Threats Against FEMA Leadership

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That's fetchpet dot com slash save Hey, Alise Hi Can you just introduce yourself, please Yes. so my name is Eloise Blondio. I am senior producer at onn the Media and I help make American Eergency the movement to kill FEMA I'm a huge on the media fan. I once ran into Brook, the host of Aim Media at a wedding a couple of years ago And when she said who she was, I like stat at my dram That's such a fun surprise. So tell me about this series you've been working on So I made this series with our host, Michael Loinger and we were really interested in how we got to This very interesting political moment where Storms and floods and fires are getting more extreme, more intense, less predictable and the agency that It's supposed to help us help Americans during those kind of really scary events is fighting for its life politically.. And we wanted to understand how did we get here? How did this agency that's meant to save America I'm so distrusted There was even this talk took office gettingetting rid of the agency altogether, which when you look at the crises that are looming over us, is a very scary thought Yeah, we talk a lot on the show about how cllimate change is making natural disasters more unpredictable. It does feel like exactly the time when you would want to have this agency around. I was really interested to find out that A lot of the distrust around FEMA stems from conspiracy theories Yes. Conspiracy theories that we see today around FEMur can actually be traced prettyretty much to the beginning of the agency And I guess the important thing that I've realized about FEMA is that always struggled to earn the trust of the public. It been hoping to serve. Interesting. That is not a contemporary challenge for the agency. It's really been there since its creation It feels like it parallels a lot of other stuff going on. with federal agencies, you know, we did several episodes about The wholeull back of funding in federal science agencies like the NIH, the CDC, NSF. and didn't occur to me really to connect that with FEMA But it seems like a similar thing is happening with FEMA and it comes from this sort of fundamental lack of Frust Yes, I think that We're in a political moment where any kind of existing fault lines or Inabilities in how our systems were set up. Uh. being exposed. And I think that For a long time Fema was able to do great work while contending with these challenges of earning trust from the public And I think that struggle to meet the current political moment I think that could be said for a lot of agencies. and the current political moment is very complicated for a lot of reasons. Comlicated. It is. And honestly, when I think about these conspiracy theories and how wild they are and how many there are, it's hard to imagine really what a Good response them would be in this current era. Right. We spoke to a Will A Remus at the Washington Post and he did a study of misinformation during Hurricane Helene. He said that FEMA's most popular tweets since Hurricane Helene reached fifty times fewer people than the false rumors Damn Okay It's really hard. Yeah That is like the challenge that our government You know, has to rise to, but yeah, it's hard to imagine it right now. So this is a four episode series you guys produced O listeners are going to hear the first in just a second. I wonder if you could just it up. what are they going to hear? In this episode, we really Go back to the very beginnings of FEemA and We find out some really surprising things about the agency and about what it was doing behind closed doors. And it also really sets up some of the problems that we see FEMA going through today. Thanks Alice. Thank you Here's on the media And that might be good. Did you get everything you needed? I feel great. Well, I have to say it's really weird being a guest as a producer, but tell me That's great Ver Anytime I'm a guest on anything, I'm like likeike, are you sure? Are you sure? like do you want me to check that you're recording? I know I know. You know serious. I think I hear a noise on your end of the mic Yeah Great, I guess I was just wondering if when you intro You could say American emergency from on the media Like at that last bit o Yeah. Let's do. okay.ll I'll just say right now. Okay Here's American emergency from the media Storms, floods, and fires are ever more extreme. And yet the Federal Eergency Management aggency is fighting for its life. I've never been a big fan of FM is Very expensive. and it really doesn't get the job How did the agency tasked with saving America become so despised? FEMA is a disaster. FEMA is a dirty word. so distrusted. People are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps. The FEMA plans to imprison American citizens have generated a lot of interest around the country and defunded. We could see the next Katrina level disaster based on the stripping away of FEMA that we have seen. Can the agency survive the stories that have been told about it And can we survive without FEMA Whenever there's a disaster, the first thing people say is Where's FEMa. American Emergency, The Movement to Kill FEMA is a brand new on the media series The first episode is coming up right after this From WNYC in New York. This is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loinger Micah, this is the week. Yeah The first episode of a brand new four part series that you and OTM senior producer Eloise Blondio have been reporting out for months. It's about the Federal Eergency Management aggency or FEMA And there is a ton of stuff in here that people won't have heard before I'm excited Let's do it. Okay, thanks, Brooke. Hope you like it. We've come to North Carolina with a simple message for all the people of this region who are Hit so hard by Hurricane Hallen. At the beginning of his second term, amid all the chaos of the incoming administration, President Trump made his first trip to North Carolina. That message is very simple. You are forgotten any longer. You were treated very badly by the previous administration. And before he got on Air Force O, Trump called a press conference on the Tarmac and casually dropped this bomb I'll also be sign an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA. The Federal Eergency Management aggency, the agency that stands between America and climate destruction. I think frankly, FEMA's not good the agency that helps people rebuild after they've lost everything. The agency that, while he was rambling, was providing aid to Californians suffering through the historic LA. wildfires, as well as Halen survivors right there in North Carolina It seemed like with a snap of his fingers, the president would be happy to see FEMA vanish., I think we're gonna recommend that FEMA go away I learned that employees at FEMA broke down in tears when they heard the news. Some replayed the president's speech over and over. and the f away Anxious members of Congress spent the day calling into the agency's headquarters with a barrage of questions Is the president serious? What happens when the next hurricane hits? If the president came to you and said, You're my DHS secretary. Do you think I should get rid of FEMA? What would you say? I would say, yes, get rid of FEMAa the way it exists today. Christy Noome, former seecretary of the Department of Homeland Security. It has been slow to respond federal level, and that is why this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today. Before she got the boot this spring, Noome effectively set fire to FEMA. prereparedness programs were slashed, unqualified leaders cycled in and out. Billions meant for survivors of storms, wildfires, and earthquakes were withheld or denied Lives hung in the balance Death toll in Texas. The flooding tragedy. It's up to one hundred four dead across six counties. That number includes nearly thirty children After deadly floodwaters inundated camp Mystic and other parts of central Texas, the agency's support lines left thousands of calls unanswered FEMa's top leader at the time couldn't be reached for twenty four hours We live about a mile down the road from Campus and we've already got two little girls who have come down the river And we've gotten to him, but How many out The federal response to this disaster has come under scrutiny allegations that FEMA cutbacks meant delays in answering people's calls for disaster assistance and aid after the flood In one telling, the dysfunctional response was Dojes's doing It's true, att the start of twenty twenty five, no agency was safe from Elon Musk's chainsaw That's only part of the story For many years, fomenting under the surface sueded distrust of FEMA which broke through during Hurricane Halen just months before the twenty twenty four presidential election. Kamala spent all Her Feme of money Billions of dollars on housing for illegal migrants Some on the right pushing conspiracy theories that they're blocking aid and seizing land from people here in North Carolina. and that is not true. An anti government militia group known as Veterans on Patrol, is claiming Hurricane Halene was caused by government controlled weather weapons. The group called Hurricane Halene an act of war I knew from my years reporting on far right militias that these groups often showed up after natural disasters to recruit, fundraise, and spit shine their public image But I never understood why they hated FEMA so much So I started digging into right wing media archives and found that the anti Fema lore went back decades. People are waking up in droves. to the FEMA camps, to the New World Order to the T trips on the streets Alex Jones has made multiple films claiming to have discovered secret prisons operated by FEMA right wing pundit Glenn Beck entertained this stuff when he was still on Fx. If you have any kind of fear that we might be headed towards a totalitarian state, buckle up. There's something going on in our country that is Ain't good Over time, these paranoas seeped into the waters of mainstream culture. Are you familiar with what the federal emergency management agency's real power is? It was a major plot point in the X files. FEMA allows the White House to suspend constitutional government upon declaration of a national emergency Even with Christy Noome replaced at DHS by Republican Senator Mark Wayne Mullen The future of FEMA is still in jeopardy. This week, the administration announced that it was patching up some of the gnome era cuts But agency insiders say that it may take years to build FEMA back up to fighting strength. About a month ago, Trump repeated his antipathy for the agency. I've never been a big fan of himame. I like to keep it local. like to see governors Neighboring states help each other as opposed to femle femes As I followed the current day crisis at FEMA I've wondered whether it can survive the stories that have been told about it the misinformation, mismanagement, and genuine catastrophes that have made this agency one of the least popular among Americans But for all its faults, and there are many, it's not clear we can afford to lose it Extreme weather leaving so many across the United States wondering when they'll get a break. In July alone, there were five one thousand year flood eventss. Extreme heat is becoming a dangerous new normal. The record setting storm measured about in inches, but in feet of snow, hundreds of thousands are now without power in this freezing weather. The US is experiencing a billion dollar disaster every ten days on average compared to every eighty two Back in the nineteen eighties Over the next few weeks, we'll explore how the organization tasked with saving America came to be so despised and mythologized For a series we're calling American Emergency, the Mment to Kill FEMA We'll hear about FEMA's identity crisis during Hurricane Katrina, how conspiracy theories have fueled violent threats against federal workers, and how a group of anonymous employees are fighting to keep the agency alive under Trump For this first episode, we're looking at FEMA's secretive origins, and the moment when Americans first learned that the agency was hiding things from us On december first, nineteen seventy four Heavy rain and fog rerouted a passenger plane over northern Virginia, some fifty miles from Washington, DC On its descent, the aircraft dropped into the forest below, sheering off the tre topops crashing into the side of Mount Weather. The two pilots were killed first, lanced by trees that burst through the cockpit The rest of the aircraft crumbled into pieces, a mangle of shrapnel on the body parts of the ninety two passengers and crew members There were no survivors One woman whose parents were on the flight, said it seemed like the mountain had jumped up and bit the plane News coverage of the day quickly turned to the blame game and the miscommunication from air traffic control amidst a violent storm But our focus is something that was buried in the reports When TV crews arrived at the crash site, they discovered rather ominously that Mount Weather had already been sealed off on the orders of federal security agents. The quick action was taken because the big jet had landed almost a mile away from a super secret government installation underground complex of emergency offices set up for federal officials in the event of nuclear war Crash had inadvertently uncovered a tightly guarded Cold War secret Inside Mount Weather was a massive covert facility And somehow that undersells it through a tunnel that burrows into the mountain and behind a thirty four ton blast door lies a subterranean strange Lvian lair A free standing city with a hospital, a crematorium, an emergency power plant, and even a broadcasting studio Everything that the White House and thousands of federal workers would need to run the country underground while millions melted on the surface I expect your people to save our government. That's what President Dwight Eisenhower told the first director of Mount Weather after it was built in nineteen fifty five It's still operated by FEMA today. It's actually being renovated as I speak. But back in the nineteen fifties, Mount Weather was run by FEMA's predecessor, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, the FCDA, which poured billions into making America nuke proof at least lulling people into the belief that with enough preparation, they might survive atomic hellfire. Dum down feel dum down The FCDA was behind this delightful, if slightly morbid PSA, instructing school children to hide under their desks during bomb drills There was a girl by the name of Bir And the turtle was very alert And dangers threaten we never go first. He knew just what to do. He got and cover. For adults, the FCDA organized Operation Alert, a series of dramatic exercises where millions of people acted out the day of their likely demise emptying the streets of America's biggest cities. While the sirens wail their grim warning, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers scurry for shelter against the attack riders and drivers taking cover in a realistic drill for a day all Americans preay will never come Operation alert was also the first time that Mount Weather saw action. As soon as the alert sounded in Washington, President Eisenhower reached for his hat and strode to a waiting limousine to be driven to an emergency base of operations in the mountains outside Washington. exact location kept secret. Keeppt secret until that terrible plane crash in nineteen seventy four. Fortunately, nuclear obliteration never came and Mount Weather was never truly put to use. There's something ironic and revealing that a single storm brought more death and destruction to the base than thirty years of the Cold War By the nineteen seventies, it had become clear that the nuclear preparations had done little to protect America from an arguably greater threat Coming up, if our government could build a secret city, It does kind of make you wonder What else could they be hiding This is on the Media Support for this show comes from Shopify Starting a business is not easy. It can come with a lot of self doubt and questions like What if I fail? or What if nobody buys what I have to sell? 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I'm Michael Loinger To better understand the current day crisis at FEMA and why so many Americans believe wild conspiracy theories about it I wanted to dive back into the era it was created. when state leaders began to realize that all the focus on Cold War civil defense had left them vulnerable to mother nature We just didn't have that many nuclear wars, which is great but we do have a lot of natural disasters. Garrett Graff is a journalist and author of a book about the origins of FEMA titled Ravenroock, the story of the U.S. government's secret plan to save itself while the rest of us die Before the agency was created, America's disaster response system was Well, barely a system. It didn't make sense for every state to be developing its own totally independent ability to respond to a hurricane, because in any given year, most states don't get hit by a hurricane. Which became a big problem in the sixties and seventies when the country was rocked by a series of record breaking disasters. No one knows the full size of the disaster yet In Betsy's wake There's only darkness Confusion I'm done After suffering one of the most serious earthquakes in history Alaska had to undergo the further ordeal of over forty severe Eth trema. Imagine being there as the streets reared up around you, like the scene of some terrible biblical retribution. They called her Camille Born of the sea, she turned like a woman scorned She screamed and ripped and flooded These big disasters overwhelmed towns and counties and states, the big ones often do But when they asked for help, the federal government was too disorganized to act quickly or efficiently. Supplying extra ambulances, delivering food and water to survivors, fixing roads and power plants, each piece of the emergency management process could come from a different office or department hundred agencies might play a role Navigating this patchwork of services and jurisdictions was a major pain in the ass for local leaders Especially during a crisis when lives are on the line and every second counts Like in nineteen seventy two, when another big storm hit. Many of the people here and others in the path of Hurricane Agnes were completely wiped out Many of them feel that federal aid is too slow in coming and too little Trump says FEMA should return its responsibilities to the states which is odd because states often bring in FEMA when they're unable to respond on their own. And anyway, it was the states that asked for FEMA in the first place In nineteen seventy eight, the National Governors Association drew up plans for a streamlined one stop shop for federal emergency response and delivered it to a sympathetic White House. Washington President Carter proposed merging five big federal emergency preparation and disaster relief agencies into one agency as part of his reorganization plan. Civil defense experts say it will provide much needed communication between the state and federal levels. In nineteen seventy nine, Jimmy Carter signed an executive order giving life to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA was a federal Frankenstein with a dual mission, Cold War civil defense, and disaster relief. I wish I could illustrate this moment by playing you like a triumphant speech from President Carter or some colorful news footage, but either that stuff never existed or no one thought it was important enough to archive Even the earliest employees at FEMA were confused about how to talk about it Wait a new director there And there was a message when that went out to us that said If we're referring to the agency publicly, we should say either Federal emergency Management aggency or FEMA because the word FEMA, he thought sounded too much like a laxative. This is Leo Bosner, a retired FEMA official who's taught me a lot about the earliest days of the agency He was working as a flood insurance specialist with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in one of the offices that was folded into FEMA We're all working along in the office and one day they tell us, okay Everybody go down to phhoto ID, you're getting new photo ID. So we walk down the stairs get new photo IDs that say FEMA. turnurned in our photo ID's that say housing urban development And then we're all told we're all getting new job titles and our new job title is emergency management specialist And I'm thinking What on God's earth as an emergency management specialist, likeike this is the end of my career. What kind of Leo would spend the next thirty years at FEMA He eventually found really satisfying work helping hospitals and medical organizations prepare for floods, wildfires, and hurricanes But less than two years after he started getting the hang of his new job, Fema fell into a decade long tailsin The big shift really didn't come until nineteen eighty. Ronald Reagan appears to be heading toward a landslide electoral victory tonight across the United States. Ronald Reagan got elected president And there's a super U turn from Jimmy Carter was mostly all about social welfare and Ronald Reagan was more about national defense To run FEMA, Reagan picked someone who would stir up a lot of trouble for the agency. This man. Only a masochist with a death wish would accept the job of directing FEMA. Army Colonel Louis Jafrida, speaking here with a caller on Larry King's radio show. I really don't believe can we can be safved if there is a nuclear war. I mean How are you going to save me if you're blown up too? But you're not suggesting that because we both might be blown up by a nuclear war that we shouldn't have in place a system that would take care of us if there was an earthquake or a tidal wave or a hurricane or anything that sort While Lewis Jeiffrida paid lip service to FEMA's disaster relief mission, he was quietly funneling most of FEMA's budget towards Cold War civil defense Leo Bosner. All of a sudden, we start seeing all these military officers signing in at the login desk , why these military people here military if you'll go to floods or something And then we learn little by little that FEMA's mission was really, really going to be to get ready for the big nuclear attack from the Soviet Union In the early eighties, Leo started to hear whispers about classified programs at the agency. Every day on his trip up the elevator at FEMA HQ, he'd ride by a secret fifth floor manned by a security guard Mostly, he rolled his eyes at all the Cold War theater, wishing FEMA would focus more on preparing Americans for natural disasters But he still wondered What are they doing in there the majority of its funding, Garrett Graft, and about a third of its workforce was actually hidden in the nation's classified black budget, the special budget that Congress oversees that protects our most secret programs and capabilities. And FEMA on a daily basis is in charge of tracking the whereabouts of everyone in the presidential line of succession so that in the event of a nuclear war knows where all of those people are, how to get them to secure relocation sites like the Mountain Weather Bunker and who would be best positioned be the person who takes over as president of the United States in the event of a nuclear war I wonder if this classified continuity of government planning helps explain why there was so little media about FEMA when it was first created I think the Feds just didn't want to draw attention to their secret plans That said, the coverage did pick up when the agency launched a controversial new initiative. The head of emergency management, Louis Jeaffrida, says the heart of the proposal is crisis relocation. What we want to accomplish is taking the maximum number of people from highigh risk areas. to areas of lesser risk. A mass evacuation program there was sort of this sense of, well, if you could just get twenty, thirty, fifty miles away from a major city, you would at least have a chance to survive the initial blast from the nuclear weapons and then live into nuclear winter Government officials estimated that in the worst case, sixty million Americans could survive an attack Can you imagine all those urbanite swamping small towns and rural areas? News reports at the time featured a mixture of fascination and incredulity. My God, you're going to have modified anarchy after that sort of thing. How in the world are you going to coordinate the recovery and putting leadership back into place? How't do that? sixixty million is still a lot of people. That is the modern population of France those people would need functioning government and functioning infrastructure afterward This is where we start getting into the bizarre conspiracy theories that haunt FEMA today In nineteen eighty two, in an effort to game out some of these post apocalyptic scenarios, President Ronald Reagan signed a secret executive order to create a covert program called Project Nine notot eight. It's nine zero eight, but they called it nine notot eight pulled billions of dollars in top officials from the National Security Council, FEMA, and the FBI The FBI was in charge of pre identifying buildings that could serve as refugee camps If I have this right, basically you had FBI agents working Undercover for FEMA Traveling around the country, visiting warehouses car shops casinos Walmart helping identify businesses that could be used to house citizens after a nuke was dropped on an American city. Yes, and often without telling the businesses that they were being scouted for these purposes. There was, thankfully, never a need to construct these refugee camps. But the secrecy went way deeper and darker Just five years after the launch of Project nine hundred ninety eight, a bombshell report from the Miami Herald revealed that before Jafrida was asked to help run FEMA, he'd written his master's thesis on how the military could quell race riots by detaining millions of black people and putting them in concentration camps Members of Congress were given a copy of his thesis during Jfrida's confirmation hearings A horrifying detail that makes me think they considered this to be part of his qualifications for the job The most damning part of that Miami Herald piece though, was news that Jafrida had worked with Reagan's National Security Council to write plans for declaring martial law. putting the country temporarily under a sort of shadow government And not just in the case of a nuke but also in a so called national crisis, like a war Bunch of this comes out in the late nineteen eighties amid the Iran contontra hearings and investigations. out that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who was the central figure at the White House of Iran Contra. was also one of the planners Yeah Projecty eighty. Oliver North was asked about these martial law plans during the Iran contontra hearings. Colonel North, in your work at the NSC Were you not assigned at one time to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster North was questioned by Texas repepresentative Jack Brooks We see North Pause and whisper to his attorney And Th then, the chairman of the hearings, Daniel K. Eoway jumps in to respond on the government's behalf. I believe the question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area May I request that You not touch upon that, sir I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman Because I read in Miami papers and several others That there had been a plan a contingency plan that would suspend the American Constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe he was. I respectully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage The government never acknowledged any of this stuff until much of it was declassified years later Lewis Jefffrida ended up resigning from FEMA for totally unrelated reasons following a congressional fraud investigation According to Senator Albert Gre, Giofrida had spent one hundred seventy thousand dollars of federal money to build a house on federal property for his own use By the start of the nineties, FEMA employee Leo Bosner was beyond tired of the dysfunction and the kooky national security schemes. Frankly, for me, once that stuff was in the rear view mirror, it's like fine that's the trash. I hope they come on Friday and pick it up and dump it to the landfill There were some pretty nutty people working back there then. Unfortunately nothing much ever came of that except they ate up most of her budget. He was eager for the agency to shift resources to preparing for floods and hurricanes But all this doomsday planning had done a number on FEMA's reputation I would talk on my off duty time to people in Capitol Hill or report news reporters and say, look, this is a dangerous thing. We're ignoring these natural disasters. And I was having lunch with a news reporter one day and I'm telling him this And the guy's looking really bored. He says, Yeah, Lo, that's all really bad. but Tell me about FEMa's secret plan. to round up all the liberals in the country and put them in concentration camps What't you Yeah, you head should, buddy People are so inept they couldn't organize a two kark parade and they were never going round up everybody in the country. C on, get out of here were you Leo didn't know it at the time, but those FEMA Camp's conspiracy theories had started popping up in fringe message boards on the early internet. The FEMA plans to imprison American citizens have generated a lot of interest in locating the potential prison camps throughout the country. This woman, Linda Thompson, a sort of godmother of the right wing militia movement, made a nineteen ninety four documentary, America Under siege which warned that FEMA was part of the New World Order, a global authoritarian takeover that would require rounding up anti government dissidents. These may be facilities that have other uses, but which could be quickly used to detain large numbers of people, such as this Amtrak facility in Beeachgrove, Indiana. Following in her footsteps a couple decades later were militia leaders like Stuart Rhodes of the Oath Kepers, one of the January sixth guys. A lot of thisuff is dual use. They put together a detention center or an emergency center supposedly for refugees from other countries. And as I mentioned, InfoWars host, Alex Jones. People are waking up in droves To the FEMA camps, to the New Wld Order to the troops on the streets, theseese FEMA camps. And Glenn Beck when he was still on Fox News. I'm tired of hearing. You know about them? No. We've now for several days done research on them. I can't debunk them After whipping up this paranoia, Beck did eventually debunk the theory with help from the editor in chief of Popular Mechanics. This is an Amtrak repair facility in Beach Grove, Indiana We set a crew there the other day and we got this your video? Yes. And sure enough, what did we find Rre pairing trains in there Remember how earlier Garrett Graft told us about stores like Walmarts being scoped out by the government to be used as refugee camps They don't exist, but people on TikTok and YouTube still like to make videos about them. It's like military style. Entrance, kindind of like a FEMA camp Why in the hell does Walmart's suuper center need that? See the Walmart trucks? These videos are low effort and easy to laugh off. But I mean, if FEMA could operate Mount Weather, why not A Mount Walmart? The challenge of a lot of these conspiracies is that they have a germ of truth to them. Derek Graff, in the early stages of the Cold War, Jadgar Hoover at the FBI had pre selected lists of suspected communists and political dissidents that he wanted to round up in the event of a nuclear war. Not to mention the fact that the US imprisoned over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans during World War two. I think FEMA has always been in a difficult place and this is true, by the way, across all continuity planning and doomsday planning. You just can't talk about these classified bunkers and classified operations even if you're trying to debunk conspiracies. The secrecy in and of itself is naturally gonna to feed conspiracy theories Absolutely The kicker to all this is that some of what the conspiracy theorists warned about is happening, just not to them This past July, FEMA, under Christy Nhm's Department of Homeland Security, revealed a new program FEMA allocating six hundred eight million dollars in state grants for construction of detention centers. Migrant detention centers, partart of Trump's mass deportation program. The announcement came right around when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis opened Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious facility in the Everglades And while he built the jail using state emergency funds intended for natural disasters He claimed that federal reimbursement was on the way. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirms Florida did submit an application to FEMA and were awarded two days ago, the full amount Florida applied for. six hundred eight million dollars. The coverage made it sound like the money was in Florida's bank account But at time of recording, those FEMA funds have actually been held up by Trump's Justice Department. Florida officials say the money is still likely, but who knows Despite that uncertainty and many legal attempts aimed at closing it Alligator Alcatraz remains open. Amnesty International says immigrants held at the ice jail in Florida W were shackled inside a two foot high metal cage and left outside without water for up to a day at a time. In a new report they also detail on sanitary conditions, lights on twenty four hours a day, poor quality food and water, and lack of privacy. And while Governor DeSantes says the conditions are up to standard, the families of migrants being held inside are calling it a concentration camp That is the most real FEMA camp ever built What do you think it says that FEMA would actually use public funds for the very thing that has been a far right boogeyman. There is something uniquely dystopian about a right wing government elected on the backs of the anti government conspiracies that it is now implementing Coming up. First time, FEMA finds its groove. They ought to change the name. because the old FMA has a pretty bad name and the new one they're running now is a cracker Jack agency. This is on the Media. for the show comes from Quininces. 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I'm Michael Loinger, and you're listening to the first episode of our series American Emergency, the Movement to Kill FEMA In my reporting, I learned that FEMA's Cold War mission to save America from nuclear war was met with a lot of suspicion, and understandably so. Case in point, when I was digging around in the National Archives, something that caught my eye was a tape curiously labeled FemMa Blues Seattle Washington. Now Seattle did a spunky thing the other day. It turned out to be a comedy special from a guy named Mark Russell, which aired in nineteen eighty two He starts with this hokey bit about Lewis Jeafrida's nuclear evacuation plans In an apparent effort to coax Seattle officials into participating FEMA had offered to subsidize the city's mass relocation, which the city refused. They turned down their allotment from the Federal Eergency Management addministration. I think it really stands for feeble exercise in mindless administration. You know Seattle's allotment was seventeen thousand dollars. Can you imagine that? I guess the money went to provide each resident with a free roadmap and a granola bar so Yeah After a bit of vamping, Russell calls up his band This is our spunky feisty little band. We only do this once a year to perform a song that I think captures the zeitgeist in the eighties.. I got those federal emergency management administration blues, blues, blues, blues. Cause when you're hit, That's it. You winner center stand meltdown in your shoes, lose, lose, lose. Don't need no federal bureaucrat to tell me where to go so I can have my choice roast and fas or slow. The Federal Eergency Management Administration blew. According to its critics, FEMA' leaders were either mounting a comically pitiful defense against the nation's most pressing threat or they were burning resources that would be better spent on responding to mother Nature Leo Bosner, that OG FEMA employee was in the ladder camp As the eighties went on, he was busy trying to warn the press. I was kind of in my whistleblower mode letting them know that FEMA is spending all of its time doing nuclear stuff and not doing anything for these natural disasters If Ronald Reagan's FEMa was too active, too conniving, George Bush Sr's FEMa had the opposite problem It was out to lunch Daddy Bush left the agency leaderless for over a year, and he was punished for it in nineteen eighty nine when a category five storm came barreling off the Atlantic. Two weeks after Hurricane Hugo hit South Carolina, it's FEMA that is in the eye of the storm. Only about twenty percent of FEMA's budget goes for disaster relief FEMA is trying to live down a reputation for being slow, stingy, and distracted. South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollins today accused FEMA of raw incompetence. They're a s bunch Bureaucratic jackasses I've ever worked with in my life Fema did a terrible job, Leo Bosner. but I think the feeling was, well, that's a once in a hundred years thing except three years later hurricane Andrew hit in ninety two, another category five, one of the strongest in Florida's history. And FMO is on the front pages, a barrage of criticism for its handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. If we do not get more food and water in a very short period of time We are going to have more casualties because we're going to have people who are dehydrated who are without food. After the storm, as journalists started digging into FEMA's dysfunction, they discovered a political backwater filled with unqualified Bush appointees Congressional records show that while at most federal agencies, there is only one political appointee for every three thousand government agencies, at FEMA, there's one for every three hundred The election for the president was only like three months later. This election is a clarion call for our country to face the challenges Of the end of the Cold War. and the beginning of the next century Bill Clinton, the first Democrat to take the White House in twelve years, had seen how FEMa's reputation had dragged his predecessors Unlike them, he understood that natural disasters are media spectacles able high stakes dramas that generate a steady stream of coverage So when Clinton came into office, he did something radical When did somebody actually qualify to run FEMA Somebody who had fundamentally transform the agency from a liability to a government success story A man named James Lee Witt had served as the Arkansas director of emergency mananagement when Clinton was governor. As goovernor of Arkansas when I went to work for him there He said, if it affects people's lives and it's going to be in the media. Then I want to know about it. This is Witt speaking with CSan in nineteen ninety six. Can you tell us the story of your very first meeting with Bill Clinton Absolutely And they will forget it. It was in nineteen seventy four And I was coaching a little Lague baseball team in Dardaell, Arkansas When they first met, Clinton was a law professor and congressional candidate, and Witt ran a local construction company. You didn't go to college. No Do you ever have any Second thoughts about that Sure, I guess anyone that has never been to college wish they had gone. but When I grew up I was working. What' your father do? He was a farmer Suffice to say, Witt's humble beginnings did not hold him back. And when he came to FEMA in nineteen ninety three, he became the first leader in the agency's fourteen year history with any professional experience managing domestic disasters. W comes in And that's when he totally started turning everything around How did he do that? Well, a lot of it was really common sense. He knew there were all kinds of problems internal to Fema. So he sends a memo to all hands, first official action Op door policy all of a sudden He's getting all these employees coming in and giving him an earful of all the problems in the agency. He collected all these ideas and got to work reorganizing the agency for what he called an all hazards approach to emergency response. Okay, if the FEMA employees might be needed in a disaster What kind of jobs are they going to have to do? Let's train people for those jobs. He also made rosters of who would be on duty when during the disaster. And it said, okay We're going to divide the employees here like into three teams, the red team, the white team and the blue team. Yeah, the flag, right If you're on the red team You're on call for disasters during January. February, If you're on the white team, you're on call. Th he even breaks it down into night shifts and day shifts This does not take like a PhD in higher mathematics to come up with this people could say, God, this is common sense. And my answer is yeah, but nobody did it before And when did you get a sense that like people out there in the public were taking notice Well, that was one of the other really smart things that mr. Witt did Back in the Cold War days Fema the news media at bait like go away, keep out, keep out, keep out And so that just added the suspicion O wit open the doors to it The news media could come into our emergency operations center right there in Washington, DC. and they could observe things and they could even interview us Witt relished speaking with the press. He seemed to genuinely want to explain how the agency worked. Within a year of joining FEMA, he began chipping away at its secret black budget. declassifying much of that doomsday planning and diverting a whole bunch of its resources to natural disasters. The agency began to see the fruits of all these new reforms during Witt's first major test as administrator And It started in nineteen ninety three with the flood on the Mississippi River affected nine states And the devastation was just Unreal But the water kept on coming, small river towns were swallowed up. Over fifty four thousand people were forced to evacuate and leave behind homes and belongings. Though it was far from perfect, a New York Times headline about FEMA's actions following the floods reads In this emergency, agency wins praise for its response The tide was turning for FEMA's reputation. They ought to change the name because the old FEMA has a pretty bad name and they knew when they're running now as a cracker jack agency. President Clinton and I was talking about it in Governor Carnahhan, Missouri, James Lee Whitt. and I said, you know, mr. President, We can't let people build back in those areas that flooded And we were able to buy out on a voluntary basis and relocate people out of the floodplain so they'd never flood again. And Missouri alone, we bought out over four thousand pieces of property thirty years later, this type of policy is considered a core tenet of good emergency management. Recent studies vindicate W approach. Research shows that for every dollar spent on mitigation, six dollars are saved down the line During the nineties, FEMA had gotten to be so well known In nineteen ninety six, President Clinton publicly elevated James Leeeewitt to cabinet level, saying he's done such a great job here. That's how it was You can probably tell from the way he talks about it, Leo Bosner was so proud of his agency during the nineties. Some of its greatest work, he says, was visible on one of the darkest days for the country. That April morning in nineteen ninety five werere all at work like normal all of a sudden A plume of smoke rising in the air. If you are anywhere downtown, you probably heard it and felt it. An explosion of some kind. People are yelling because on the TV screen, Oh my God, there's been a bomb in Oklahoma City. We have been able to confirm right now an explosion at the federal court building downtownake few minutes, my painer is going up We're seeing all this action suddenly, very organized action going on regional office in Texas Within one hour was on the phone with Oklahoma and they decided that what was needed most from FEMA was our specialized search and rescue teams who had special tools and training to go into collapseed concrete buildings, which is not a simple thing to do And our search and rescue teams were then deployed there within a couple of hours, so they were quick Oh yeah, that's when you can really see that FEMA is real and we could do things The reinforcements showed up tonight At the center of it all, of course, is the bombed out shell of the federal office building, and in its shadow the exhausted, who for a day and a half now have sifted through its debris and counted its dead and seen up close Why they call it terror The bombing was part of an alarming trend. Anti government extremists were becoming more active and more violent After the attack, the White House brought in a new number two official at FEMA, a man with experience monitoring and investigating terrorism, including far right militias. I'm Mike Walker, the deputy Director of FEMA And I'm one of the newest employees of FEMA. Mike's a legend in the business Tim Manning held the same deputy director role during the Obama administration. Now he's a professor at Georgetown University, but earlier in his career, Mike Walker was his mentor Mike's been confirmed by the Senate. He's held a number of senior roles. He's been around, seen, and been part of just about everything in the past forty plus years of emergency management and homeomeland security. When Tim was preparing for his own Senate confirmation hearings, Mike warned Tim about the job he was about to take at FEMA. told him a story that's never been reported before now It happened in nineteen ninety nine He's in the new role at FEMA. He was gone a lot. These are very demanding jobs traveling around the country, dealing with disaster response He was commuting often between FEMA headquarters in DC and his home in West Virginia, where he lived with his wife He needed help around the house and there was a person in the neighborhood who came by and offered his services as a handyan. For a few weeks, the handyman comes by to repair windows, fix doors, whatever it might be Mike and his wife were pretty happy with his work Until he got a call from the FBI one day asking if he knew who this person was Mike said, Well, yeah, he's our handyman doing work for us. And the FBI said, Well, he's not. he's actually undercover He's a militia member So was sent here to get close to you and Watch your movements, figure out your patterns, try to collect information he's there surveilling you as a spy. Oh my God Fortunately, nothing dangerous ever happened for Mike's family, I suppose having an undercover militia operative in your home for a time is dangerous in itself. I don't know whatever kind of dangerous plots might have been. in the works before the FBI figured out who he was and what was happening and interdicted I mean, what when I hear this story, it doesn't sound real. It sounds like a movie like noir. Yeah. I wish it was a more fiction It's the kind of thing that you're always worried about and You know, you think about in the middle of the night, is my family safe and am I doing all the right things? And You think about that as like, oh, that's so far fetched that would never happen, but you know, here it did happen When I first heard this story, I thought it could be explained simply by the rise of extremist militia groups in America. But the more I learned about FEMA, its secretive origins, its unhinged leadership under Reagan The more I realized that the agency that was born of the paranoas of the twentieth century had been met with paranoia in return W While reporting this series, I spoke to FEMA workers from just about every era of the agency. And I've heard too many stories of threats from conspiracy theorists to chase them all down. But for now, here's one more FEMA official from the nineties told me that he'd seen FEMA head James Lee Witt walking around with the U.S. Marsall seecurity detail, but never learned why After some digging, I discovered that in nineteen ninety eight, Witt was asked to meet with the FBI. An agent told him that a militia group had been selling VHS tapes with his home address and information on his kids and wife death threats were credible enough that Witt was told to stop taking public transportation to work early in the morning. As you'll learn in the coming weeks, these plots against FEMA's leadership foreshadow its current day unraveling But in the early two thousands, as FEMA was forced to shapeshift after nine eleven, it wasn't anti government militias that ultimately took down the agency that James Lee Witt built. M as an independent agency as an organization that responded for eight years to the American people's needs. That has been destroyed It's not there now.