BROOKE: From WNYC in New York this is On the Media, I’m Brooke Gladstone. 

 

MICAH: And I’m Micah Loewinger.

 

BROOKE: Micah this is the week!

 

MICAH: Yeah!

 

BROOKE: The first episode of a brand new 4-part series that you and OTM Senior Producer Eloise Blondiau have been reporting out for months. It’s about the Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA and there is a ton of stuff in here that people won’t have heard before. I’m excited. Let’s do it!

 

MICAH: Ok thanks Brooke. Hope ya like it :)

 

Trump: We've come to North Carolina with a simple message for all the people of this region who were hit so hard by Hurricane Helene.

At the beginning of his second term, amid all the chaos of the incoming administration, President Trump made his first trip to North Carolina.

That message is very simple. You are not forgotten any longer. You were treated very badly by the previous administration. 

Before he got on Air Force One, Trump called a press conference on the tarmac, and casually dropped this bomb…

Trump: I'll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency. The agency that stands between America and climate destruction… 

Trump: I think frankly, FEMA's not good.

The agency that helps people rebuild after they’ve lost everything. The agency that, while he was rambling, was providing aid to Californians suffering through the historic LA wildfires, as well as Helene survivors right there in North Carolina. It seemed like, with a snap of his fingers, the president would be happy to see FEMA vanish…

Trump: I think we're gonna recommend that FEMA go away.

I learned that employees at FEMA broke down in tears when they heard the news. Some replayed the president’s speech over and over. Anxious members of Congress spent the day calling into the agency's headquarters with a barrage of questions: Is the President serious? What happens when the next hurricane hits?

CNN: If the president came to you and said, you're my DHS secretary. Do you think I should get rid of FEMA, what would you say? 

Kristi Noem: I would say yes, get rid of FEMA the way it exists today.

Kristi Noem, former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. 

Kristi Noem: It has, um, been slow to respond at the federal level. And that is why this entire agency. Needs to be eliminated as it exists today

Before she got the boot this spring Noem effectively set fire to FEMA. Preparedness programs were slashed.  Unqualified leaders cycled in and out. Billions meant for survivors of storms, wildfires, and earthquakes were withheld or denied. Lives hung in the balance.

Archival News Anchor: The death toll in Texas, the flooding tragedy, it's up to 104 dead across six counties. That number includes nearly 30 children

After deadly floodwaters inundated Camp Mystic and other parts of central Texas, on July 4th last year, The agency’s support lines left thousands of calls unanswered. FEMA’s top leader at the time couldn’t be reached for 24 hours. 

911 call: We live about a mile down the road from Camp Mystic, and we've already got two little girls who have come down the river and we've gotten to them, but I'm not sure how many else are out there.

News Tape: ...the federal response to this disaster has come under scrutiny. Allegations that FEMA cutbacks meant delays in answering people's calls for disaster assistance and aid after the flood.

In one telling, the dysfunctional response was DOGE’s doing. It’s true, at the start of 2025, no agency was safe from Elon Musk’s chainsaw. But that's only part of the story. For many years, fomenting under the surface, was a deep-seated distrust of FEMA, which broke through during Hurricane Helene, just months before the 2024 presidential election.

Trump: Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars.On housing for illegal migrants,

MSNBC: Some on the right pushing conspiracy theories that FEMA has spent all of its money on immigration, on services for migrants that they're blocking aid and, uh, seizing land from people here in North Carolina. And that is not true.

Brianna Sacks: there were, about a dozen militia extremist right wing groups who had come into the area offering supplies and. Tagging themselves as doing what the federal government wasn't doing.

News Anchor: an anti-government militia group known as Veterans on Patrol is claiming Hurricane Helene was caused by government controlled weather weapons. The group called Hurricane Helene an act of war.

I knew from my years reporting on far-right militias, that these groups often showed up after natural disasters to recruit, fundraise, and spit-shine their public image. But, I never understood why they hated FEMA so much. So I started digging into right-wing media archives, and found that the anti-FEMA lore went back decades...

Alex Jones: People are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps, to the new world order, to the troops on the streets.

Alex Jones has made multiple films claiming to have discovered secret prisons operated by FEMA… And right wing pundit Glenn Beck entertained this stuff when he was still on Fox...

Glenn Beck: If you have any kind of fear that we might be headed towards a totalitarian state, buckle up. There's something going on in our country that is. Ain't good.

Over time these paranoias seeped into the waters of mainstream culture.

The X Files: You familiar with what the federal emergency management agency's real power is?

It was a major plot point in the X Files.

FEMA allows a White House to suspend constitutional government upon declaration of a national emergency. Think about that. 

Even with Kristi Noem replaced at DHS by Republican senator Markwayne Mullin, the future of FEMA is still in jeopardy. This week – the administration announced that it was patching up some of the Noem-era cuts. But agency insiders say it may take years to build FEMA back up to fighting strength. About a month ago, Trump repeated his antipathy for the agency. 

Trump: I've never been a big fan of FEMA…I like to keep it local, I like to see governors and neighboring states help each other as opposed to FEMA.

As I've followed the current-day crisis at FEMA, I've wondered whether it can survive the stories that have been told about it: the misinformation, mismanagement, and genuine catastrophes that have made this agency one of the least popular among Americans. But for all its faults, and there are many, it's not clear we can afford to lose it...

News Tape: extreme weather leaving so many across the United States wondering when they'll get a break.

News Tape: In July alone there were five 1000 year flood events.

News Tape: Extreme heat is becoming a dangerous new normal.

News Tape: The record setting storm measured not in inches, but in feet of snow. Hundreds of thousands are now without power in this freezing weather

News Tape: The US is experiencing a billion dollar disaster every 10 days on average compared to every 82 back in the 1980s.

Over the next few weeks, we'll explore how the organization tasked with saving America came to be so despised and mythologized, for a series we're calling American Emergency: the Movement to Kill FEMA. We'll hear about FEMA’s identity crisis during Hurricane Katrina. How conspiracy theories have fueled violent threats against federal workers. And how a group of anonymous employees are fighting to keep the agency alive under Trump. For this first episode, we’re looking at FEMA's secretive origins, and the moment when Americans first learned that the agency was hiding things from us....

—--

On December 1, 1974, heavy rain and fog rerouted a passenger plane over northern Virginia, some fifty miles from Washington D.C. 

[plane radio crackle/ storm sounds]

On its descent, the aircraft dropped into the forest below, shearing off the treetops and crashing into the side of Mount Weather. 

The two pilots were killed first, lanced by trees that burst through the cockpit. The rest of the aircraft crumbled into pieces, a mangle of shrapnel and the body parts of the 92 passengers and crew members. There were no survivors. 

One woman, whose parents were on the flight, said it seemed like the mountain had "jumped up and bit the plane." News coverage of the day quickly turned to the blame game and the miscommunication from air traffic control amidst a violent storm. But our focus is something that was buried in the reports. When TV crews arrived at the crash site they discovered, rather ominously, that Mount Weather had already been sealed off on the orders of Federal security agents.

Archival News Anchor: The quick action was taken because the big jet had landed almost a mile away from a super secret government installation, an underground complex of emergency offices set up for federal officials in the event of nuclear war.

The crash had inadvertently uncovered a tightly guarded Cold War secret: inside Mount Weather was a massive covert facility. And somehow, that undersells it. Through a tunnel that burrows into the mountain, and behind a 34-ton blast door, lies a subterranean Strangelovian lair. A freestanding city with a hospital, a crematorium, an emergency power plant, and even a broadcasting studio. Everything that the White House, and thousands of federal workers, would need to run the country underground while millions melted on the surface. “I expect your people to save our government” -- that’s what President Dwight Eisenhower told the first director of Mount Weather after it was built in 1955.

It's still operated by FEMA today, it's actually being renovated as I speak.

But back in the 1950s, Mount Weather was run by FEMA's predecessor, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, the FCDA, which poured billions into making America nuke-proof. Or at least lulling people into the belief that with enough preparation they might survive atomic hellfire.

FCDA song: Dum dum dum

The FCDA was behind this delightful if slightly morbid PSA, instructing  school children to hide under their desks during bomb drills.

FCDA song: There was a turtle by the name of Bert, and Bert the turtle was very alert. When danger threatened him, he never got hurt. He knew just what to do. He duck and cover, duck and cover.

For adults, the FCDA organized Operation Alert, a series of dramatic exercises, where millions of people acted out the day of their (likely) demise, emptying the streets of America's biggest cities...

Archival news tape: while the sirens wail their grim Warning. Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers scurry for shelter against the attack. Riders and drivers taking cover in a realistic drill for a day, all Americans pray will never come.

Operation Alert was also the first time that Mount Weather saw action.

Archival news tape: As soon as the alert sounded in Washington, president Eisenhower reached for his hat and strode to a waiting limousine to be driven to an emergency base of operations in the mountains outside Washington. Exact location kept secret.

Kept secret until that terrible plane crash in 1974. Fortunately, nuclear obliteration never came and Mount Weather was never truly put to use. 

But there's something ironic, and revealing, that a single storm brought more death and destruction to the base than 30 years of the Cold War. By the 1970s, it had become clear that the nuclear preparations had done little to protect America from an arguably greater threat...

Coming up, if our government could build a secret city, it does kinda make you wonder: what else could they be hiding? This is On the Media.

[break]

This is On the Media, I'm Micah Loewinger. To better understand the current day crisis at FEMA, and why so many Americans believe wild conspiracy theories about it, I wanted to dive back into the era it was created. When state leaders began to realize that all the focus on Cold War civil defense had left them vulnerable to Mother Nature.

Garrett Graff: We just didn't have that many nuclear wars, which is great. but we do have a lot of natural disasters.

Garrett Graff is a journalist and author of a book about the origins of FEMA titled "Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself While the Rest of Us Die." Before the agency was created, America's disaster response system was, well, barely a system... 

Garrett Graff: It didn't make sense for every state to be developing its own totally independent ability to respond to a hurricane because in any given year, most states don't get hit by a hurricane.

Which became a big problem in the 60s and 70s, when the country was rocked by a series of record-breaking disasters...

Archival news tape : no one knows the full size of the disaster yet. In Betsy's wake, there's only darkness, confusion, and death, 

Archival news tape: After suffering one of the most serious earthquakes in history, Alaska had to undergo the further ordeal of over 40 severe earth tremors. Imagine being there as the streets reared up around you, like the scene of some terrible biblical retribution. 

Archival news tape: they called her Camille, born of the sea, she turned like a woman scorned. She screamed and ripped and flooded and killed.  

These big disasters overwhelmed towns and counties, and states -- the big ones often do. But when they asked for help, the federal government was too disorganized to act quickly or efficiently.  Supplying extra ambulances, delivering food and water to survivors, fixing roads and power plants -- each piece of the emergency management process could come from a different office or department; 100 agencies might play a role. Navigating this patchwork of services and jurisdictions was a major pain in the ass for local leaders, especially during a crisis when lives are on the line and every second counts. Like in 1972 when another big storm hit.

Archival news tape: Many of the people here and others in the path of Hurricane Agnes were completely wiped out. Many of them feel that federal aid is too slow and coming and too little.  

Trump says FEMA should return its responsibilities to the states. Which is odd because states often bring in FEMA when they're unable to respond on their own. And anyway, it was the states that asked for FEMA in the first place..... In 1978, the National Governors Association drew up plans for a streamlined, one-stop shop for federal emergency response, and delivered it to a sympathetic White House...

Archival News Anchor: in Washington, president Carter proposed merging five big federal emergency preparation and disaster relief agencies into one agency as part of his reorganization plans.

Archival news tape: Civil defense experts say it will provide much needed communication between the state and federal levels.

In 1979, Jimmy Carter signed an executive order,  giving life to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA was a federal frankenstein with a dual mission: Cold War civil defense and disaster relief. I wish I could illustrate this moment by playing you like a triumphant speech from President Carter or some colorful news footage, but either that stuff never existed or no one thought it was important enough to archive. Even the earliest employees at FEMA were confused about how to talk about it... 

Leo Bosner: we had a new director there and. There was a message that went out to us that said that if we're referring to the agency publicly, we should say either “Federal Emergency Management Agency” or F-E-M-A, because the word FEMA he thought sounded too much like a laxative.

This is Leo Bosner -- a retired FEMA official -- who's taught me a lot about the earliest days of the agency. He was working as a flood insurance specialist with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in one of the offices that was folded into FEMA…

We're all working along in the office and one day they tell us, okay, everybody go down to photo id. You're getting new photo IDs. So we walk down the stairs. Get new photo IDs that say FEMA turned in our photo IDs that say Housing urban development, And then we're all told, we're all getting new job titles. And our new job title is emergency management specialist. And I'm thinking: “What on God's earth is an emergency management specialist like this is the end of my career.”

Leo would spend the next 30 years at FEMA. He eventually found really satisfying work helping hospitals and medical organizations prepare for floods, wildfires, and hurricanes. But less than 2 years after he started getting the hang of his new job, FEMA fell into a decade-long tailspin.

Leo Bosner: The big shift really didn't come until 1980.

Archival news tape: Ronald Reagan appears to be heading toward a landslide electoral victory tonight across the United States 

Leo Bosner: Ronald Reagan got elected president and there's a super U-turn from Jimmy Carter who was mostly all about social welfare and Ronald Reagan was more about national defense

To run FEMA, Reagan picked someone who would stir up a lot of trouble for the agency, this man.. 

Louis Giuffrida: Only a masochist with a death wish would accept the job of directing FEMA.

Army Colonel Louis Giuffrida, speaking here with a caller on Larry King's radio show.

Radio caller: I really don't believe that we can be saved if, if there is nuclear war. I mean, how are you gonna save me if you're blown up too? 

Louis Giuffrida: Yeah. But you're not suggesting that because we both might be blown up by a nuclear war that we shouldn't have in place a system that would take care of us if there was an earthquake or tidal wave or a hurricane or anything of that sort. Are you?

While Louis Giuffrida paid lip service to FEMA's disaster relief mission, he was quietly funneling most of FEMA's budget toward Cold War civil defense. Leo Bosner. 

Leo Bosner: All of a sudden we start seeing all these military officers signing in at the login desk and we’re going, why these military people here, military people'll go to floods or something? And then we learned little by little that FEMA's mission was really, really gonna be to get ready for the big nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.

In the early 80s, Leo started to hear whispers about classified programs at the agency. Everyday on his trip up the elevator at FEMA HQ, he'd ride by a secret fifth floor manned by a security guard. Mostly he rolled his eyes at all the Cold War theater, wishing FEMA would focus more on preparing Americans for natural disasters. But he still wondered, what were they doing in there?

Garrett Graff: The majority of its funding...

Garrett Graff.

 ...and about a third of its workforce was actually hidden in the nation's classified black budget. The special budget that Congress oversees that, protects our most secret programs and capabilities and FEMA on a daily basis is in charge of tracking the whereabouts of everyone in the presidential line of succession, so that in the event of a nuclear war, it knows where all of those people are, how to get them to secure relocation sites like the Mountain Weather Bunker. And who would be best positioned to be the person who takes over as president of the United States in the event of a nuclear war

I wonder if this classified continuity-of-government planning helps explain why there was so little media about FEMA when it was first created. I think the feds just didn't want to draw attention to their secret plans. That said, the coverage did pick up when the agency launched a controversial new initiative; 

Archival news tape: the head of emergency management, Louis Giuffrida says the heart of the proposal is crisis relocation.

Louis Giuffrida: What we wanna accomplish is taking the maximum number of people from high risk areas to areas of lesser risk.

A mass evacuation program.

Garrett Graff: There was sort of this sense of well, if you could just get 20, 30, 50 miles away from a major city. You would at least have a chance to survive the initial blast from the nuclear weapons and then, live into nuclear winter.

Government officials estimated that in the worst case, 60 million Americans could survive an attack. Can you imagine all those urbanites swamping small towns and rural areas? News reports at the time featured a mixture of fascination and incredulity…

Archival news tape: My God, you're gonna have, modified anarchy after that sort of thing. How in the world are you going to coordinate the recovery and putting leadership back into place. How are you gonna do that? 

Garrett Graff: 60 million is still a lot of people, that is the modern population of France. Those people would need a functioning government and functioning infrastructure afterward.

This is where we start getting into the bizarre conspiracy theories that haunt FEMA today. In 1982, in an effort to game out some of these post-apocalyptic scenarios, President Ronald Reagan signed a secret executive order to create a covert program called Project Nine Naught Eight.

Garrett Graff: That's 9 0 8, but they called it nine, naught eight.

It pooled billions of dollars and top officials from the National Security Council, FEMA and the FBI...

Garrett Graff: the FBI was in charge of pre identifying buildings that could serve as refugee camps. 

Micah: If I have this right, basically you had FBI agents working undercover for FEMA, traveling around the country, visiting warehouses, car shops, casinos, Walmarts – helping identify businesses that could be used to house citizens after a nuke was dropped on an American city?

Garrett Graff: Yes. And, often without telling the businesses that they were being scouted for these purposes.

There was, thankfully, never a need to construct these refugee camps. But the secrecy went way deeper and darker… just 5 years after the launch of project nine naught eight, a bombshell report from The Miami Herald revealed that before Giuffrida was asked to help run FEMA, he'd written his masters thesis on how the military could quell race riots by detaining millions of Black people and putting them in concentration camps. Members of Congress were given a copy of his thesis during Giuffrida's confirmation hearings, a horrifying detail that makes me think they considered this to be part of his qualifications for the job. The most damning part of that Miami Herald piece though was news that Giuffrida had worked with Reagan's National Security Council to write plans for declaring martial law and putting the country temporarily under a sort of shadow government -- and not just in the case of a nuke but also in a so-called "national crisis" like a war...

Garrett: A bunch of this comes out in the late 1980s amid the Iran Contra hearings and investigations. It turns out that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who is the central figure at the White House and Iran Contra, was also one of the planners for project 9, 0, 8.

Oliver North was asked about these martial law plans during the Iran-Contra hearings.

Jack Brooks : Colonel North in your work at the NSC. Were you not assigned at one time to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?

North was questioned by Texas Representative Jack Brooks. We see North pause and whisper to his attorney. Then the Chairman of the hearings, Daniel K. Inouye (EN-oh-way), jumps in to respond on the governments’ behalf.

Daniel K. Inouye : I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area. So may I request that you not touch upon that, sir? 

Jack Brooks: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan, a contingency plan that would suspend the American constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was, but I wanted to... 

Daniel K. Inouye: May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage.

[ MUSIC COME UP ]

The government never acknowledged any of this stuff until much of it was declassified years later. Louis Giuffrida ended up resigning from FEMA for  totally unrelated reasons following a Congressional fraud investigation...

Archival news tape: according to Senator Albert Gore, Giuffrida had spent $170,000 of federal money to build a house on federal property for his own use.

By the start of the 90s, FEMA employee Leo Bosner was beyond tired of the dysfunction and the kooky national security schemes.

Leo Bosner: Frankly for me, once that stuff was in the rear view mirror, it's like, fine. That's the trash. I hope they come on Friday and pick it up and dump it to the landfill. There were some pretty nutty people working back there then. Fortunately nothing much ever came of that, except they ate up most of our budget.

He was eager for the agency to shift resources to preparing for floods and hurricanes. But all this doomsday planning had done a number on FEMA's reputation...

Leo Bosner: I would talk on my off-duty time to people on Capitol Hill or news reporters and say, look, this is a dangerous thing. We're ignoring these natural disasters.

And I was having lunch with a news reporter one day and I'm telling him this. And the guy's looking really bored, he says, yeah, Leo, that's all really bad. But tell me about FEMA's secret plan to round up all the liberals in the country and put them in concentration camps.

Micah: What?!

Leo Bosner: Yeah, I said buddy. These people are so inept, they couldn't organize a two car parade and they're never gonna round up everybody in the country. Come on, get outta here, will you?

Leo didn't know it at the time, but those "FEMA camps" conspiracy theories had started popping up in fringe message boards on the early internet. 

Linda Thompson: The FEMA plans to imprison American citizens have generated a lot of interest … in locating the potential prison camps throughout the country.

This woman Linda Thompson, a sort of godmother of the right-wing militia movement, made a 1994 documentary "America Under Siege" which warned that FEMA was part of  the New World Order, a global authoritarian takeover that would require rounding up anti-government dissidents.

Linda Thompson: These may be facilities that have other uses, but which could be quickly used to detain large numbers of people such as this Amtrak facility in Beach Grove, Indiana.

Following in her footsteps a couple decades later, were militia leaders like Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, one of the January 6 guys…

Stewart Rhodes: A lot of this stuff is dual use. They'll put together a detention center or an emergency center supposedly for refugees from other countries.

And, as I mentioned, Infowars host Alex Jones…

Alex Jones: people are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps, to the new world order, to the troops on the streets.

Glenn Beck: These FEMA camps. 

And Glenn Beck, when he was still on Fox News.

Glenn Beck: I'm tired of hearing– you know about them? Sure. We've now for several days, done research on them. I can't debunk them. 

After whipping up this paranoia, Beck did eventually debunk the theory with help from the Editor In Chief of Popular Mechanics.

Jim Meigs, Popular Mechanics: This is an Amtrak repair facility in Beach Grove, Indiana. We set a crew there the other day and we got footage inside. 

Glenn Beck: This, your video? 

Jim Meigs: Yes. And sure enough, what did we find? They're repairing trains in there. 

Remember how earlier, Garrett Graff told us about stores like Walmarts being scoped out by the government to be used as refugee camps? They don’t exist, but people on TikTok and YouTube still like to make videos about them…

Guy: It's like military style entrance, kinda like a FEMA camp. (laughs) Why in the hell does Walmart Supercenter need that? See the Walmart trucks?

These videos are low-effort and easy to laugh off... But I mean, if FEMA could operate a Mount Weather, why not a Mount Walmart?

Garrett Graff: The challenge of a lot of these conspiracies is that they have a germ of truth to them.

Garrett Graff.

In the early stages of the Cold War. J Edgar Hoover at the FBI had preselected lists of suspected communists and political dissidents that he wanted to round up in the event of a nuclear war.

Not to mention the fact that the US imprisoned over 100,000 Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Garrett Graff: I think FEMA has always been in a difficult place, and this is true by the way, across all of the continuity planning and doomsday planning you just can't talk about these classified bunkers and classified operations. Even if you're trying to debunk conspiracies,

Micah: The secrecy in and of itself is naturally gonna feed conspiracy theories.

Garrett Graff: Absolutely.

The kicker to all this is that some of what the conspiracy theorists warned about is happening, just not to them.  This past July, FEMA under Kristi Noem's Department of Homeland Security, revealed a new program...

News tape: FEMA allocating $608 million in state grants for construction of detention centers.

Migrant detention centers -- part of Trump's mass deportation program. The announcement came right around when Florida Governor Ron Desantis opened Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious facility in the Everglades. And while he built the jail using state emergency funds intended for natural disasters, he claimed that federal reimbursement was on the way..

News tape: A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirms Florida did submit an application to FEMA and were awarded two days ago. The full amount Florida applied for $608 million

The coverage made it sound like the money was in Florida's bank account. But, at time of recording, those FEMA funds have actually been held up by Trump's Justice Department. Florida officials say the money is still likely, but who knows. Despite that uncertainty and many legal attempts aimed at closing it, Alligator Alcatraz remains open...

News tape: Amnesty International says immigrants held at the ICE jail in Florida, were shackled inside a two foot high metal cage and left outside without water for up to a day at a time, and in a new report, they also detail unsanitary conditions, lights on 24 hours a day, poor quality food and water, and lack of privacy.

News tape: While Governor DeSantis says the conditions are up to standard, the families of migrants being held inside are calling it a concentration camp.

Garrett Graff: That is the most real FEMA camp ever built.

Micah: What do you think it says that FEMA would actually use public funds for the very thing that has been a far right boogeyman?

Garrett Graff: I mean, there is something uniquely dystopian about a right wing government elected on the backs of the anti-government conspiracies that it is now implementing. 

Coming up, for the first time, FEMA finds its groove....

News archival/lawmaker: They ought to change the name, uh, because the old FEMA has a pretty bad name. And, uh, the new one they're running now is a Cracker Jack agency.

This is On the Media.

 

This is On the Media, I'm Micah Loewinger and you’re listening to the first episode of our series American Emergency, the movement to kill FEMA. In my reporting I learned that FEMA's Cold War mission -- to save America from nuclear war -- was met with a lot of suspicion, and understandably so. Case in point; when I was digging around in the National Archives, something that caught my eye was a tape, curiously labeled: "FEMA Blues." 

Mark Russell: Seattle, Washington. Now Seattle did a spunky thing the other day.

It turned out to be a comedy special from a guy named Mark Russell, which aired in 1982. He starts with this hokey bit about Louis Giuffrida's nuclear evacuation plans. In an apparent effort to coax Seattle officials into participating, FEMA had offered to subsidize the city's mass relocation, which the city refused.

Mark Russell: They turned down their allotment from the Federal Emergency Management Administration. I think it really stands for feeble exercise in mindless administration.

You know what Seattle's allotment was? $17,000. Can you imagine that? I guess the money went to provide each resident with a free roadmap and a granola bar, and so yeah,

After a bit of vamping, Russell calls up his band, The Buzzards...

Mark Russell: our spunky, feisty little band. We only do this once a year. Once a year.

...to perform a song that I think captures the zeitgeist in the 80s...

Mark Russell: Hit it fellas. I got those Federal Emergency Management Administration. Blues, blues, blues, blues. Because when you are hit, that's it. You either sit or stand and meltdown in your shoes, ooze ooze. Don't need no federal bureaucrat to tell me where to go so I can have my choice of roasting fast, or slow. The Federal Emergency Management Administration blues.

According to its critics, FEMA's leaders were either mounting a comically pitiful defense against the nation's most pressing threat, OR they were burning resources that would be better spent on responding to Mother Nature. Leo Bosner -- that OG FEMA employee -- was in the latter camp. As the 80s went on, he was busy trying to warn the press...

Leo Bosner: I was kind of in my whistleblower mode letting them know that FEMA was spending all of its time doing nuclear stuff and not doing anything for these natural disasters.

If Ronald Reagan's FEMA was too active, too conniving. George Bush Senior's FEMA had the opposite problem: it was out to lunch. Daddy Bush left the agency leaderless for over a year. And he was punished for it in 1989, when a category five storm came barrelling off the Atlantic.

Archival news tape: Two weeks after Hurricane Hugo hit South Carolina, it's FEMA that is in the eye of the storm.

Archival news tape: Only about 20% of FEMA's budget goes for disaster relief. FEMA is trying to live down a reputation for being slow, stingy, and distracted. 

Archival news tape: The South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings today accused FEMA of raw incompetence. 

Ernest Hollings: They're the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I've ever worked with in my life. 

Leo Bosner: FEMA did a terrible job. 

Leo Bosner.

But I think the feeling was, well, that's a once in a hundred years thing, except three years later. Hurricane Andrew hit in ‘92.

Another category 5 -- one of the strongest in Florida's history...

Leo Bosner: And FEMA was on the front pages…

Archival news tape: A barrage of criticism for its handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew.

Kate Hale: If we do not get more food and water, in a very short period of time, we are going to have more casualties because we're gonna have people who are dehydrated, who are without food, babies that need formula.

After the storm, as journalists started digging into FEMA's dysfunction, they discovered a political backwater filled with unqualified Bush appointees.

Archival news tape: Congressional records show that while at most federal agencies, there is only one political appointee for every 3000 government agencies at FEMA, there's one for every 300.

Leo Bosner: The election for the president was only like three months later.

Archival news tape: This election is a clarion call for our country to face the challenges of the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the next century.

Bill Clinton, the first Democrat to take the White House in 12 years, had seen how FEMA's reputation had dragged his predecessors. Unlike them, he understood that natural disasters are media spectacles: predictable, high stakes dramas that generate a steady stream of coverage. So when Clinton came into office, he did something radical: he appointed somebody actually qualified to run FEMA. Somebody who would fundamentally transform the agency from a liability to a government success story. A man named James Lee Witt, who had served as the Arkansas Director of Emergency Management when Clinton was Governor.

James Lee Witt: As governor of Arkansas, when I went to work for him, there. He said, if it affects people's lives, and it's gonna be in the media, then I want to know about it.

This is Witt speaking with CSPAN in 1996. 

CSPAN interviewer: Can you tell us the story of your very first meeting with Bill Clinton? 

James Lee Witt: Absolutely. I never will forget it. It was in 1974 and I was coaching a little league baseball team in Darnel, Arkansas.

When they first met, Clinton was a law professor and congressional candidate. And Witt ran a local construction company.

CSPAN: You didn't go to college? 

James Lee Witt: No. 

CSPAN: Do you ever have any second thoughts about that? 

Witt: Sure. I, I can see anyone that has never been to college, wish they had gone but when I grew up, I was working.

CSPAN: What'd your father do? 

James Lee Witt: He was a farmer.

Suffice to say, Witt's humble beginnings did not hold him back. And when he came to FEMA, in 1993, he became the first leader in the agency's 14-year history with any professional experience managing domestic disasters.

Leo Bosner: Witt comes in and that's when he totally started turning everything around.

Micah: How did he do that?

Leo Bosner: Well, a lot of it was really common sense. He knew there were all kinds of problems internal to FEMA. So he sends a memo to all hands. First official action, open door policy, so all of a sudden he's getting all these employees coming in and giving him an earful of all the problems in the agency.

He collected all these ideas and got to work reorganizing the agency for what he called an "all-hazards approach" to emergency response.

Bosner: Okay? If the FEMA employees might be needed in a disaster, what kind of jobs are they gonna have to do? Let's train people for those jobs. He also made rosters of who would be on duty when during the disaster, and he said, okay, we're gonna divide the employees here, like into three teams. The red team, the white team, and the blue team. Yay. The flag, right? If you're on the red team. You're on call for disasters during January, February, if you're on the white team, you're on call. Then he even breaks it down into night shifts and day shifts.

Now this does not take like a PhD in higher mathematics to come up with this and people could say, God, this is common sense. And my answer is, yeah, but nobody did it before.

Micah: And when did you get a sense that like people out there in the public were taking notice?

Leo Bosner: Well, there was one of the other really smart things that Mr. Witt did. In the Cold War days, FEMA kept the news media at bay like, go away, keep out, keep out, keep out. And so that just added the suspicion. Well, Witt opened the doors to it. The news media could come into our emergency operations center right there in Washington DC and they could observe things and they could even interview us.

Witt relished speaking with the press -- he seemed to genuinely want to explain how the agency worked. Within a year of joining FEMA, he began chipping away at its secret "black budget," declassifying much of that doomsday planning and diverting a whole bunch of its resources to natural disasters. The agency began to see the fruits of all these new reforms during Witt’s first major test as administrator...

News tape: it started in 1993 with the flood on the Mississippi River, affected nine states. And the devastation was just unreal.

Documentary tape: the water kept on coming. Small river towns were swallowed up. Over 54,000 people were forced to evacuate and leave behind homes and belongings.

Though it was far from perfect, a New York Times headline about FEMA's actions following the floods reads "In This Emergency, Agency Wins Praise for Its Response." The tide was turning for FEMA’s reputation…

Archival news tape: They ought to change the name, uh, because the old FEMA has a pretty bad name. And, uh, the new one they're running now is a Cracker Jack agency. 

James Lee Witt: President Clinton and I was talking about it and Governor Carnahan, Missouri. 

James Lee Witt.

and I said, you know, Mr.President, we can't let people build back in those areas that flooded. And we were able to buy out on a voluntary basis and relocate people outta the floodplain so they'd never flood again. In Missouri alone, we bought out over 4,000 pieces of property.

30 years later, this type of policy is considered a core tenet of good emergency management. Recent studies vindicate Witt’s approach. Research shows that for every dollar spent on mitigation, six dollars are saved down the line.

Leo Bosner: During the nineties, FEMA had gotten to be so well known. In 1996, President Clinton publicly elevated James LeWitt to cabinet level saying he's done such a great job here. That's how it was. 

You can probably tell from the way he talks about it, Leo Bosner was so proud of his agency during the 90s. Some of its greatest work, he says, was visible on one of the darkest days for the country. 

Leo Bosner: ...that April morning in 1995, we’re all at work like normal. All of a sudden…

Archival news tape: A plume of smoke rising in the air. If you are anywhere downtown, you probably heard it and felt it, an explosion of some kind.

Leo Bosner: People are yelling ‘cause on the TV screen, oh my god, there's been a bomb in Oklahoma City. 

Archival news tape: we have been able to confirm right now an explosion at the federal court building downtown. That is where it took place. 

Leo Bosner: Within like a few minutes.… My pager’s going off. And we're seeing all this action suddenly very organized action going on. Our regional office in Texas, within one hour was on the phone with Oklahoma and they decided that what was needed most from FEMA was our specialized search and rescue teams who had special tools and training to go into collapse concrete buildings, which is not a simple thing to do. And our search and rescue teams were then deployed there within a couple of hours.

Micah: So they were quick.

Leo Bosner: Oh yeah. That's when you could really see that FEMA is real and we could do things.

Archival news tape: The reinforcements showed up tonight at the center of it all, of course, is the bombed out shell of the federal office building and in its shadow, the exhausted who for a day and a half now have sifted through its debris and counted its dead and seen up close why they call it terror.

The bombing was part of an alarming trend: anti-government extremists were becoming more active and more violent.

After the attack, the White House brought in a new number 2 official at FEMA, a man with experience monitoring and investigating terrorism, including far-right militias...

Hearing tape: I'm Mike Walker, the Deputy Director of FEMA, and I'm one of the newest employees of FEMA. 

Tim: Mike's a legend in, in the business. 

Tim Manning held the same Deputy Director role during the Obama administration. Now he's a professor at Georgetown University, but earlier in his career, Mike Walker was his mentor. 

Mike’s been confirmed by the Senate… He's held a number of senior roles, he's been around, seen and been part of just about everything in the past 40 plus years of emergency management, Homeland Security.

When Tim was preparing for his own Senate Confirmation hearings, Mike warned Tim about the job he was about to take at FEMA. Mike told him a story that's never been reported before now. It happened in 1999. 

Tim Manning: He's in the new role at fema. He was gone a lot. These are very demanding jobs. Traveling around the country, dealing with disaster response.

He was commuting often between FEMA headquarters in DC and his home in West Virginia, where he lived with his wife.

Tim Manning: He needed help around the house and there was a person in the neighborhood who came by and offered his services as a handyman.

For a few weeks, the handyman comes by to repair windows, fix doors, whatever it might be. And Mike and his wife were pretty happy with his work until…

Tim Manning: He got a call from the FBI one day asking if he knew who this person was. Mike said, ‘well, yeah, he's our handyman...doing work for us.’ And the FBI said, ‘well, he is not, he's actually undercover, he's a militia member who was sent here to get close to you and watch your movements, figure out your patterns, try to collect information. He's, they’re surveilling you as a spy.’ 

Micah: Oh my God.

Tim Manning: Fortunately, nothing dangerous ever happened for Mike or his family. I suppose having an undercover militia operative in your home for a time is dangerous in itself… I don't know whatever kind of dangerous plots might have been in the works before the FBI figured out who he was and what was happening and interdicted.

Micah: I mean, when, when I hear this story, it doesn't sound real. It sounds like a movie. Like noir.

Tim Manning: Yeah, I wish it was a noir fiction. It's the kind of thing that you're always worried about and you think about in the middle of the night, is my family safe and am I doing all the right things? And you think about that and it's like, oh, that's so farfetched. That would never happen. But you know, here it did happen.

 When I first heard this story, I thought it could be explained simply by the rise of extremist militia groups in America. But the more I learned about FEMA -- its secretive origins, its unhinged leadership under Reagan -- the more I realized that the agency that was born of the paranoias of the 20th century had been met with paranoia in return.

While reporting this series I spoke to FEMA workers from just about every era of the agency and I've heard too many stories of threats from conspiracy theorists to chase them all down. 

But, for now... here's one more. A FEMA official from the 90s told me that he'd seen FEMA head James Lee Witt walking around with a US Marshall security detail, but never learned why. After some digging, I discovered that in 1998, Witt was asked to meet with the FBI. An agent told him that a militia group had been selling VHS tapes with his home address, and information on his kids and wife. The death threats were credible enough that Witt was told to stop taking public transportation to work early in the morning.  As you'll learn in the coming weeks, these plots against FEMA's leadership foreshadow its current-day unraveling. 

But in the early 2000s, as FEMA was forced to shapeshift after 9/11, it wasn't anti-government militias that ultimately took down the agency that James Lee Witt built.

James Lee Witt: FEMA as an independent agency, as an organization. That responded for eight years to the American people's needs - that has been destroyed. It's not there now.

Next week in episode two of my investigation, American Emergency, FEMA gets swallowed up by the Department of Homeland Security and the War on Terror...

They have driven a stake in the heart of emergency management in this country as we know it.

MICAH: That’s it for this week’s show. This series is reported and hosted by me, Micah Loewinger. With additional writing and reporting from…

Eloise: Me, Eloise Blondiau, On the Media’s Senior Producer. Jared Bartman designed the artwork for this series. Our fact-checker is Tom Colligan. Original music and mixing from Jared Paul. “American Emergency” was edited by Executive Producer Katya Rogers.

Micah: Special thanks to Samantha Montano and Michael Coen. On the Media is produced by WNYC. See you next week!