Susan Walsh/AP Photo
President Joe Biden talks with FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell as he arrives in Greer, South Carolina, on Wednesday to survey damage from Hurricane Helene.
One of the most reliable patterns in American governance over the last 30 years is the cycle of federal disaster response. When a Democrat is in the White House, they build up competence at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and elsewhere, and rescue and cleanup operations after hurricanes, floods, and other disasters are generally pretty good.
But when a Republican takes their place, they destroy all that hard-won state capacity through negligence, incompetence, and corruption. Disaster response is invariably bungled, and many die unnecessarily. Then when a Democrat returns, they have to pick up the pieces.
We are seeing precisely this pattern play out right now with the response to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. Contrary to the bellowing on right-wing media (and from some left-wing quarters) that Biden has “abandoned” the state—leading an exasperated FEMA to have to publish a web page debunking crack-brained rumors circulating on social media, above all Twitter—the Biden administration has mounted a large and aggressive rescue effort that is going reasonably well.
Biden issued an immediate emergency declaration, coordinated a whole-of-government response that is ongoing, and has been in close contact with the governors of both North Carolina and Georgia. Five thousand federal workers are on the ground, and as of October 3 FEMA had shipped in 9.3 million meals, over 11.2 million liters of water, 160 generators, and 260,000 tarps. Thousands of other work crews from utilities, local governments, and other groups are frantically clearing debris, fixing roads, and repairing power lines, in rather dangerous, mountainous territory. Most power has been restored, and the remainder is predicted to be hooked back up within a few days. A North Carolina National Guard effort has been supplemented with 1,000 federal troops to fly in supplies to the most cut-off areas, which as of October 2 had delivered over 100,000 pounds of supplies. FEMA relief payments for breastfeeding mothers, home repairs, and other problems are starting to flow.
The Biden administration also announced that it would foot the bill for all local response costs in the disaster zone. The one serious looming problem is that FEMA predicts it will likely run out of money if another hurricane hits, but only Congress can fix that with an additional appropriation.
Now, I should emphasize that cleanup is still ongoing, some have died, and many have lost all their possessions. But this simply reflects that Helene caused a terrific amount of damage in an unexpected, rugged, isolated location. No doubt things could have gone better; every disaster response by definition ends up being somewhat haphazard and improvised. On the whole, it’s a solid effort, thanks to grinding and thankless work by Biden administration officials to undo the damage caused by the previous president.
If Trump wins this election, all that work is going in the garbage, again.
One reason the devastation in North Carolina is so bad is that Republicans have been undermining and blocking flood safety regulations for over a decade.
Washington Monthly has been telling the story of the “FEMA phoenix” for 20 years. Back in 2005, Daniel Franklin wrote how the Clinton administration, under Administrator James Lee Witt, had transformed the agency from an inert slug into a well-oiled machine. Under President George H.W. Bush, it was disastrously slow to react to hurricanes in Puerto Rico and Florida, but thanks to Witt, it mounted a vigorous response to severe Mississippi River floods in 1993 and the Oklahoma City bombing.
In the 2000s, George W. Bush and congressional Republicans broke FEMA once more. As Kevin Drum outlined at the Monthly, first Bush appointed one of his Texas cronies with no prior experience to run it, who stayed for less than two years. That guy was replaced with another crony, Michael Brown, whose prior experience was running the International Arabian Horse Association. The administration announced it would privatize much of FEMA’s capacity. Then FEMA was folded into the Department of Homeland Security, and its advance preparation systems were given to a different agency. It became a dumping ground for Bush cronies who needed patronage jobs.
In 2004, FEMA denied requests from Louisiana for pre-disaster funding. That year, Republicans in Congress slashed funding to the Army Corps of Engineers for levee construction in New Orleans, and the following year—only a couple of months before Hurricane Katrina—slashed funding again for the agency’s New Orleans district as a whole.
The stage was set for the Katrina catastrophe. Idiotic Republican policy made New Orleans more vulnerable to hurricanes, and idiot Republican leaders and officials grossly botched the response. A vital task for presidents and agency leaders is to get the vast government apparatus moving and coordinate the response, but both Bush and Brown plainly had little idea what to do, and FEMA lacked the capacity to move quickly even if they had. Precious hours and days were wasted, and rescuers, supplies, and repair crews were slow to move in. At least 1,392 people died. Bush’s comment that “Brownie” was doing a “heckuva job” was instantly infamous.
President Obama again appointed an expert FEMA administrator, Craig Fugate, who turned things around. The responses to Hurricane Irene and Superstorm Sandy were widely agreed to be solid.
Donald Trump was worst of all. Bush at least felt that he had to make some effort during a disaster, however hapless, but not Trump. He did pick a FEMA administrator with some experience, who by all accounts did relatively well in the response to Hurricane Harvey in Texas (though he had a habit of taking agency vehicles for his own use, and eventually resigned). But it was a different story in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. FEMA was caught unprepared and overstretched, and just as with Katrina, rescue and repair efforts were very slow to start. Wastewater facilities and hospitals were knocked out for months, power was not fully restored for 11 months, millions of water bottles were forgotten on a runway, and something like 3,000 people died. And as usual under Republican rule, large reconstruction contracts started mysteriously going to unprepared companies with administration ties.
As the scale of the disaster became clear, rather than trying to make up for it, Trump started fights with the mayor of San Juan on Twitter for criticizing him. This bitter vindictiveness marked all of Trump’s disaster responses (and elsewhere, like his attempt to extort Ukraine for a campaign stunt), and is what made him worse than Bush. Texas got its Harvey money because it is a red state, but Trump held such a grudge against Puerto Rico that he held up about $20 billion in congressionally authorized aid for the rest of his presidency; some was unlocked just before the 2020 election, and the rest by Biden in early 2021. He also diverted $10 million from the FEMA budget to ICE immigrant detention programs. The administration also impeded investigations into whether it was holding up the funds. A former aide recently told reporters that Trump had only granted aid money for California wildfire response after it was explained to him how many Republicans were in the affected region in Orange County.
By the end of Trump’s term, the entire federal bureaucracy was in shambles. After taking office, Biden had to once again clean up the Republican mess at FEMA (and the rest of the government), and as Matthew Cooper writes at the Monthly, for the most part he has done it.
That brings us back to Helene. North Carolina is one of the states where Republicans have gerrymandered democracy out of existence in the state legislature. No matter how the votes go, the GOP is all but guaranteed a supermajority of seats. And as The New York Times reports, one reason the devastation in North Carolina is so bad is that these same Republicans have been undermining and blocking flood safety regulations for the state building code for over a decade. While the federal government and outside groups have pushed for upgraded flood requirements, state Republicans sided with builder groups (many members of which are themselves legislators), who complained they would cost money. Once again, idiotic Republican policy left their constituents literally up a creek without a paddle.
Luckily for the Trump voters in the North Carolina mountains, Biden is there to coordinate a federal response that compensates for state Republican negligence. But if Trump returns to power, and another hurricane nails the state once more, they probably will not be so lucky.
