FEMA is unprepared for the next Hurricane Katrina, disaster experts warn    » Yale Climate Connections

Stephen Murphy had only lived in New Orleans for a few weeks when Hurricane Katrina began brewing in the Gulf. Murphy, then a graduate student and now the director of Tulane University’s disaster management program, decided to evacuate.

“I was a newbie to New Orleans,” he said. “My neighbors were kind of like, ‘What are you doing? Why are you evacuating? We’re having a party.’ I joked – I had a pickup truck with my kayak in it. I said, ‘You want me to leave this for you?’”

When Katrina came ashore near the Louisiana-Mississippi border on August 29, 2005, the impact in New Orleans was dire. The city, something of a bowl surrounded by levees that broke during the storm, flooded and stayed that way for more than a month. Over 80% of city residents evacuated ahead of the storm. Many of those who stayed couldn’t afford to leave. At least 1,833 people were killed.

In the days and years following Katrina, the federal response received intense scrutiny. The response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which is tasked with mitigating, preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters, was widely seen as a failure. FEMA, Murphy said, became a four-letter word in New Orleans.

Samantha Montano, the author of “Disasterology” – a book about U.S. vulnerability to disasters in the face of climate change – and an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, said that in the past two decades, FEMA and the emergency management profession as a whole have been trying to improve systems and processes so that a disaster like Katrina doesn’t happen again. 

But as the Trump administration cuts federal workers, denies disaster relief, and toys with the idea of abolishing FEMA altogether, that progress is at risk. Meanwhile, the cuts come at a time of mounting vulnerability as climate change makes hurricanes more dangerous and deadly for growing coastal populations. And when disaster survivors get angry at FEMA, it’s usually because they want more support from the agency, not less. 

“I do think it’s safe to say that many of the gains that FEMA has made since Katrina have backslid in the past four months,” Montano said.

Experts worry that what went wrong ahead of Katrina is happening again

In 2003, FEMA was absorbed into the Department of Homeland Security, which was created in the aftermath of 9/11. This change was part of a large-scale reorganization of the federal government to focus on terrorism. FEMA was still reeling from that reorganization when Katrina made landfall, said Sarah DeYoung, a professor at the University of Delaware’s disaster research center.

“Many disaster scientists and experts agree that putting FEMA under the Department of Homeland Security, under their umbrella, rather than its own cabinet, with direct access to the president in terms of expertise and communication, is one of the reasons why Hurricane Katrina ended up being managed so poorly,” DeYoung said.

Montano said that the reorganization in 2003 led to a brain drain of talented, expert staff from FEMA, which she sees echoed in the current climate at the agency. Reports suggest that FEMA has lost about a quarter of its full-time staff, including senior leadership like the head of FEMA’s storm response center, who submitted his resignation June 11. 

“The loss of that expertise within FEMA is something that you can’t rebuild quickly, and if you don’t have it in a response, things can go sideways very fast,” she said. 

Back in 2003, before Katrina, FEMA’s director Michael Brown wrote that the post-9/11 reorganization would lead to “an ineffective and uncoordinated response” during disasters. Brown resigned, disgraced, two weeks after Katrina’s landfall. 

“That was a time when political favorites were appointed to these top-level positions with very little emergency management expertise. And now we’re seeing that happening again,” DeYoung said recently. “It’s really concerning because there are some really critical decisions that need to be made, particularly during hurricane season, that rely on that technical expertise of disaster management.”

Reporting and leaked audio from meetings at FEMA under the current acting Administrator David Richardson point to an unprepared and chaotic period at the agency. 

“I wouldn’t say [Brown] was qualified to lead FEMA, but he had some familiarity with emergency management. Richardson does not have that at all,” Montano said. “It’s very clear that he does not know any of the basics.”

Before his appointment as acting administrator, Richardson served in the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office and in the U.S. Marine Corps. 

In early June, Reuters reported that Richardson had told staff he didn’t know that the United States has a hurricane season. Staff said they were unsure whether Richardson was joking. 

Could states manage a Katrina-like storm without federal support?

President Donald Trump and others within his administration have said that they would like to abolish FEMA and leave disaster management up to state governments. Three-quarters of Americans oppose eliminating FEMA, according to new polling from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the publisher of this site.

Montano said that no state could manage a major storm without federal support.

“The second you talk about needing to do rescues into the thousands, they cannot do that on their own,” she said. “When you start talking about any kind of large-scale evacuation, they’re not doing that on their own. Even mass sheltering operations – Florida and Texas, are in the best position to do that – but even then, I don’t think that that is happening on their own. They are absolutely reliant on federal resources during response and recovery, and I don’t know how the narrative has gotten out that they are not.”

Murphy said that the immediate aftermath of Katrina might offer insight into what a major storm without adequate federal response would look like.

“I think we saw a little taste of what that was going to be like in the first couple of days before, for example, Russel Honoré arrived,” he said. “That really started putting some command and control presence, and some accountability, and structure to the actual immediate response and into a little bit of the shorter-or-near-term recovery.”

Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré managed the military response to Hurricane Katrina. In a recent interview, he said the military was involved because at the time, the Louisiana and Mississippi National Guards were in Iraq, and the governors of those states asked for military support. Their mission, he said, was to save lives, evacuate people, and provide food and medicine. FEMA helped coordinate their work with the state of Louisiana and reimbursed the Department of Defense for the costs spent during their mission.

“When a state gets hit, as in the case of Florida, Texas, or Louisiana, the three most prominent states that have taken the most damage over the years from storms, a lot of their first responders and a lot of capabilities are either overwhelmed or did not operationalize,” Honoré said. “In the case of New Orleans, all the hospitals were closed because of the storm, so we had no option but to evacuate people.”

FEMA’s work continues after the immediate disaster recovery phase. After Katrina, Murphy returned to New Orleans to finish his graduate studies and interned at the city’s newly reorganized Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Response. He then joined the staff and later became the chief of planning. Throughout that time, Murphy and his colleagues across the city oversaw what some considered to be impossible: a rebuilding of New Orleans. That work relied on federal funding and coordination. 

“Other federal agencies don’t just show up at a disaster on their own. They are coordinated through FEMA,” Montano said. “So there’s this question of like, if FEMA doesn’t exist and a hurricane happens, do those other federal agencies still respond? If those functions still exist within them, then I would assume yes, but there’s a question then of who is coordinating them. You can’t just have 15 different federal agencies showing up in Texas and have them know what to do.”

FEMA also finances mitigation projects, which help communities prevent emergencies, and preparedness projects, which can help limit the loss of life and property during disasters. After Katrina, New Orleans’ system of floodgates and levees was rebuilt with a nearly $15 billion federal investment. Murphy said that New Orleans’ levees protect the city much better than they did in 2005.

In April 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would not allocate $750 million in funding for flood or other hazard mitigation projects this year through the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program. Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, has asked the president to reconsider.

“This program is a lifesaver and a cost-saver that President Trump supported during his first term,” Cassidy said in a speech on the Senate floor. 

But the administration continues to double down on the idea that states can manage disasters on their own.

On June 10, 2025, President Trump said, “If a certain state, as an example, gets hit by a hurricane or tonight, that’s what the governor – you know, the governor should be able to handle it,” Trump said. “And frankly, if they can’t handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn’t be governor.”

Despite FEMA’s failures during Katrina, every expert Yale Climate Connections spoke with shuddered at the thought of any state experiencing a storm like Katrina without FEMA’s coordination and checkbook. Katrina’s costs topped $125 billion in 2005. The state of Louisiana’s total budget that year was $17.5 billion. 

“I don’t think [New Orleans] would have survived,” Murphy said of recovery without federal support.

Storms with major impacts are more likely now than they were 20 years ago

Though New Orleans’ infrastructure was built back stronger after Katrina, climate change has upped the risk of flooding. Because of the geography of the city, nearly every drop of rain that falls into New Orleans must be pumped out. The city frequently floods during routine summer rainstorms when the pump system can’t keep up with increasingly intense rates of rainfall. As climate change warms the atmosphere, it can hold more water, and rain rates increase. 

Hurricanes are also dropping more rain for the same reason. Rainfall totals from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 topped 60 inches in Southeast Texas. And on top of rainfall, fossil fuel pollution has made hurricanes stronger and more destructive by warming ocean waters and raising sea levels above what they were in 2005. 

The waters of the Gulf are also much warmer now than they were in 2005. That increases the likelihood of rapidly intensifying storms. Rapid intensification occurs when a tropical cyclone intensifies at least 35 miles per hour in a 24-hour period, giving people less time to evacuate ahead of a storm. Yale Climate Connections meteorologist Jeff Masters said that the Trump administration’s cuts to the National Weather Service could mean less accurate rapid intensification forecasts. 

The air is hotter now, too. Power outages are common after hurricanes and can leave people without access to air conditioning for weeks as they clean up after the storm in the sweltering summer heat. 

“Last year was hotter than the year before, and this year is going to be hotter than it was last year,” Honoré said. “The deaths we had after [Katrina] were from people that succumbed to not having proper medical care or from heat.”

Montano said that, given climate change, the timing couldn’t be worse for the chaos and cuts to federal emergency management.

“They are breaking the emergency management system that we have as that last resort in response and recovery, and at the same time, are actively increasing our risk and speeding up the climate change process by taking us out of [the] Paris [Agreement] and their energy policy,” Montano said.

Beyond climate change, housing development in hurricane-prone coastal areas has skyrocketed in the last 20 years, putting more people in harm’s way. 

Emergencies are also more likely to compound on each other as vulnerabilities from climate change and development make it increasingly likely that the U.S. will be forced to manage multiple billion-dollar hurricanes in the same season. In 2017, for example, Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria caused massive destruction in a one-month period in Texas, Florida, and Puerto Rico, respectively. This triple-whammy stretched the federal response thin. Murphy expects that the same scenario this year would be even worse since there are fewer staff available to manage and respond. 

“I worry that we are putting our citizens and our residents and population at extreme risk if we have one of these catastrophic hurricanes coming through,” he said.