From FEMA to Systemic Change: The Challenge Ahead

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, launched in 1979, has had its greatest successes under Democratic presidents and suffered its worst failures under Republican presidents who all campaigned on shrinking the federal government.

Our page on FEMA, recently added to the “Growth of Government” storyline, explains that the agency was created at the request of the National Governors Association but that its impact has been limited by Republican presidents who appointed unqualified people to run the agency. Some of those Republican presidents have also sought to shrink or eliminate the agency despite the bipartisan wishes of state governors who are desperate for federal coordination and support when natural and man-made disasters occur.

All this may sound partisan, especially to partisan ears, but the evidence supports the conclusion. Too often and for too long, many journalists have been reluctant to call out the Republican Party for bad behavior despite the evidence. Take the example of the Pulitzer Prize-winning founder of PolitiFact, who apologized for lying on national TV in 2012 because he feared he would be accused of bias and partisanship if he reported the truth. The lie: that he didn’t have the data to know if Republicans lied more than Democrats. The truth, which he admitted to 12 years later:  Republicans lied a lot more than Democrats.

Too many journalists still have not taken to heart what Richard Viguerie, a father of the conservative movement, and John Dean of Watergate infamy said in 2004 and 2006, respectively: that the Republican Party’s conservative message had been “co-opted by my-party-right-or-wrong partisanship” and the GOP had succumbed to “the growing presence of conservative authoritarianism”.

That was 20 years ago. Those insider observations were warnings that went unheeded by their fellow Republicans, the Democrats, and the news media. And so here we are facing midterm elections with real questions about the legitimacy of the vote (just how many eligible voters are being intimidated, illegally detained, or unfairly prevented from voting by our government?) and justifiable expectations that the results will not be honored.

We will get through this. Our democracy has a history of bending but not breaking, and when it bounces back, it leaps forward with new amendments and laws that strengthen the democratic system we prize. The passion for our freedoms and the stubborn resentment of abuses of power and privilege run too deep in this country to believe otherwise.

The American Leader’s pro-democracy, problem-solving lens emphasizes historical trends and patterns, like the partisanship that has affected FEMA’s impact, so that you have a more complete picture of current events beyond the rationalizations and excuses that populate the daily news feed. Rather than the usual siloed glimpses of what’s going on in the world, we offer a more systemic vision of where we, as a nation of communities, are strong and where we are vulnerable. And we spotlight the deep bench of risk takers and problem solvers who are putting ideas into action to strengthen those systems, improve our lives, and, perhaps, show us a way forward.

Rob Sand, Iowa’s Democratic candidate for governor, might be one of those problem solvers. As he told Mother Jones magazine, he believes we need “a political system that actually is oriented to solve problems”.

That political system needs a media ecosystem oriented the same way. That’s the conclusion that brought us here, to The American Leader. The challenge we’ve taken on: Helping decisionmakers and community members understand the risks and benefits when choosing between patchwork solutions to immediate crises and more systemic change that provides a sturdier foundation for the next generation.