It’s Hurricane Season. Do You Know Where Your FEMA Director Is?

IT’S BEEN NEARLY SEVEN WEEKS. And they’re still looking for bodies.

On July 4, torrential rains from the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry caused the Guadalupe River to overflow its banks in central Texas, creating a flash flood of such destructive fury it ripped buildings off their foundations. As the waters rose by ten, twenty, and eventually more than thirty feet, people reached for tree branches, grabbed for mattresses or pieces of wood—anything to stay afloat.

Many couldn’t. The floods had torn through a summer camp for girls, killing more than two dozen—including 11- and 13-year-old sisters whose bodies were discovered hours later, still clinging to one another. In a house not far away, a young father died saving his wife, mother, and two small children—telling them, in his final moments, that “I’m sorry, I’m not going to make it. I love y’all.”

It was a heartbreaking natural disaster and, with a death toll that now stands at 138, one of the country’s deadliest of the last quarter century. Yet somehow the subject has more or less disappeared from the national conversation, even though it should be raising alarm bells about the multiple governmental failures that made the tragedy worse—and about what those failures say when it comes to our readiness for the next natural disaster.

The biggest failures appear to have been at the local level, where county officials had rejected proposals to install an early-warning system of sirens, despite the known flood risk to the area—and then, in the days leading up to the flood, failed to make sure the right personnel were on the job and ready to act.

But the federal government seems to have failed too, in ways that trace directly to decisions by the Trump administration—in particular, those of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. One of her responsibilities is overseeing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). And one of the policies she introduced after taking office was requiring that any spending requests for more than $100,000 go through her office for review.

That policy reportedly prevented FEMA from pre-positioning search-and-rescue teams. It also left call centers understaffed and slow to respond because the contract for staffing those centers had lapsed and Noem had yet to approve renewal, according to reporting in the New York Times and National Public Radio.

Holding up money for approval by a cabinet-level official is not the way the federal government has handled disaster spending in the past, and for good reason, as homeland-security expert Juliette Kayyem explained in a Bulwark interview with me last week.

“Either you’re going to deploy those resources or you’re not—deploying them three days late doesn’t help anyone,” said Kayyem, who has served in both state and federal office and now teaches at Harvard. “That search-and-rescue effort has to start within hours to make it worthwhile.”

Administration officials have bristled at the suggestion their policies let down the people of Texas, with Noem insisting “the response time was immediate” and Trump saying at a press conference that a reporter was “evil” for asking questions about the government response.

But neither contradicted any of the reporting about the government’s slow response. And while it’s impossible to know just how much difference the delays in federal action ultimately made, it’s also impossible not to see those delays as part of a larger pattern of management—or, rather, mismanagement—since Trump took over.

TRUMP HAS TREATED FEMA the same way his administration has treated virtually every other federal agency, by reducing staff through a combination of layoffs and retirements—and withholding, canceling, or cutting spending that Congress had already authorized.

That includes a multi-billion-dollar program to fund state and local disaster-mitigation projects. “It’s really put some communities in tough spots,” William Turner, emergency management director for Connecticut, told me in a phone interview.

Among the affected projects in his state was an initiative to build seawalls and pumps in coastline cities like Stamford and New Haven, where there are signs that flooding is becoming more frequent and more severe, possibly because of global warming..

States have challenged the program’s cancellation and recently won a victory in the lower courts, though that’s no guarantee they will prevail as the case moves through the legal system. “The outlook for those programs is unclear,” Turner said, “unless we can find some other source of funding.”

And the Trump administration may be doing more than holding back mitigation funds. North Carolina has been waiting on more than $100 million in funds to help rebuild after Hurricane Helene, according to an early August investigative article in the Washington Post.¹ And that seems to be part of a pattern of approvals for fund requests tending to be slower, according to Sarah Labovitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.

Labovitz, who maintains a tracking website called the Disaster Dollar Database, contrasted the quick approval of funds for the Texas floods with much slower approval of funds for the St. Louis area following deadly tornadoes there. “They were really on th