Harris should promise to elevate FEMA head to Cabinet

With Hurricane Milton making landfall in Florida, as the nation is still embroiled in intense relief efforts for victims of Hurricane Helene, concern over a lack of resources at the Federal Emergency Management Administration has become a critical point of discussion. To make a long story short, FEMA has been denied important resources both recently and in decades past, making post-hurricane federal relief a long-standing national weakness.

The single best thing to improve disaster response would be to reorganize FEMA into its own federal department (currently it sits within the Department of Homeland Security), substantially increase its funding and bring on additional personnel. The increased resourcing is mostly a congressional matter, which sadly makes it less plausible, especially given congressional Republicans recent balking at additional FEMA funding on both the eve of and in the immediate aftermath of Helene.

However, some of the important organizational improvements could be made through executive action. While the establishment of federal departments happens via legislation, the creation and restructuring of some federal agencies is a power of the president. Some are still created by acts of Congress, but others, like the Environmental Protection Agency, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and FEMA were created by executive order, which means that the president can (generally, with limitations) move those to a different department, make them independent (a la the EPA), change who their lead reports to, and adjust their missions.

President Biden could attempt such a change now, but reorganizing FEMA in the middle of hurricane season seems like inviting trouble. But FEMA can’t be allowed to continue to wallow in the back of public consciousness — the next president needs to take a hard look at this. There’s little hope that Trump, who talks abut nuking hurricanes, would have any interest in such minutiae, but Vice President Kamala Harris should; in addition to being good policy innovation, it would bring immense political upside. 

One part of Project 2025 calls for the dismantling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which includes the National Weather Service and National Hurricane Center) and another calls for gutting FEMA’s resources. Now is the best time to champion a different vision.

Harris could call out Project 2025 by proposing a merger between FEMA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration into an independent administration, making its head a Cabinet member, and giving it increased resources. The FEMA director has been elevated to a cabinet-level post once before: under President Clinton in 1996. Even that relatively small step could make a huge difference. 

As it currently stands, Cabinet meetings often lack a dedicated voice on matters of emergency management. Updates about FEMA pass through the secretary of Homeland Security, who typically has a more law-enforcement oriented background. Elevating the director to Cabinet level would give him or her a more direct line to the president, more public visibility and more weight when he or she asks Congress for money. This is why emergency managers urged President Obama to move FEMA out of DHS and make the director Cabinet level.

The symbolism also matters, as elevating the director to the Cabinet would establish what a priority FEMA and its work have. For Harris, it creates the opening to say “they want to take away the tools FEMA has to help people hit by disaster, but I want to give them more tools, a bigger voice in my administration, and more prominence.”

Treating natural disasters that are worsening due to climate change means giving experts a real voice and real power. Good policy, good politics — that is, if the Harris camp is open to it.

Dylan Gyauch-Lewis is a senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project. She leads RDP’s Economic Media Project.