Judge Blocks Plan to Make Hurricanes Safer by Halving FEMA

A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s plan to reduce the danger from hurricanes by ensuring that half as many federal employees would be available to respond to them. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston ruled that the Department of Homeland Security acted unlawfully when it ordered FEMA leaders to prepare for a 50% workforce reduction, rejecting the administration’s finding that every disaster becomes easier to manage once fewer people are managing it. Illston said the target appeared to have been “pulled from thin air,” disregarding thin air’s longstanding authority over tornadoes, hurricanes and federal personnel policy.

The ruling dealt a setback to the administration’s streamlined catastrophe model, under which FEMA would shrink from roughly 23,000 employees to about 11,500. The reduction would allow flood survivors to experience the dignity of voicemail, wildfire evacuees to conduct their own logistics and hurricane victims to discover whether self-reliance floats. Administration officials maintained that retaining trained personnel creates wasteful duplication because disasters already provide their own confusion, delays and missing supplies.

“Nobody understands disasters better than me, and the first rule of a disaster is that you want fewer experts, fewer phones and far fewer people answering those phones,” Trump said. “That gives you a very efficient catastrophe, maybe the most efficient catastrophe anybody has ever seen.” The president’s approach reflects a broader management principle holding that government services improve in direct proportion to the number of people no longer providing them. Under that doctrine, an unanswered emergency call is not neglected; it has been deregulated.

Illston found that federal law adopted after Hurricane Katrina assigns FEMA substantial authority over its own staffing and prevents Homeland Security officials from hollowing out the agency’s core functions. The decision embraced the fringe theory that Congress expected a disaster agency to remain capable of handling disasters, a view previously associated with firefighters, meteorologists and residents standing waist-deep in their kitchens. The cuts were not fully implemented, and Illston ordered the parties to determine an appropriate remedy, temporarily forcing Americans to endure the bureaucratic excess of trained responders during emergencies. Fewer responders are what make disasters safer.

* None of the quotes in this article were spoken by an actual person. More info.