Kyle King: [00:00:00] Emergency managers weren't supposed to be responders. They were coordinators bringing stakeholders together to collectively reduce disaster risk. Disasters were to be handled at the lowest level possible with federal intervention reserved for truly catastrophic events.
Now let's fast forward to today. Federal data shows FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund had outlays of approximately $68 billion in 2020 alone more than 60 times what was spent annually in the 1980s. So what really happened? How did a discipline designed to reduce disaster impacts through coordination transformed into a massive humanitarian relief operation? Welcome to the Crisis Lab podcast where we examine how governance decisions shape our ability to manage a crisis.
I'm your host, Kyle, and I'm excited to bring you another thought provoking discussion on emergency management system failures and the path to resilience. [00:01:00] In this series, we've been exploring how choices made long before disaster strike.
Determine their ultimate impact. We've looked at patterns of failure across domains from aviation safety to power grid failures to reveal the underlying governance decisions that turn manageable problems into catastrophes. Today we are diving into how emerging management has transformed from coordination.
Focus, discipline to one overwhelmed by relief operations and what that means for our communities. This episode continues our exploration of how governance choices shape our vulnerability to crisis. The emergency management agency should be very small.
This wasn't a radical proposition when the National Governor's Association made it in 1978. It was for all intents and purposes, common sense. Emergency managers weren't supposed to be responders. They were coordinators bringing stakeholders together to collectively reduce disaster risk. Disasters were to be handled at the [00:02:00] lowest level possible with federal intervention reserved for truly catastrophic events.
Now let's fast forward to today. Federal data shows FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund had outlays of approximately $68 billion in 2020 alone more than 60 times what was spent annually in the 1980s. So what really happened? How did a discipline designed to reduce disaster impacts through coordination transformed into a massive humanitarian relief operation?
And what have we lost in the process In our previous articles, I. examined how governance failures often transform manageable problems into catastrophes. The same pattern that led to the, for example, Boeing 7 37 max Door incident, the Texas power grid failure and the water crisis in Flint is evident in emergency management Decisions made warnings ignored and systems designed to address symptoms rather than causes.
Now it's time to explore perhaps the most consequential governance failure of all. The slow suffocation of emergency management under the weight of disaster relief. [00:03:00] So we're really talking about a mission transformed. Imagine you're in emergency management. When you enter the field. You envision coordinating mitigation projects, strengthening community partnerships, building a network of local responders who could handle most emergencies without federal assistance.
You wanted to prevent disasters, not just respond to them. Today, your reality, I'm sure looks quite different. Your office walls are lined with. Three ring binders containing grant guidance for federal disaster programs or calendars filled with meetings about damage assessments. Applicant briefings and recovery program administration prevention feels like a luxury.
You're constantly changing and chasing the last disaster,
this transformation didn't happen overnight. Former FEMA attorney Quinn Lucy traces this evolution back decades during the Cold War era. FEMA and its predecessors were charged with civil defense and national mobilization, not just disaster recovery. From 1979 through the late 1980s, FEMA was focused on preparing for potential national security emergencies, including [00:04:00] industrial mobilization.
The turning point came in 1992 with Hurricane Andrew. Under President Clinton's FEMA administrator James Lee Witt, the agency pivoted sharply towards natural hazards mitigation, and day-to-day disasters. By the time of the 2017 hurricane season, federal disaster relief operations reached unprecedented levels, and the numbers really tell the story.
Federal spending records show that disaster outlays averaged only about $1 billion. In today's terms and in today's dollars in the 1980s, and by 2005 to 2006 period following Hurricane Katrina, that figure had grown to roughly $70 billion.
The 2017 hurricane season, projected cost to reach about $86 billion, and in 2020, primarily due to COVID-19 response. FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund saw outlays of nearly $68 billion. Meanwhile, funding for coordination and mitigation has grown at a. Fraction of that pace. This isn't merely just a budget shift.
It's a fundamental transformation of emerging management's identity and purpose. Unlike the governance [00:05:00] failures documented in a previous article on the betrayal of safety, it happens so gradually that many haven't recognized what's been lost until the consequences become impossible to ignore. So what happens when relief overwhelms coordination?
The consequences of this shift extend far beyond organizational charts or budget lines. Imagine you're preparing for Hurricane Milton, the category five storm that devastated Florida in October, 2024. As the storm approaches, you find yourself overwhelmed, not just by the impending disaster, but by the weight of federal recovery programs still active from previous hurricanes.
You still have staff dedicated to administrating recovery grants from storms that hit years earlier, some dating back to 2017 and Hurricane Irma. The complex requirements of these programs have consumed so much capacity that the basic coordination functions, the very heart of emergency management are compromised.
You're trying to prepare for Milton while still managing recovery programs from multiple previous storms. There simply [00:06:00] aren't enough hours in the day or people in your office. You're finding yourself making impossible choices between preparing for tomorrow's disaster and managing yesterday's recovery.
And this is the cruel irony of emergency management's transformation. The more resources devoted to disaster relief operations, the less capacity remains for the coordination that could reduce the need for relief in the first place. The problem isn't that we've gotten bad at relief. On the contrary, we've gotten remarkably good at it.
Federal agencies can deploy resources faster, provide more comprehensive assistance and process claims more efficiently than ever. The problem is that this success has become an excuse to avoid addressing the underlying causes of vulnerability. Why make difficult zoning decisions when federal aid will rebuild in the same vulnerable locations?
Why invest at prevention when relief is guaranteed? When FEMA administrator, Deanne Criswell told Congress in 2022 that we no longer have disaster seasons. We are busy year round. She wasn't [00:07:00] describing the triumph emergency management. She was acknowledging a system under continuous strain, one that has abandoned its preventive mission in favor of an endless cycle of response and recovery.
So we find ourselves with an eroding coordination muscle. As disaster relief operations have grown more sophisticated, the coordination function that was once the heart of emergency management has withered. In a previous article, I highlighted research from the Rand Corporation that identified what they called a quote, adding machine problem unquote, where new requirements, systems and frameworks are continuously added without others being retired.
This has resulted in emergency management practitioners having to navigate an estimated 31 different strategic frameworks, a level of complexity that overwhelms the capacity for effective coordination. The evidence of this erosion appears in multiple ways. Federal records indicate that the vast majority of emergency management funding flows to disaster relief operations rather than coordination, planning, or prevention.
Fragmented responsibilities. Disaster [00:08:00] functions are split across numerous federal programs and multiple agencies creating coordination challenges that didn't exist when emergency management was much simpler. Increasing complexity. The proliferation of frameworks, regulations, and programs has created a system so complex that even experienced emergency managers struggle to navigate it effectively.
Coordination skill gaps. A generation of emergency managers has been trained primarily in relief program administration rather than facilitation, collaborative problem solving, and stakeholder engagement. This eroding coordination capacity comes precisely when we need it the most. Climate data indicates disasters are increasing in frequency and severity.
Critical infrastructure is aging. Development continues in vulnerable areas, and the need for coordinated risk reduction has never been greater yet the capacity for such coordination has never been more compromised. Just as we've seen in other systems from aviation safety to water infrastructure, this isn't a technical problem, but a governance failure.
The institutions we've built and the incentives we've created have consistently prioritized [00:09:00] visible relief operations over invisible prevention, despite the overwhelming evidence that prevention is more cost effective and saves more lives. So what about the Forgotten Art of Mobilization? This transformation has consequences beyond natural disasters.
As former FEMA attorney Quinn Lucy has pointed out the shift away from FEMA's original coordination role has led to the forgotten art of national mobilization. So imagine a scenario where resources become scarce across the entire nation, not just in one region. Our current emergency management frameworks like the Incident Command System, national Incident Management System, NRF, et cetera, assume resources can be found somewhere and moved to the effective area.
But what happens when there are no surplus resources anywhere? This is exactly what occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. As the nation faced critical shortages of personal protective equipment, ventilators, and other medical supplies, the traditional mutual aid model broke down. There were simply no resources to share.
The pandemic exposed a critical gap in our [00:10:00] emergency management approach, the loss of mobilization of authorities and capabilities, tools that were once central to the agency's mission, but had atrophied as the focus shifted to disaster relief operations. Now this parallels a pattern we've seen repeatedly across systems.
The skills and capabilities needed to prevent catastrophic failures are often the first to be sacrificed when budgets tighten or priorities shift. Just as Boeing's safety culture eroded under production pressures and Flint's water oversight collapsed under financial constraints. FEMA's mobilization capacity has withered as relief.
Operations consumed more attention and resources.
And this gap extends beyond equipment shortages. It affects how we prepare for and respond to all manner of national scale emergencies from catastrophic earthquakes to cyber attacks on critical infrastructure. The coordination function that would allow for effective national mobilization has been overshadowed by the day-to-day demands of disaster relief operations.
But is there [00:11:00] a structural reform on the horizon?
The growing recognition of this coordination, relief, and balance has sparked serious proposals for structural reform. In March, 2023, a bipartisan bill, HR 55 99, the FEMA Independence Act was introduced to remove FEMA from the Department of Homeland Security and reestablish it as a cabinet level independent agency.
As former Florida Emergency Manager, director, representative Jared Moskovitz explained. Right now, FEMA functions more like a grant agency with emergency management capabilities. This common sense Bill will help return it to its original mission, responding before, during, and after disaster events. Now, the bill proposed a comprehensive restructuring plan, including Senate confirmed leadership with significant executive experience, regional directors, and full authority over all aspects of FEMA's mission supporters.
Argued that FEMA had become bogged down by DH S'S sprawling scope, which includes immigration enforcement, cybersecurity, and border control, this echoes a parallel development in March, [00:12:00] 2025, the executive order on achieving efficiency through state and local preparedness. The order explicitly states that quote, preparedness is most effectively owned and managed at the state, local, and even individual levels supported by a competent, accessible, and efficient federal government.
More significantly, it manages a review of national preparedness policies to move away from an all hazards approach towards a risk informed approach. The executive order specifically targets a bureaucratic complexity that has hindered effective coordination.
It criticizes the bureaucratic and complicated lens of overlapping and overbroad functions and calls for a national risk register to quantify national and malign risks to national infrastructures and systems. These developments signal potential movement, but as we've seen with other system failures documented from our previous articles.
There's a vast difference between identifying a problem and implementing an effective solution. In one of our previous articles on the most expensive report ever written, I highlighted how post-disaster analysis often leads to reports rather than [00:13:00] reform. This repeated cycle of disaster investigation recommendation and in action has become a tragic routine in American governance.
Will these reforms and efforts break the cycle? History suggests caution. Previous efforts have sometimes been stymied by the same political dynamics that favor post-disaster spending over pre-disaster investment.
Career incentives, cognitive limitations of expertise in bureaucratic path dependency and political time horizons, all work against the fundamental reform that is sometimes required.
So different structures. The evidence points towards a clear conclusion. Emergency management coordination and disaster relief are different functions that might be better served by different organizational approaches. Coordination, for example, requires deep local relationships and knowledge.
A convening authority, nimble organizational structures, consistent stakeholder engagement and [00:14:00] integration with everyday governance. Whereas relief requires surge capacity, logistics expertise, financial management systems, standardized processes and specialized technical capabilities. So rather.
Expecting a single organizational structure to excel at both. We should consider alternatives that recognize these distinct requirements.
But this is where a previous pattern that we identified in an article has become evident. The solutions typically propose more funding, better training. Starter leadership rarely challenge the fundamental structure of our emergency management system. They represent what organizational theorists. Call first order change adjustment within existing systems rather than reimagining the systems themselves.
True transformation would require what theorists call second order change, questioning whether our current approach to emergency management is fundamentally sound or whether it needs to be reconceived from first principles.
Potential approaches include functional separation, create clear organizational distinctions between coordination and relief functions with dedicated resources and [00:15:00] leadership for each. Strengthened coordination authority. Establish coordination offices with explicit mandates to convene stakeholders across sectors for risk reduction.
Separate from relief administration, balanced metrics develop measures that value successful risk reduction, not just efficient relief. Delivery, and aligned incentives create financial and political motivations for prevention rather than relief. Dependency. Of course, a restored mobilization capacity, rebuild the capacities and capabilities needed for national scale coordination during true catastrophes, recognizing that some emergencies will exceed the capacity of any single jurisdiction.
The question isn't whether these approaches are technically feasible. They clearly are. The question is whether our institutional structures and political incentives will allow us to make these changes before the next catastrophic failure forces our hands.
How do we reclaim [00:16:00] coordination as our core mission? None of these approaches will be easy to implement. Each requires questioning structures that have evolved over decades, challenging the political dynamics that favor post-disaster spending over pre-disaster investment. Yet the stakes are high.
Every dollar spent on disaster relief operations represents a failure to address the underlying conditions that created the vulnerability in the first place. For emergency managers across the country, the path forward starts with recognition that coordination was always the heart of emergency management, and that we've allowed the heart to be overwhelmed by the machinery of relief.
So imagine you're in emergency management again. You're witnessing the aftermath of Hurricane Milton in Florida. Communities that implemented strong building codes and land use planning suffered far less damage than those that didn't. Areas with robust coordination before the disaster are recovering faster than those where such networks were weak or non-existent.
You see firsthand the value of [00:17:00] prevention and the limits of even the most effective relief operations. You still believe in the original vision. You know that emergency management at its best isn't about delivering relief after disasters.
It's about bringing people together to prevent disasters in the first place. We've lost sight of that, but it's not too late to find our way back. As we've seen throughout this series of articles and podcasts, the challenge isn't technical. We know. How to reduce disaster impacts to challenges governance, creating the systems and incentives that value prevention.
As much as we currently value response, it's about recognizing that true resilience comes not from how quickly we recover, but from whether we needed to recover in the first place.
That's all for this episode of the Christ Lab Podcast. If you found this discussion valuable, please share it with your colleagues and join the conversation over on LinkedIn where we publish these articles every couple of weeks. And so with bipartisan legislation, proposing to restructure FEMA in a new executive order,
towards greater state and local preparedness. The question remains, [00:18:00] how might emergency management professionals reclaim their coordination role while ensuring communities remain protected from increasingly frequent and severe disasters? In our next episode, we'll explore the resilience paradox, why we demand more resilience from individual citizens than from systems they depend on.
It's a fascinating look at how we've normalized individual preparation for system failures rather than designing systems that don't fail. The solutions to our most pressing challenges won't come from doing more of the same. They'll emerge from fundamentally reimagining our approach to risk resilience and governance.
This is Crisis Lab podcast. Thanks for listening, and until next time, stay resilient.
