From The Hill: Get rid of FEMA? That would be a disaster

“The trends that brought about the expanded federal disaster role in the 1960s and 1970s have only been exacerbated in the intervening years. Development in risky areas, such as the Florida coastlines, has continued more or less unabated. Katrina, as is now clear, heralded the beginning of two decades of increasingly catastrophic natural disasters.

All of this has put increasing pressure on a federal disaster system that is chronically understaffed and relies on year-to-year funding from Congress that has become partisan on these issues in a way that was simply not the case in the 1970s.”