Twenty years after Hurricane Katrina’s devastation, a new storm is brewing in the corridors of American emergency management. On August 25, 2025, more than 181 employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—including 35 who boldly signed their names publicly—took the unusual step of petitioning Congress. Their message was direct: the Trump administration, they argued, is betraying the hard-won lessons of Katrina, risking a repeat of the failures that left New Orleans underwater and thousands of Americans desperate for help.
“Since January 2025, FEMA has been under the leadership of individuals lacking legal qualifications, Senate approval, and the demonstrated background required of a FEMA Administrator,” the employees wrote in their petition, as reported by HuffPost. Their letter was not just a bureaucratic complaint; it was a warning rooted in a shared commitment to the agency’s mission: “Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office, and our mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration.”
To understand the gravity of these warnings, it’s worth recalling the chaos of August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall. The storm breached levees, flooding 80% of New Orleans, as The Conversation recounts. Nearly 1,400 people died—some estimates go as high as 1,836—and the economic toll exceeded $100 billion (about $170 billion in today’s dollars). The images of stranded residents on rooftops, the horrors inside the Superdome where 16,000 evacuees faced squalid conditions, and the breakdown in communication among government agencies became symbols of failed emergency management.
The aftermath of Katrina was supposed to change everything. In 2006, Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, requiring that FEMA administrators possess “demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security” and at least five years of executive experience. For a while, that mandate held. Professional emergency managers led the agency, and reforms focused on ensuring that no one—especially the most vulnerable—would be left behind in future disasters.
But the current picture, according to FEMA employees and multiple news sources, is alarmingly different. Since January 2025, the agency has been led by acting administrators without the required background. David Richardson, the current acting head, was appointed after his predecessor, Cameron Hamilton, was abruptly fired for telling Congress he didn’t believe FEMA should be eliminated—a stance at odds with President Donald Trump’s oft-stated desire to dissolve the agency and shift its responsibilities to state governments. Richardson himself admitted, in a moment of candor reported by The Wall Street Journal, “I feel a little bit like Bubba from ‘Forrest Gump.’ We’ve got hurricanes, we’ve got fires, we’ve got mudslides, we’ve got flash floods, we’ve got tornadoes, we’ve got droughts, we’ve got heat waves and now we’ve got volcanoes to worry about.”
Richardson’s lack of emergency management experience was put to the test during the Texas flash flood disaster on July 4, 2025, which killed more than 100 people (some reports say over 135). Despite the scale of the tragedy, he called the federal response “outstanding” in testimony on Capitol Hill. But the FEMA petitioners and outside critics saw something different: a federal response hampered by leadership gaps, funding delays, and what they describe as political interference from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by Elon Musk.
One of the most contentious changes has been the insistence of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on personally signing off on all agency grants. According to HuffPost, this policy “may have hampered the federal response” in Texas, as crucial funding and resources were delayed. Senator Peter Welch (D-Vt.) didn’t mince words in his criticism: “Brave FEMA employees are sounding the alarm, and the leadership of FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House need to be all in on fixing the problem.” Welch warned that, “Because of DOGE and Secretary Noem’s mismanagement, FEMA will be even more strained and under-prepared.”
The Department of Homeland Security, for its part, pushed back forcefully. A spokesperson told HuffPost, “It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform. Change is always hard. It is especially for those invested in the status quo. But our obligation is to survivors, not to protecting broken systems.”
Yet, as The Conversation points out, the history of Katrina demonstrates that “emergency response is only as strong as the weakest links.” FEMA took much of the blame in 2005, but the failures were systemic—poor communication, delayed evacuation orders, and confusion between federal, state, and local authorities all played a part. The Senate committee that investigated Katrina found that delays in declaring a disaster and a lack of coordination at every level of government cost precious lives and time. The lesson? Good disaster response requires effective governance at all levels, not just a patchwork of local efforts.
Another lesson from Katrina was the need to “leave no one behind.” The tragedy exposed how vulnerable low-income, elderly, and disabled residents were left stranded, whether on rooftops or in overwhelmed shelters like the Superdome and Memorial Medical Center. In response, FEMA under the Obama administration adopted a “whole community” strategy, emphasizing accessibility, inclusion, and tailored emergency communications. But, as The Conversation warns, many of these advances are now in jeopardy as the Trump administration moves to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives from emergency management programs.
Professionalism, too, is under threat. Katrina’s legacy was supposed to be a new era of expertise at FEMA’s helm. Instead, critics say, the agency is once again being led by people without the necessary experience—precisely the scenario Congress tried to prevent. The risk, according to emergency management specialists, is that states and localities, with varying levels of preparedness, will be left to face increasingly complex disasters on their own, in an era of social media misinformation and political polarization that makes coordination even harder.
Looking ahead, the stakes could hardly be higher. As The Conversation notes, “Leaders and organizations can forget critical lessons from the past.” The warnings from FEMA’s own employees, echoed by outside experts and lawmakers, suggest that some of those lessons are already slipping from view. The question now is whether Congress and the administration will heed them—or whether the next disaster will bring déjà vu all over again.
For those who lived through Katrina and for the professionals charged with preventing history from repeating itself, the urgency is clear. The cost of forgetting is measured not just in dollars, but in lives.
