Disasterology: May 2026 The FEMA Review Council Report
This newsletter is a compilation of recent disaster ~things~ that I think are cool, important, or otherwise of interest to people who are intrigued with disaster (broadly defined). There’s a little something for everyone!
Here I am with your weekend reading!
If we all stand very still and don’t make any noise maybe Trump will forget about Cameron Hamilton and let Bob Fenton stay in charge at FEMA. I am serious. We are Emily Blunt in the bathtub scene. Not a single noise or we all get eaten by aliens.
REASONS THIS NEWSLETTER IS ALMOST TWO WEEKS LATE
I took a week off work to chase Icebergs in Newfoundland.
I entered a minor psychosis (not actually but close) from analyzing the FEMA Review Council Report.
I had to re-read the Stafford Act like five times.
I had to plant our entire summer garden, so my luffa has time to grow before it gets too cold. Maine has a short growing season.
I had to call every single person I know in emergency management at least once to ask them if I was misreading the FEMA Review Council Report. They have assured me I am not.
I had to make eight memes for this newsletter as an antidote so y’all getting hit with FEMA Review Council Report psychosis.
THE FEMA REVIEW COUNCIL REPORT
We finally got our hot little hands on the actual FEMA Review Council Report.
Whoa baby!
I have written a lengthy analysis of the 10 recommendations made by the Council on my blog. It was way, way, way too long to be a newsletter. The big challenge is that the recommendations themselves are so lacking in detail that understanding the Council’s intention is difficult. Lucky for you, writing coherent analysis of incoherent emergency management policy ideas has become a specialty of mine!
The Quick Summary:
The FEMA Review Council has proposed recommendations that would force unfunded mandates on state and local emergency management agencies. They have recommended slashing the amount of aid individuals are eligible to receive post-disaster by tens of thousands of dollars. They have deepened, and introduced new forms, of racial and class discrimination into recovery aid. They have outlined a timeline for post-disaster mitigation and recovery that even our best emergency management agencies will likely be unable to achieve. They are setting state emergency management agencies up to fail and leaving local emergency management agencies without a support system. They have recommended a stunningly regressive formula for determining public assistance that ignores not only social vulnerability but physical vulnerability as well. They have included handouts to private insurance companies while recommending policies to make it more difficult for individuals to find affordable and reliable flood insurance. They have laid the groundwork for mass firings of FEMA staff. They ultimately believe that fewer communities, and fewer survivors, should receive less help during and post-disaster.
I approached the analysis similarly to my Project 2025 analysis: I review each recommendation and talk through some of the potential consequences if implemented. I also provide additional context for each recommendation - why might the Council have included this? Where did this idea originate? Is this idea actually a solution to the identified problem, and such. I also found myself diving much deeper into the politics of certain recommendations. There is a lot of sub-text in this report. If you are not someone immersed in day-to-day emergency management policy and politics, you’d miss a lot.
I hope this analysis will be particularly useful to emergency managers who are looking to understand how these recommendations could affect them if they were ever implemented. It is also helpful for lawmakers, advocacy organizations, journalists, students, and anyone else involved in emergency management policy work.
You should send this analysis to your boss and post it on LinkedIn! I heard there was a lot of confusion and AI summaries about the Council’s report over there! Is AI going to catch the Evangelical Christian sub-text they might have slipped in two vague sentences of a 74 page report. Not a chance.
The good news is that the majority of the Council’s recommendations would require Congressional action. They would have to take a red pen to the Stafford Act. There appears to be very little interest in Congress to do this. However, there are recommendations that the administration could implement immediately. A big one would be changes to how Presidential Disaster Declarations are decided (see Recommendation 3). I will also point out some of these recommendations have already, in a part, been implemented. The big example here is the staff reductions at FEMA (see Recommendation 10). Regardless of if more cuts come, there have already been substantial cuts!
I think if you skim quickly through the report and don’t think too deeply about what is being recommended, how these policies would be implemented, and what the outcomes would be then it might not seem so bad. For example, I have seen a lot of excitement that the recommendation of cutting 50% of FEMA’s staff was removed from the final draft (it had been included in a leaked version). Y’all? All the Council changed was removing a specific percentage. They still call for staff reductions. If the report’s recommendations were implemented, probably about 50% of FEMA’s staff would be cut. We all need to keep our critical thinking caps on at all times.
It makes me think people have not fully thought through what the Council wrote — and what they didn’t write. This is how you get emergency management leaders shrugging this off on LinkedIn. I took a different approach. I spent a month going through every word of this thing. I pulled out the fine tooth comb. I consulted with people who might know more than me about why a certain recommendation was included. I talked through the implications of these recommendations with other emergency management experts. I ran some of the recommendations by my students to see what they thought. I did some math to test the Council’s new formulas for programs like Individual Assistance (see Recommendation 5). I did a lot of googling and a lot of google scholaring. I revisited GAO and CRS reports. I pulled up FEMA OpenSource data sets to check their work. I still am planning on submitting at least one FOIA related to this thing.
The more I dug into the recommendations, the more horrified I became by what was being suggested. (Read my analysis of Recommendation 5 for what I think is the best example of, “wait a damn minute, they want to do WHAT?!”)
The most generous reading is that the Council put together a bunch of half-baked ideas. There are basic errors in here like the claim that we have a “National Preparedness Framework” and the misuse of terms like “emergency housing”. The Council had a year and a half to write this and access to all of the emergency management experts in the country and this is what they produced? It is embarrassing.
A less generous reading, and one I think to be more likely, is that this report reflects the beliefs of the largely republican Council. It aligns much more closely with the recommendations in Project 2025 than it does with the bipartisan FEMA bill in the House. In that sense, I fear this is meant to be a serious effort to reform emergency management.
These recommendations are not representative of the beliefs of most people in emergency management. This is not surprising because the Review Council is not representative of the field or the country. These recommendations do not address the very real problems with our emergency management system. They don’t even address the problems that the Council found in their survey and public calls! This was a political exercise, something that jumps off the page more and more as you read.
Still, I believe putting in the effort of analyzing these recommendations (and it has been a BIG effort) is necessary because of how consequential the changes would be to the nation’s risk and disaster survivors, if implemented. Almost every recommendation from the Council feels like a political non-starter for republican governors (they have proven to have the most sway here). However, as any good student of disaster history knows, ideas that are sitting around have a way of becoming law when focusing events open a policy window. There should be an independent analysis available to the public to help people understand where these ideas came from and what they could mean for all of us if implemented.
The FEMA Review Council was not brave enough to recommend abolishing FEMA but there is still a cruelty that runs through their report. This is not a vision for an emergency management system that is more effective, efficient, and equitable. It is not a vision for a system that helps the people who need it most. It makes me enormously sad, and extraordinarily angry. We have to do better than this.
I am not willing to accept an emergency management system that is anything less than we are capable of creating.
If you already opened the link to my analysis you will have seen that it is annoyingly long. I get that. I really do. I hope you read it anyway because this affects all of us.
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Okay, now that all the boring policy people are gone, let’s gossip.
Guys, wtf.
Why does the FEMA Council Report include an acrostic poem?
I am so serious. I want answers. I write a silly little newsletter and even I would not stoop so low as to include an acrostic poem. A sonnet? Sure! A haiku? Hell, yea! But an acrostic? These are not serious people!!
Where is my New York Times Alert: PRESIDENT’S FEMA COUNCIL WRITES POETRY INSTEAD OF RECOMMENDING HELPFUL REFORM.
And you people thought the Trump administration didn’t support the arts! Amanda Gorman could (would) never.
ProPublica, you up? INVESTIGATE THIS!! Who is this for? The President? I have been told he does not read. WHO DID THIS?
Me for the past month:
I feel like I need an exorcism.
Actually, you know what? I am not the problem here. Everyone on the FEMA Review Council needs an exorcism.
You get one life on this earth. Why spend it trying to take away what minimal help people get in a disaster? Do they think they will personally pay less in taxes because a single mother in rural Texas gets $30,000 less after a flood destroys her home? Have they seen our military budget?! You think you’re getting a tax break? Do they think they are going to show up to the pearly gates and St. Peter is going to be like “Hey buddy, yeah, come on into heaven! Great job preventing Lake Charles and Swannanoa from getting the money they needed to repave their roads!” Like, HELLO?
I dove deep into meme making as a coping strategy. I have created a little “shot”, “chaser” game for y’all. Go read about each recommendation in my Very Serious Analysis (shot) and then come back here to see my Much Less Serious Meme (chaser).
Recommendations 1, 2, 9, and 10.
This report could have been 7 recommendations but I guess 10 just sounded better.
Recommendation 3
Don’t think we don’t see y’all stealing Fugate’s fave recommendation. lol
Recommendation 4
Reforming emergency management by just making the states do everything that FEMA was doing is actually a little funny but in a very bad way.
Recommendation 5
Bernie Sanders showed up in my living room yelling, “MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES”!!!
Recommendation 6
I am 100% sure they are going to try and use AI to do this and my head will do a full 360 swivel.
Recommendation 7
NFIP is GREAT if you think about it as just being a recovery program. Try it out.
Recommendation 8
We are experiencing more frequent disasters that affect a greater number of people at a time when things cost more and no one can figure out why FEMA is spending more money.
TITANIQUE
In April I stood in the lobby of the St. James Theater debating over spending $70 on sweatshirt that read “Iceberg Bitch” in glittered lettering. Was this a reasonable use of money? Weeks later as I was hunting for icebergs in Newfoundland, I found my answer.
If you see Titanique, which is now a Tony nominated show on Broadway, you too will have the opportunity to own an Iceberg Bitch sweatshirt. I first saw Titanique last year when it was still off Broadway (humble brag) and I was thrilled to get to see it again this year. I would go every weekend if I could. This is a thing with this show. When you arrive, everyone asks you how many times you have seen it. I am embarrassed to have only been twice. Some people have been a dozen times! Perhaps I am uncultured, but I always thought you saw any given Broadway show one time. Perhaps all the others were just not worth seeing more than once.
Titanique is a queering of James Cameron’s Titanic told from the perspective of Celine Dion who, it is revealed, is actually 150 years old and a survivor of the Titanic. This is the perfect concept for a disaster musical. A real shift in tone from the last disaster musical I saw – Come From Away (speaking of Newfoundland! Passed right by Gander on the way to the Icebergs). A bit of a tearjerker.
I teach Titanic in my Disaster Film course. I am a former Titanic Kid. I remember vividly seeing Titanic in theaters when I was seven. I have been to the Pigeon Forge museum, Molly Brown’s house in Denver, and the big Titanic museum in Belfast. Incidentally, on our way to the Icebergs, we stopped in Halifax to visit the graves of many Titanic victims. A career highlight was being in a National Geographic Titanic Documentary (they asked me to fly all the way to Ohio to be in it and I immediately rearranged by schedule without hesitation to make it happen).
I also am very sick of hearing about the Titanic. My god. We’ve really analyzed this thing as much as anything can be analyzed. We really have to let this one rest. There cannot be much else to say. It’s been over a century!!!! Or so I thought!
Titanique is a whole new iteration of the world’s most famous disaster. I am the biggest critic of disaster commentary so when I tell you this is fresh, funny, and blistering, I hope you take me seriously!
You absolutely must see Titanique. Move mountains to see it. If you cannot make it to New York City or London, they are touring next year.
The End Bits
It’d be cool if you forwarded this newsletter to your friends, post it on social media, or undertake any other form of newsletter sharing you deem appropriate. I’ve heard some of you print out the memes to hang in your emergency management offices! Incredible.
In case you signed up for this newsletter without knowing who I am (a bold choice!), you can listen to this interview with me on Ologies. If you really want to dive in, you can read my book Disasterology: Dispatches From The Frontlines of The Climate Crisis to catch up (here’s a USA Today review). You can order it here and get it as an audiobook here.
Other places to find me: Blog. BlueSky. Instagram. TikTok.
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You’re funny, but what they’re doing to Emergency Management is not! Thank you so much for your thorough analysis. I hope all professionals in the field take the time to review and understand this.