The Federal Emergency Management Agency appears to be on life support.

According to recent news reports, Trump administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and acting administrator Cameron Hamilton, are poised to act on President Trump’s desire to drastically reduce the federal government’s role in responding to disasters and to downsize or eliminate FEMA altogether.

This comes on the heels of the administration attempting to freeze over $100 billion in payments FEMA had promised to states for rebuilding and increasing disaster resiliency after Hurricane Helene, and for responding to the California wildfires and other disasters last year.

Eradicating or gutting FEMA would be a disaster. The fact that the conversation is happening at all underscores that we are in a far different era of the politics of disaster than the one that FEMA emerged from during the 1960s and 1970s.

FEMA itself has become shorthand for the larger policy shift of that era, where states, localities and nongovernmental agencies such as the American Red Cross were shuddering under the burden of increasingly costly disasters such as the Alaska........

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