Disaster Ready with this Republican Administration?

I watched a Nova show titled: Baltimore Bridge Collapse It got me wondering: What Ifs? The specifics I mention regarding the bridge come from this show and this Wikipedia article.

We have all been hearing and asking, “what if there is another pandemic”. With the personnel/financial cuts and head of agency changes the current Republican administration is making, do the agencies have the capability, capacity to respond? The question is not will it be an adequate response, but will the response actually meet the specific needs of the disaster such that the post disaster experience is sustaining of life. Will the response be seamless and confident or will it be segmental and disconcerting. Is there the capacity to respond to an ever-increasing number of these life altering events?

The Francis Scott Key bridge was struck by Dali, a 124,000 ton container ship in March of 2024. It was exiting a port that sees 2000 ships per year. There is approximately 2500 such bridges at risk of experiencing the same damage.

The response involved the Coastguard, the Army Corps of Engineers, NOAA, the Navy and NBTA. All five agencies acting in concert with the state of Maryland to implement and carry out the recovery and repair of all the harm done. Harm to life, harm to infrastructure, harm to the ecology, harm to the economy. Even the FBI was involved to investigate for criminal involvement. Six federal agencies/departments for this one disaster. Each a specialist needed to address all aspects of this disaster. In 11 weeks, the bodies of the deceased had been recovered, the ship had been moved, the debris was removed and the channel opened. By June of 2024 the state of Maryland was already accepting bids for design and replacement of the bridge.

Orchestrating the recovery from this disaster, I can only imagine what it took to keep all the parts working such that it was complete in 3 months. There were 22 cranes working in the area! Even more impressive is that 6 federal agencies were involved. That is government working at its best. This is a well thought out and structured government.

There is always the question after a disaster of what planning had been performed if any to prevent such a disaster from happening. Baltimore Harbor Safety Committee meeting notes from 2006 to 2016 discuss protection for the bridge from ship strikes. Cost was also discussed per the notes. No steps were taken to fortify the bridge from ship impacts. However, the Delaware Memorial bridge, began a project in 2023 of $93 million for dolphin bridge protection to insure against $2 billion in potential bridge replacement expense if it were to collapse from a ship strike. The Baltimore bridge is now estimated at $1.7 to $1.9 Billion. The price to be covered in legislation signed by President Biden. Will this money survive the current Musk program? If it does not, then what?

Knowing the cuts that have been made and are wanting to be made in both personnel and contracts with the current Republican administration and Congress, will our government still be capable of properly responding? Will it look in any form like the performance under President Biden? I’m confident the answer is no. It took the status of the government pre-2025 to accomplish the results of the post Baltimore bridge disaster.

Musk cut near 80% of the Twitter/X workforce and the results is an operation that no longer functions to the satisfaction of the consumer as it had. The failure of the entity is reflected in the current value of the company. We don’t need an imagination to know what such an approach means for our government. Only, it won’t be just the federal level government. Such cutting will affect all government down to your local level.

We don’t have to look at the extreme example of Twitter to understand what our government response to a disaster is becoming. We have an actual Republican example of cutting and reorganization from the Bush/Cheney administration and their results. They dismantled FEMA, folding it into the DHS and making the military the primary system to respond. It didn’t take much to understand that Bush/Cheney were all about the military as they reached for it regardless of the situation.

According to an article authored by Leo Bosner an employee of FEMA from 1979 until his retirement in 2008 (at the time of his retirement, he was president of the FEMA Headquarters employees’ union) the Clinton administration had: shown that the federal government could do something right via FEMA and it was FEMA’s most effective era since its inception in 1979.

There are two points noted in the article. There was no concern about what FEMA was for other than a tangential relationship to terrorism and ideology connected people were going to be put in charge.

“Shortly after the November 2000 election, members of the Bush transition team arrived at FEMA to meet with senior FEMA officials of the outgoing Clinton administration. One of the FEMA officials later recalled the meeting: As long as the conversation centered on things like FEMA’s work with NATO, or civil-military coordination, or anything that was related to military defense, the Bush team members were sitting forward and taking notes. But when the discussion turned to FEMA’s role in responding to natural disasters, the team members sat back and sipped their coffee. The FEMA official finally asked them, Why aren’t you paying more attention? This is what FEMA does. One of the team members smiled indulgently. It’s really all just blue smoke and mirrors, he said. If there’s a disaster, all you need at FEMA is somebody in a suit handing a check to the state governor in front of the TV cameras.“

“The first big change would come in the person of the new FEMA Director, Joseph Allbaugh. Unlike Witt, Allbaugh had no substantial disaster experience, but he had been Bush’s presidential campaign manager, so he was clearly aligned with the thinking of the new administration.“

There was an operation called Project Impact started by the Clinton FEMA Director. It was a program that brought together key people of communities to assess their disaster vulnerabilities and ways to reduce the damage and cost. Noted is that for every dollar spent on prevention there is two dollars saved on disaster repairs.

“Upon taking office in 2001, the Bush administration began to deconstruct FEMA. It was assumed that a program like Project Impact, which focused on individual and private-sector responsibility, would thrive under a Republican administration. Instead, it was eliminated as not being effective and funding for other natural disaster mitigation programs was dramatically reduced.”

The reputation of FEMA was destroyed after the Bush/Cheney operation. People saw that it was not responding well at all. Experience was kicked out the door. Independence was taken away and given to DHS a more central control. The National Response Plan work ultimately was contracted out. The contracted plan was what resulted in the horrible Katrina response. Even the name of FEMA was changed to reflect the terrorist focus and not the natural disaster focus.

Do read the entire article as it is exactly what we are now facing, and the results are going to be worse. This time, the Republicans are not just changing the focus of an agency or department they are eliminating them. This is ideological with Republicans. It is the issue I discussed in my posting: Democratic Policy without Ideology is just Random Activity.

The Republican ideology has no imagination for anything that falls outside of a perspective evolved from an inward-looking position. The way FEMA was treated because of the singular focus is exemplary of the Republican ideology. The thought process that resulted in the dismantling of FEMA, the intentional neglect of planning for future natural disasters which were and are far more prevalent than a terrorist attack or even the far more unlikely invasion is the same thinking that is driving the current Republican dismantling of government. But it’s not like they haven’t been telling us and showing us what they understand of government, what the focus of government should be and most of all how much it should cost. History has failed as a teacher. But my god, they slapped the nation upside the head but good with their Project 2025 document.

Political appointments of no experience, consolidation of power, defunding, elimination of departments deemed useless and the excuse of “not being effective”. The ideology is all there in the Bush/Cheney FEMA governance as we are experiencing in the present. There is nothing surprising as to what the Republicans are doing today. I just wish there were not so many that are surprised. Any theme you want to discuss regarding understanding Republican governance can be found by viewing what they did to FEMA. Being surprised means there was not enough if any gaming out of scenarios followed by activities which would at least reduce the harm and at best completely prevent what we are now experiencing.

There are many who, after every coast flood ask: how many times are we going to keep rebuilding on the beach? Why do we keep spending the money over and over. It’s an appropriate question…if only the storm had not already eliminated the buildable coast. The Republicans enjoy a reputation of understanding money, and it is always about money to them, yet they can’t understand spending $1 to save $2.