Your Independent Journal from the Heartland
It’s axiomatic by this point that the Grand Old Party has morphed into a pro-death cult ruled by the cruelest overlords in American history — as evidenced by their worshipful gun fetish (even when the bullets kill prayerful kids), their determination to sabotage life-saving vaccines (I dread the next pandemic), and their crusade to destroy the federal agency that helps people recover from climate-change disasters.
The latter in particular has been on my mind as we mark the 20th anniversary of the Katrina hurricane that killed 1,400 and devastated not just New Orleans but a big swath of southern Mississippi. You’d think that after what happened - after the Bush administration was publicly exposed for screwing up FEMA, for staffing it at the top with inexperienced imbeciles, for slashing its budget - that the crucial agency would forevermore be gifted all the resources and expertise it needs to prepare and respond.
But that would only happen in a rational nation. The one we no longer inhabit.
The easiest prediction, in the fall of ‘24, was that if a fatal share of feckless, oblivious, and ignorant Americans voted to re-hire a convicted criminal who vowed to wreak lawless havoc, then once in office he would indeed wreak lawless havoc. It didn’t take a seer to divine that one. And here’s a new one that Nostradamus could’ve done in his sleep:
When the next catastrophe inevitably hits, a lot of people will die needlessly thanks to the pro-death MAGA cult - whose leaders have slashed one-third of FEMA’s work force, at precisely the time when climate change is stoking the severity of killer storms.
How sickeningly on-brand it was, the other day, that after 200 FEMA employees signed an open letter warning us that the MAGA regime is plotting “the effective dissolution of FEMA itself and the abandonment of the American people,” that the regime would respond by pulling a few dozen of the whistle-blowers off their posts.
And how sickeningly on-brand it was that some of those whistle-blowers got the word about their “administrative leave” while they were working down in Texas, helping the region recover from the recent killer floods. It was bad enough, 20 years ago, when the Bush regime weakened FEMA; now Trump aspires to finish the job.
L. Russel Honoré, a now-retired Army general who led a military rescue task force during Katrina, is sounding the alarm: “Federal assistance and coordination is not a luxury. It’s a necessity. This will become more apparent as global warming continues to heat the Gulf, making tropical storms more powerful, more frequent and hitting closer to home.” But now, thanks to Trump, “much of (FEMA’s) institutional knowledge has been lost and our best practices for disaster response destroyed.”
There’s an old saying that while history doesn’t repeat itself, it often rhymes. I’ll pair that with an axiom of my own: Republicans Never Learn.
The political fallout from Katrina was devastating for George W. Bush. He went on TV after the storm hit and said, “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the (New Orleans) levees.” But not long after, we learned (via video footage leaked to the Associated Press) that Bush had been explicitly warned in advance that the storm could breach the levees; that during those briefings he didn’t ask a single question; and that he’d assured state officials, “We are fully prepared.”
But FEMA was not “fully prepared,” because the Bush team had been busy slashing the agency’s budget - killing FEMA’s disaster-planning program, which was particularly popular in vulnerable southern states; killing FEMA’s national flood-prevention program; and staffing the agency at the top with dopes who had zero experience in emergency management. Exhibit A, of course, was Michael Brown, who headed Bush’s FEMA based on his 11-year tenure at the International Arabian Horse Association.
Indeed, 15 months before Katrina the warning signs were already obvious. That’s when a veteran FEMA official told Congress that because of the Bush crew, “FEMA has gone from being a model agency to being one where…employee morale has fallen and our nation’s emergency management capability is being eroded.” (Any of that sound familiar?)
Post-Katrina, a chastened Congress boosted FEMA’s funding. And starting in 2009 Barack Obama restored the agency by appointing, as its director, Craig Fugate — a guy with decades of actual emergency management experience in storm-plagued Florida. Fugate served all eight years of Obama’s tenure. I’m not implying that FEMA has been perfect — under presidents of both parties, it has long been credibly accused of failing to aid some of the most vulnerable storm victims — but now the post-Katrina reforms that helped put the agency back on track have been trumped by the governing cult.
In addition to slashing the FEMA work force, the cultists are defying the law (no surpriser there). According to the reform act passed by Congress after Katrina, top FEMA administrators must have a “demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management.” But Trump’s current acting FEMA head, David Richardson, has no experience in emergency management - as evidenced in June, when he told FEMA employees that he didn’t know the United States had a hurricane season. (You read that right.)
The reform act also barred FEMA’s overseer, the Homeland Security Department, from meddling with FEMA’s “authorities, responsibilities, and functions.” But Trump toady Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary, has been meddling anyway, big time, by delaying FEMA contracts and slowing FEMA’s response to the aforementioned Texas floods. Meanwhile, the Trump team swiped some of FEMA’s money and used it to build “Alligator Alcatraz.” The team also commanded FEMA to scrub, from its documents, various mentions of climate change.
All told, I shudder to think what will happen when the next inevitable catastrophe — driven by warmer ocean water, courtesy of climate change — decimates a wide swath of the homeland. General Honoré writes plaintively: “Twenty years after Katrina, we need a return to common sense.” But that would require an electorate that hasn’t lost its mind.
Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist, alumni of the Philadelphia Inquirer and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes at DickPolman.substack.com and is distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Email dickpolman7@gmail.com. (Dana Milbank’s column is no longer syndicated.)
