Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana 20 years ago this week. The storm killed more than 1,300 people and displaced tens of thousands more.
In the years since Katrina, a slew of studies and government reports have found that most of the deaths and much of the destruction could have been avoided. Levees built and maintained by the federal government collapsed during and after the storm, causing massive flooding in New Orleans. Local, state and federal officials struggled to evacuate, rescue and house people as the disaster unfolded in the hardest-hit parts of Louisiana and Mississippi.
It was immediately clear that the government had failed. Then-President George W. Bush acknowledged as much in a speech in New Orleans three weeks after the storm: "The system, at every level of government, was not well-coordinated and was overwhelmed in the first few days," Bush said.
"Katrina was a catastrophic government failure by every measure," says Andy Horowitz, a historian and expert on the Gulf Coast who wrote a book about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
One agency became the public face of the botched response: the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
As the country's top disaster response agency, FEMA is charged with responding to disasters that overwhelm the capabilities of local and state governments. The agency is supposed to coordinate search and rescue efforts, emergency shelters, mass evacuation and debris removal after disasters like Katrina. But it took days for federal help to arrive in New Orleans, as survivors sat stranded on the roofs of their inundated homes or walked through chest-high water with elderly people and young children, trying to get to safety.
Two weeks after the storm made landfall, then FEMA-director Michael Brown resigned.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, some saw FEMA as irredeemably broken. There was a bipartisan effort in Congress to dismantle the agency altogether and replace it with a new emergency office. But in 2006, Congress instead chose to strengthen and expand the agency. FEMA was given more money and power to respond to major disasters faster. And Congress required that FEMA's leader be a disaster expert.
Now, the Trump administration is reversing some of those reforms, as it cuts billions of dollars from disaster preparedness programs and even considers eliminating FEMA altogether. The administration says it is eliminating wasteful federal spending and giving states more responsibility to respond to major disasters.
In a letter to Congress this week, 181 current and former FEMA employees warned that the Trump administration has undercut the agency's readiness to respond to large-scale disasters like Katrina.
But the Trump administration says federal disaster responses have been chronically slow and inadequate, and FEMA must be reformed.
"It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform," wrote Daniel Llargués, FEMA's acting press secretary, in a statement to NPR. "Change is always hard. It is especially for those invested in the status quo. But our obligation is to survivors, not to protecting broken systems."
Here are three key changes FEMA made after Hurricane Katrina — changes that face an uncertain future under the Trump administration.
Post-Katrina change No. 1: FEMA's leader must be an emergency expert
One of the biggest reforms to FEMA after Hurricane Katrina was a new requirement from Congress that the agency's leader have emergency management experience.
That change was a direct response to FEMA's leadership during Katrina: then-Administrator Michael Brown had no professional background managing disasters. A college friend of President George W. Bush's campaign manager, Brown was a lawyer and former commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Administration before taking over FEMA.
Every FEMA administrator since has been a trained emergency manager, says Chauncia Willis-Johnson, founder of the Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management and herself a former emergency manager in Tampa. "Katrina was a wake-up call," she says.
The agency saw an influx of new talent after Congress started requiring that the top job be occupied by someone with relevant experience, Willis-Johnson says: "FEMA took up that charge and brought in the best people, brought in the best administrators, got the most qualified [people]."
FEMA's current acting administrator is an outlier. David Richardson, who took over the agency in May, previously ran a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office dedicated to weapons of mass destruction and has no emergency management experience. His predecessor, who served for the first few months of the Trump administration, did have some emergency management experience. He was fired after telling Congress he did not think it was in the best interests of the American people for FEMA to be eliminated.
Since Trump took office in January, there has been an exodus of top officials from FEMA, including the head of the agency's crucial disaster response coordination office.
The instability at FEMA is reminiscent of what was happening in the lead-up to Hurricane Katrina, says Craig Fugate, who ran FEMA from 2009 to 2017. The agency then saw a lot of employee turnover under an inexperienced leader. "The biggest challenges that FEMA is facing today are not dissimilar to what was occurring in the summer of 2005," he warns.
Post-Katrina change No. 2: FEMA can act faster
The influx of emergency management expertise into FEMA in the years after Katrina led to other sweeping changes at the agency, Fugate says.
Fugate was an emergency manager in Florida before he took over FEMA and brought lessons from his time working in the most hurricane-prone state in the country.
One of the changes he prioritized was getting help to states more quickly. State and local governments take the lead after disasters, as local police and firefighters work with city and state agencies to evacuate and rescue people, clear debris from roads and connect displaced residents to food and shelter. FEMA's job is to step in when a disaster is too big for a state to handle on its own.
After Katrina, Congress gave the president and FEMA administrator authority to move resources to an area even before a storm arrived and before local officials ask for assistance. "FEMA doesn't have to wait for the governor to make a formal request. If the president decides that there's a need, you can do it," Fugate says.
For example, search and rescue teams and staff to coordinate shelters for displaced people can be sent to the region early, so survivors don't have to wait hours or days for help.
That change allowed FEMA to support states better and save lives, Fugate says.
"Time is the most precious resource," he says.
Under the Trump administration, help has often been slow to arrive. It took weeks for President Trump to approve assistance for people affected by tornadoes that hit Missouri in May, leading Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., to accuse the administration of "slow-walking" aid.
After flash floods hit central Texas on July 4, it took days for FEMA search and rescue teams to arrive. The agency's search and rescue chief resigned in protest, CNN reported.
In the wake of that disaster, FEMA failed to staff its hotline for survivors seeking help, leading to more than 40,000 calls from survivors going unanswered.
FEMA's staffing problems appear to have been caused by a new policy under DHS Secretary Kristi Noem that requires that she personally sign off on all expenditures of $100,000 or more. FEMA is part of DHS.
In an email to NPR, a FEMA spokesperson defended its staffing of call centers and wrote that "no one was left without assistance" after the Texas floods. FEMA did not respond to questions from NPR about why the response to the Texas floods was slow, or why Noem instituted the spending review policy.
But Noem has repeatedly said that FEMA should take a smaller role after disasters. "We all know from the past that FEMA has failed thousands, if not millions, of people," she said at a press conference at the White House in June. "This agency fundamentally needs to go away as it exists, and we need to have a response to states that supports them."
Previous FEMA leaders disagree. "This is taking us backwards," says Deanne Criswell, who ran FEMA under the Biden administration. "You have this added layer of administrative burden at a time when you need to be as agile as you can to help the American people."
Post-Katrina change No. 3: FEMA helps communities prepare before disasters
One of the big takeaways from emergency experts after Hurricane Katrina was that the most effective way to save lives and prevent damage is to prepare for disasters before they happen.
Hurricanes are a part of life on the Gulf Coast. Storms can't be avoided. Keeping people safe requires work in advance, such as upgrading flood-control infrastructure and making evacuation plans that account for everyone.
In the two decades since Katrina, FEMA expanded its role helping cities, tribes and counties prepare for disasters, not just recover from them.
In 2018, Congress passed the biggest set of FEMA reforms since 2006. It created a special fund to pay for disaster preparedness projects all over the country, including flood walls, wildfire protections and tornado warning systems. President Trump, then in his first term, signed the bill into law.
Under the Biden administration, FEMA dramatically increased funding available for disaster preparedness and awarded money for a wider range of projects.
The shift makes financial sense, experts say. It costs far less to upgrade infrastructure beforehand than to pay for damage later. And disasters are guaranteed to happen, especially as climate change makes severe weather events more common across the U.S.
But the Trump administration argues that such federal spending is wasteful. In April, the administration eliminated the main FEMA program for disaster preparedness grants and canceled billions of dollars that had already been promised to local governments.
Willis-Johnson says the changes will lead to unnecessary suffering after disasters.
"It makes me very frightened," she says. "You're just going to throw out all the work that's been done?"
Edited by Rachel Waldholz
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