That's just the way you have to go forward from the federal government, and if that's true. Totally understand it, move on. But I think it's just a good, that's just one example. One of the detailed things I think this council could really dive into. But it all goes back to that fundamental question.
Are we talking about emergency management? Are we talking disaster relief? And depending on how that council looks at this. Which of course is co-chaired by the Department of Defense. I think once they decide on that fundamental fact that will decide the path as council goes down, and then ultimately, again, we'll see this EO on Monday, the future of literally the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
But as I said, the idea of emergency management, like those requirements will always have a home in the federal [00:30:00] government and the state and local level. That's a side story, but again. Is it emergency management or is it disaster relief?
Kyle King: Now, this is the crux of Quin's argument. Do we want a federal disaster relief agency or a true federal emergency management agency? And the question matters for future crisis because of scope. Authority and politics and of course public perception. So in terms of scope, a pure disaster relief organization focuses on addressing typical floods, wildfires, and hurricanes.
It's vital, and that's really not a question, but a bigger crisis, say a pandemic plus a major war demands something else. Large scale coordination of every facet of our society, from industrial capacity to national logistics. And then we have authority. If FEMA's only recognized authority is handing out recovery grants or grant mechanisms, it lacks the credibility or legal framework to do national level resource triage.
The Defense Production Act is rarely used comprehensively, and yet that's [00:31:00] exactly the tool that might be needed if we had to, for instance, produce millions of doses of a new vaccine while shipping essential supplies overseas for a conflict and supporting an allied nation. And of course there's always the politics and public perception.
And politically it's easier for FEMA to be a relief organization that resonates with the average voter who sees these types of storms every year, and their community is always impacted. And meanwhile, mobilization for war or pandemics is more abstract until a crisis hits and then we scramble.
So listening to Quin, we also sense that an entire cultural shift. Is happening and might be required. Over decades. The American public got used to local volunteerism plus federal support and relief in a crisis. Real mobilization with an event large enough at a scale enough might mean federal direction, mandated production quotas or major supply chain oversight.
Things that many in the US reflexively resist. So any pivot to a bigger, broader. [00:32:00] Emergency management might face pushback unless leaders communicate why this is actually necessary. Now, during World War ii, the war production board and other offices orchestrated the economy at an unprecedented level with widespread public support.
that acceptance came because Americans felt this type of existential threat. Then they were invested in the outcomes. Now, Quin's argument suggests that if we face a 21st century existential threat. We'll need something akin to those World War II types of frameworks, and we can't simply just build them overnight.
Now if we keep ignoring that side of the mission, we risk confusion in a real crisis. This is, at its core a question of governance, and in the course of everyday disasters, FEMA has been sufficient, and that is largely in question now these days. But in an extraordinary scenario, we might discover that we're actually missing half the puzzle.
Now Quin and I spoke for an extended period of time, and given everything that we've heard, I just wanted to sort of take a step back and [00:33:00] consider how this ties into broader crisis management and, and largely about how we govern during a crisis. and there's a few key points here that I wanna get through.
And, and the first of which is multi-level governance. And so Quin's remarks highlighted attention between. Federal, state, and local authorities. Now, in typical disasters, you know, states request federal aid, but in a massive crisis, every state is claiming for the same Resources. And so without a robust national system, we get disjointed efforts.
The next crisis might require a nationwide plan, and the question is, who is going to enforce that? And if we really wanna talk about policy reform, which is the next point? If we want FEMA to regain a quote wartime mobilization approach, that might mean rewriting laws or reactivating old authorities, for example, clarifying the circumstances under which FEMA can override state procurement for how it can direct private industry.
Political leaders must debate this openly because it's a major shift in how we handle emergencies, and we might see some of that out of the recent conversations around FEMA and its mission, but that really takes us to public communication and [00:34:00] trust, which is. The third point because as with any sweeping policy, there's a trust factor.
The public needs to understand why FEMA would coordinate a big crisis rather than leaving it to the states or to the market if we don't build that trust. Pre-crisis attempts at federal direction might face intense resistance in the moment, as we saw with some states during covid. Or even after recent hurricanes and what has brought FEMA into the recent spotlight in the last year or so.
And then we have, of course, the all hazards approach versus niche missions. Now, historically, all hazards means you plan it for everything from floods to nuclear war, but in practice, many agencies drift into specialized pockets. Quin calls for returning to truly integrated approach that might help with the lesser known threats like extreme cyber disruptions or repeated.
Pandemics, but it's a heavy lift. No single agency can do everything without strong interagency ties. And that really brings us into the fifth point, which is potential models. Could [00:35:00] FEMA be split into two parts, for example, one for. Routine disasters, quote unquote, and the other four mobilization efforts, large scale, complex crisis.
Or should we just resurrect something like the Old Office of Emergency Management in the White House for cross departmental coordination? Either approach demands robust collaboration and legal clarity. Now, finally, let's recall. That a crisis and complex crisis and well actually, they're just becoming more complex these days.
And so, you know, natural hazards intersect with health emergencies and supply chain breakdowns and possible security issues in this, this era of poly crisis is now transitioning into what we call perma crisis, where it's just something every day consistently, and we're always responding and always recovering.
And this type of environment demands a more flexible. Broad-based fema, but without it, we rely on ad hoc measures each time, and so the political question as Quin points out is whether we have the will to do so before the next complex crisis, [00:36:00] or if we will only fix the things after we're already in the midst of it.
And that brings us to the end of our discussion with Quin Lucie. I hope this journey through FEMA is often overlooked at national security origins, plus its pivot towards disaster relief. Sparks some new thinking about how we collectively handle emergencies. And so there's three sort of. Key final points I'll make before we conclude, and that FEMA was just never about relief.
it began as a broad-based emergency management entity coordinating everything from war mobilization to civil defense, and over time with the growth and frequency and cost of disasters, that mission has largely become overwhelmed by relief operations. And we are now in a constant state of recovery as a society.
And so the pandemic, the pandemic itself was really a wake up call because we lack robust resource mobilization tools. We built them on the fly, losing valuable time. And for an even bigger, more complex crisis, even those with national security implications, that approach simply will not cut it.
And so the future of FEMA is really a policy choice and it is a governance choice. So do we [00:37:00] want full spectrum all hazards? Coordination, including potential conflict and resource coordination mobilization at its central government level, or do we remain a specialized disaster relief agency? Both approaches have their own implications for governance, states rights, and private industry.
And so just consider all that as all of these policy discussions are happening this year in terms of what is happening with FEMA and where our future actually lies. We know a couple of things really for sure, is that FEMA is under scrutiny, and number two, that a crisis and emergencies and disasters are ultimately getting more frequent, more complex, and more interconnected.
And that's all for today's episode of the Christ Lab Podcast. While you're here, do me a quick favor and help us grow, share this episode with colleagues or friends working in emergency management, policy making or governance, or anyone curious about how we manage the next complex crisis. And while you're doing that, give us a like as well.
I'd really appreciate it. A huge thanks to Quin Lucie for taking time to share his thoughts. And thank you, our listeners, for joining us on the Christ Lab Podcast. Until next time, I'm Kyle and wishing you a safe and thoughtful week. [00:38:00]
