Hurricane Katrina haunts New Orleans as Trump guts disaster aid

default

Darren McKinney grew up in New Orleans’s Lower Ninth Ward. When Hurricane Katrina struck 20 years ago this week, he watched his neighborhood wash away. From his second floor apartment, he saw flood waters rise up to his window.

“I had no food at all, no water, no electricity,” he recounted one rainy day this month, while taking a break from his job leading home restoration in the neighborhood as field operations director of the non-profit lowernine.org.

After being trapped inside for four days, city officials rescued McKinney in a boat and dropped him off on a nearby bridge. He was told a military truck would bring him to an emergency shelter in the city’s superdome, but a vehicle never arrived because the shelter reached capacity. He was forced to walk to an evacuation point downtown.

“You had to fend for yourself,” he said. “There just wasn’t enough shelter, wasn’t enough support.”

Friends helped McKinney evacuate to Houston, Texas. Months later, when he returned to the city, he found his home in “real bad condition”. He eventually settled into a trailer provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).

During his stay in the temporary home, he began to hear news reports that some Fema trailers were found to have high levels of the harmful chemical formaldehyde. With nowhere else to stay, he tried to ignore those reports.

“What could you do?” he asked.

The federal response to Katrina, particularly by Fema, came under intense scrutiny after the hurricane, which killed at least 1,833 people. In New Orleans, residents spray-painted curses at Fema on their boarded-up homes and wore T-shirts around the city that bore the slogan: “FEMA – Federal Employees Missing in Action.”

Some on the right have called to shrink the agency or even abolish it. In recent months, the Trump administration has picked up on those calls, defunding key Fema programs, laying off hundreds of staffers, and threatening to dismantle the agency completely. But McKinney believes the administration’s policies will leave New Orleans worse prepared for future hurricanes.

“You don’t know when you’re gonna have another disaster like that,” he said. “For people that don’t have money, without Fema, how you going to help them out?”

In recent weeks, Donald Trump has walked back promises to abolish Fema. But disaster management experts fear the changes he has made will still leave the US just as underprepared to take on a hurricane like Katrina as it was in 2005.

“It has been so demoralizing to realize how closely aligned we have become again to what Fema looked like pre-Katrina, and how quickly we’ve backslid on the progress of the last 20 years,” said Samantha Montano, a disaster response expert at Massachusetts Maritime Academy and author of the book Disasterology.

Interactive

‘State-led, federally supported’

Since re-entering the White House in January, Trump has repeatedly called for states to bear more responsibility for disasters, signing a March executive order saying municipalities should “play a more active and significant role” in national resilience and preparedness.

“If they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be governor,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office in June, as he spoke about a plan to “wean” states off Fema assistance.

But states have always led disaster response, said Craig Fugate, who directed Fema from 2009-2017.

“The current administration says states should lead, we should support, [but] that’s what it’s always been,” he said. “The federal government, at the direction of the president, through Fema, supports the governor.”

Cuts at Fema could have particularly negative implications for poor, climate-vulnerable states like Louisiana, which received the most direct assistance from Fema between January 2015 and April 2024, according to data collected for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Disaster Dollar Database.

Interactive

“For states that are oftentimes underresourced, Fema gives the support that is needed to navigate disasters, both in the form of financial assistance and providing technical expertise,” said Reggie Ferreira, who directs the disaster resilience leadership academy at Tulane University in New Orleans.

But even wealthier states will probably struggle to weather disasters without the agency’s support, said Montano.

“The importance of Fema really just can’t be overstated. They’re the last line of defense that we really have in moments of crisis,” she said. “We know that our state and local capacity to respond to disasters in most parts of the country is relatively limited. And we know that our needs related to disasters are increasing in the context of climate change.”

‘Brain drain’

After Katrina struck New Orleans in August 2005, the support Fema was able to provide had dwindled due to policies enacted by former president George W Bush.

“When Katrina happened, it’s really important to remember that Fema had just gone through a shock of their own,” said Montano. “Going into Katrina, Fema was deeply unprepared as an agency, which is a huge reason for the failure in the response.”

In the wake of the 2001 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration launched a government-wide reorganization to focus on the threat of terrorism, cutting disaster programs and, in 2003, stripping Fema of its independent, cabinet-level status. The agency was then absorbed into the newly created Department of Homeland Security.

“The attention was only on terrorism at the expense of anything else,” said Fugate.

The shifts at Fema led to a mass exodus of staff. Some – including senior leadership – were relieved of their duties and reassigned to terrorism-related posts, while others who were reportedly frustrated with the restructure resigned.

That “brain drain” was a key reason that Fema was not able to provide an adequate response to Katrina, said Montano.

Interactive

Fugate said what is happening at the agency today is “very similar” to that moment. Under Trump, an estimated one-third of Fema’s workforce has been eliminated due to layoffs, firings and voluntary buyouts.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has also reportedly sent some remaining Fema staff to help speed the hiring of immigration enforcement agents. Lt Gen Russel Honoré, who led the military response to Hurricane Katrina, had choice words about the decision. “That adds insult to injury,” he said. “I really think these fucking people are stuck on stupid.”

The staffing cuts threaten the relationships between state and federal officials, said Stephen Murphy, former planning section chief for New Orleans’s homeland security and emergency preparedness office. That could make disaster response less efficient.

“When you have a strong team, a network, everybody has built trust in one another because they’ve been out there together, they’ve bled for one another,” said Murphy, who now leads Tulane University’s disaster management program. “When you disrupt that, you’re playing with fire.”

The federal changes are difficult to witness, said Murphy, who said Katrina inspired his career in disaster response. When it struck, he had moved to New Orleans only six weeks earlier to pursue a graduate degree in emergency and security, expecting to focus primarily on the threat of terrorism. Classes had not even started when, as Katrina was gaining strength over the Gulf of Mexico, he decided to evacuate his new home.

“As I was pulling out of my neighborhood, some new friends that I’d met in town said: ‘Hey, where are you going? We’re going to have a party,’” he remembered from his New Orleans office. “I had my kayak in my truck, and I asked: ‘OK, you want me to leave this for you?’ I didn’t realize how terrible a joke that would be.”

In its aftermath, Murphy decided to devote his life to better managing disasters like Katrina, as did many others in the field.

“There’s been tremendous improvements and growth since then,” said Murphy. “To dismantle a lot of what has been done does feel like a little bit of a gut punch.”

Cutting funding, undercutting progress

After Katrina, Fema also increased funding for disaster relief and mitigation. But under Trump, billions of those dollars have dried up.

“A lot of the federal grants and money that helped fortify some of the most vulnerable areas, including New Orleans, are getting clawed back,” said Murphy. “You can’t just turn the spigot off and expect the system to still work.”

Some of the Trump administration’s actions at Fema directly violate policies enacted by lawmakers to prevent future botched disaster responses, said Honoré. That includes the president’s January appointment of a new administrator for the agency.

The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which Congress passed in 2006, requires all Fema administrators to have experience in disaster management. The provision was inspired by Bush’s Fema administrator Michael Brown, who was critiqued for his limited background in the field.

In the 19 years since the bill’s passage, only “seasoned emergency managers” have succeeded Brown, said Honoré. But that all changed when Trump picked David Richardson – who appears to have no disaster management experience – for the post, he said.

Before leading Fema, Richardson oversaw a Department of Homeland Security program focused on weapons of mass destruction. In a June briefing, Richardson told personnel he was unaware that the US had a hurricane season, which the White House later said was a “joke”.

The 2006 policy also empowered Fema to act with greater flexibility and clearer authority in emergency management, and designated its administrator as a principal presidential adviser. Trump does not appear to be following those provisions, Honoré said.

As deadly floods overwhelmed Texas last month, Fema officials told CNN they were not able to pre-position search and rescue crews in the region because Trump’s homeland security secretary Kristi Noem insisted upon personally approving all agency contracts and grants over $100,000 before funds were disbursed.

“Genius,” Honoré said sarcastically.

This week, Fema employees wrote to Congress warning that the Trump administration’s changes at the agency could lead to another “catastrophe” on the scale of Hurricane Katrina. “The agency’s current trajectory reflects a clear departure from the intent” of the 2006 legislation,” they wrote.

Daniel Llargués, Fema’s acting press secretary, dismissed the criticisms voiced in the letter telling the New York Times the Trump administration “is committed to ensuring Fema delivers for the American people” and to cutting “red tape, inefficiency and outdated processes” in the agency. Fema did not respond to questions from the Guardian for this article.

Equity threatened

In the absence of federal support after Katrina, many advocacy groups worked to fill the gaps, particularly in the low-income communities of color that found it disproportionately difficult to rebuild.

Even those non-governmental efforts have been undermined by Trump’s policies, said McKinney, the field operations director of lowernine.org.

The organization has for years hosted international volunteers, but fewer want to travel to the US amid Trump’s immigration crackdown, he said.

In May, the president also gutted AmeriCorps, leaving lowernine.org with fewer hands to help with their home construction efforts.

“They cut the AmeriCorps funding [one] afternoon in the middle of a workday,” said Laura Paul, executive director of lowernine.org. “Our team had just taken a wall down on someone’s house that they were living in, and they just put their tools down and walked off site.”

Trump has also ended grants to some environmental justice groups, including in New Orleans, further threatening efforts to promote equitable disaster recovery, while gutting Biden-era equity-focused government initiatives, including within Fema.

“Fema, obviously, was not perfect in any way after Katrina,” said Montano. “But a lot of the progress on equity is just gone.”

‘More support, more help’

The scrutiny federal disaster response has received since Katrina is warranted, but Trump has moved in the wrong direction, said Betina James, a resident of New Orleans’s Hollygrove neighborhood.

“We want more support, more help, not for them to take all that help away,” she said.

From a senior citizens community meeting at the Hollygrove-Dixon Neighborhood Association’s Life Transformation Community Center this month, James recounted her experience after Katrina destroyed her house: Fema denied her request for a temporary shelter for two months, and when they finally approved it, the agency provided her with a trailer that had “no floor in the bedroom”.

“It was just covered with carpet with nothing under it, so if you stepped on it, you’d go straight through to the ground,” she said.

Officials provided a replacement, but living in it made her feel nauseated with burning eyes and itchy skin. She believes it was contaminated.

At the senior citizens meeting, a dozen other residents chimed in with their harrowing Katrina experiences: stepping over human corpses in the streets and being left without shelter and financial aid. Some said they have even failed to receive adequate assistance during more recent disasters such as 2021’s Hurricane Ida.

But those experiences should push officials to improve Fema, not gut it, said Terry Caesar, another senior attending the meeting.

“It used to be when things broke, we took it to the shop to fix it,” he said. “You’re not supposed to throw it out.”