Interesting how many people here think he’s cutting funds to states. He said it will come, not through fema, from his admin directly and go to religious orgs to distribute as they see fit. It’s a much bigger agenda.
And if payment from FEMA only comes as a disaster response, how will they scale up their ability to respond to said disasters before they happen? Who pays for the training, for the staff, for the resource stockpiles?
I lived in a county where the part-time EM Director (he had an unrelated full-time job) was also the 911 addressing coordinator and the floodplain manager. He received a small stipend for his duties and gave half of it to his deputy, who was also Chief of the volunteer fire dept and a part-time EMT.
If the general public truly understood the weight that these folks hoist upon their shoulders for pennies, they'd be horrified at the idea of just leaving it up to states to manage.
Sorry, read that as emergency management agencies for small states, not the size of emergency management agencies for states. Yes, the agencies are small. Maybe because those in power don't think that they will be needed as that sort of thing doesn't happen to us.
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And the same is true — even more so — for most local emergency management agencies.
Politicians come and go, but climate is forever.
In the conversation around eliminating FEMA, all I’m hearing about is response. What about recovery and mitigation? Will they cease to exist?
(The team at OU IPPRA has some great recent surveys with county and local EMs - https://doi.org/10.1175/WCAS-D-23-0085.1)