"The emergency management agency should be very small."
This wasn't a radical proposition when the National Governors Association made it in 1978. It was common sense. Emergency managers weren't supposed to be responders—they were coordinators, bringing stakeholders together to collectively reduce disaster risk. Disasters were to be handled at "the lowest level possible," with federal intervention reserved for truly catastrophic events.
Fast forward to today: Federal data shows FEMA's Disaster Relief Fund had outlays of approximately $68 billion in 2020 alone—more than 60 times what was spent annually in the 1980s.
What happened? How did a discipline designed to reduce disaster impacts through coordination transform into a massive humanitarian relief operation? And what have we lost in the process?
In our previous articles, I've examined how governance failures often transform manageable problems into catastrophes. The same pattern that led to the Boeing 737 MAX door incident, the Texas power grid failure, and the water crisis in Flint is evident in emergency management: decisions made, warnings ignored, and systems designed to address symptoms rather than causes. Now it's time to explore perhaps the most consequential governance failure of all—the slow suffocation of emergency management under the weight of disaster relief.