When Nobody Comes to Fix the Bridge

Two things happened this week. First, the Atlantic hurricane season began. Then David Richardson, the acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said that he didn’t know there was a hurricane season. Naturally, I thought of the Roman Empire. 

One could draw interesting parallels between Richardson — a wholly unqualified former artillery officer — and the absentee barbarian generals who presided over their sclerotic empire’s descent into a world of abandoned public services, but that’s not why I thought of ancient Rome.

In the aftermath of the 2007 financial crisis, my wife was working for an already understaffed Florida county planning department. Every day, she commuted to a building in a bayside downtown that flooded during thunderstorms. There was no shortage of work. The county laid people off as the crisis deepened, doubling everyone up on jobs and pledging no more layoffs. Three months later, there were more cuts, more survivors loaded up with more full-time jobs and another announcement that the cuts had ended. Three months later, they did it again. When she was finally laid off at the end of yet another cycle of cuts, at least three full jobs and parts of others went simultaneously unstaffed.

It’s hard to get a job in urban planning without working for the government — and harder still when they’re all flirting with bankruptcy — which is how she and I found ourselves on a contract gig a year later, driving all over Florida in a rented Prius, cataloging bridge after bridge. As it turned out, in terms of structural soundness, about 80% of them fell within the holy-shit-you-should-already-be-in-the-middle-of-fixing-this category.

I think of that last detail every time a familiar observation flits around social media, which it does with increasing regularity these days, always in the voice of a newly, quietly astonished person. It goes a little something like this: I just realized that most people experienced the fall of the Roman Empire as, “One day a bridge collapsed, and no one came to fix it.”

I’ve lived in America’s ground zero for hurricanes for over 30 years. In that time, FEMA has mostly been a reliable, adaptive federal agency, on the ground seemingly instantly when friends have needed it. When it has not, it’s either been because a disaster’s devastation has delayed access to its most affected areas, or because Republicans have tried to strengthen their argument that government does not work by staffing it with leaders who cannot successfully operate it.

The second Trump administration appears to be following that playbook. It’s possible that Trump put an artillery instructor at the head of FEMA because he wants to explore non-nuclear tactical strikes on hurricanes, but it’s more likely he just doesn’t care. (As much as Trump likes destroying things, he still put a massively underqualified, serially bankrupting security-risk drunk in charge of the military.) FEMA, after all, falls under the aegis of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, whose qualifications for the gig include running a family farm, dog execution, ducking responsibility in two different legislatures and going on Fox News to get away from her former day job of running a state with a population less than one-sixth the size of greater Miami.

Both Noem and her spokesperson have described FEMA as “bloated,” with the latter adding that it is shifting from “D.C.-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens.” The D.C.-centric knock sounds like autofill, given that 99.99% of people who interact with FEMA encounter it somewhere else. (Worse: FEMA disaster plans are local plans; its lumbering D.C. weight mostly constitutes sitting down with local departments and drafting a plan based on asking, “OK, what are your priorities?”) Meanwhile, the idea that it should become inexpensively lean, nimble and more responsive echoes former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s idea for restructuring the military, before he launched an invasion and occupation of a country he showed up to at least a million men short. 

If that metaphor seems too abstracted, consider that no disaster victim waiting for bottled water and/or MREs ever said, “You know, I wish there were fewer people handing these out so they could be even more responsive.” While I’m sure the Manhattan Institute has a fellow in Supply-Side Hydrologics, nobody trying to get fresh water to put in their baby’s formula thinks “trickle down” is the correct delivery system. Making a disaster agency better by cutting funding and personnel is an idea so stupid that you have to pay people to think it.

Even if there were enough logic here to assemble a viable thought, it would fall apart upon light examination. The new lean and responsive FEMA left over 17 disaster requests hanging while it took over seven weeks to respond to Mississippi’s request for aid after a series of deadly tornadoes. It cut billions in grant programs for state disaster management, specifically disempowering them to provide relief for their citizens. FEMA’s 2025 hurricane plan was delayed and delayed until the nimble minds of the Trump administration decided to copy and reissue 2024’s, which calls for disaster responses that are now all but impossible thanks to a 9% staffing cut that claimed the personnel needed to enact them.

Devolution to the states won’t make up the difference. Climate change is expanding the reach and intensity of disasters to regions that never had to save up for them before. Worse, states can’t deficit spend like the federal government, and with once-in-a-century disasters showing up decennially, rainy-day/flood/wildfire/storm funds either can’t be replenished fast enough or can’t meet the original price tag in the first place. North Carolina was still coming up about $20 billion short on their bill even before Trump dropped by the “every Republican accusation is a confession department” and decided to follow up his campaign condemnations about Biden’s FEMA hanging the state out to dry by announcing that he wouldn’t be honoring the Biden administration pledge to extent FEMA’s 100% disaster coverage.

As bad as these cuts are, FEMA won’t disappear this year, and it may be years until it disappears for the sorts of disasters that earn a week’s worth of media coverage or more. But even now, its ability or willingness to combat those more localized and seemingly ephemeral catastrophes is in jeopardy. At the same moment that different approaches have revealed how much more coastal towns are already flooding, the administration has already cut funding to agencies that observe, anticipate and predict disasters, mitigating their effects and keeping the human and economic costs lower than they could be. (To be fair, it’s not happening if they don’t do anything to observe it happening. Better still, friends who are definitely not doing any unobserved things can’t be held civilly liable. To borrow the most hectoring boxing manager voice you can imagine: “Ya can’t sue what you can’t see, kid!”) In terms of hurricanes and tornadoes, that means fewer weather balloons, fewer meteorologists to digest the data and call local officials before it’s too late, fewer predictive models to point where to send relief. Where you live, it might mean cutting watershed and floodplain management or inhibiting the conditions that make a forest a tinderbox. These are all the first resorts, and we’re walking away from them.

What we’re seeing now with FEMA is the falsest promise of the Reagan Revolution coming to its final resting place: the lie that if we stop paying for things in just the right way, they will keep working anyway — because we hoped hard enough, because something else will pay for them, or because people who love public service will develop the occupational strength of the three employees who used to sit around them.

Much like a pandemic, a natural disaster creates a few problems but reveals many more you already had. Disaster tears apart your town, and suddenly you see all the stitches not sewn up in time, a vast quilt of failure stretching past decades: the power lines that went unburied, the traffic lights still hanging by wires, the firebreaks that weren’t cleared and the controlled burns unmanaged, the levees untended and the diversionary infrastructure unconstructed, the braces and supports unreplaced, the sprawl and congestion left to knot together, the monitoring equipment that wasn’t worth the expense, and the emergency staff and training that seemed too expensive when you could just pretend that volunteers would be enough.

We have spent my lifetime running America’s infrastructure like a guy who finds a termite in his house, figures he has three to eight years to worry about it, goes $50,000 in debt on a sports car and counts on moving in with some new squeeze before it becomes a big deal. Time and again, we have turned our backs to the first resorts until we found ourselves here, with a malicious dumbass naming unqualified bozos to dismantle the last one. It should be fine, as long as nothing bad happens. 

No one at the start of the 4th century hoped to see their great grandchildren inhabit a world that was just the ruins of their own. But one day the bridge collapsed, and no one put it back up; the flood washed away a part of the road, and no one re-laid its stones. Each generation nurtured just a little more neglect without asking how much around them was just an illusion that everyone agreed upon. Then something bad happened.