Biden’s FEMA director tried to fix the agency. Did she succeed?

When President Joe Biden nominated Deanne Criswell to serve as the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2021, she received a unanimous confirmation, a rare gesture of bipartisan support from the bitterly divided U.S. Senate. A longtime firefighter who served overseas in the Colorado Air National Guard, Criswell also had decades of emergency management experience not just with FEMA, but in local emergency response leadership roles in Colorado and New York City.

Criswell knew how the system worked at FEMA, but her mandate was to change the status quo at an agency that is often accused of acting too slowly after disasters — and of being far too slow to adapt to climate change. In her three years leading the agency, she has attempted to overhaul FEMA’s disaster aid programs, overseen billions of dollars in new spending on forward-looking adaptation projects, and navigated tough disputes over the rising cost of insurance and reconstruction in vulnerable areas. Her goal was not just to ensure that FEMA ran well during disasters but also to shift the agency’s culture, making it more responsive to survivors’ needs and more forward-looking about disaster preparedness.

With peak hurricane season approaching, Grist sat down with Criswell to discuss how she’s handled some of FEMA’s biggest challenges and how she’s attempted to transform the agency from the inside. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. Among communities that get hit with a lot of disasters, FEMA has a reputation for slowness and bureaucracy. From your perspective, after both working here and being a FEMA customer, how much of that is merited?

A. We’ve heard that a lot, and I think that there’s a lot of people that still have memories of Hurricane Katrina — they think of the FEMA of today as the FEMA from Katrina. We are a different team. We respond faster. We have more resources for recovery. We have more resources to help reduce impact, more resilience programs. We know that recovery is really complicated, and some communities are more complex than others. But recovery is doable, and so what we have to do is work with a community to understand what their recovery needs are. We have these integrated recovery teams that go in and don’t just implement FEMA programs, but they help bring the whole space — federal agencies, philanthropies, and nonprofits — together to help identify what that community’s recovery goals are and help them with that complicated road to recovery. While I think some of [the criticism] is warranted at times, I think that we are a very different agency than we were after Katrina, and we’re making huge gains. 

Q. Earlier this year, FEMA unveiled a set of reforms to its individual assistance programs, cutting red tape and offering survivors more money for food and housing after disasters. These reforms address many of the longest-standing complaints and criticisms about how that program works. Why didn’t this happen earlier?

A. We’ve been working on that since the day that I came into this office. I think this really came about through hearing from the people that are trying to get assistance and the struggles and the barriers that they’re facing. I’ve been a local emergency manager in a small community in Colorado. I’ve been a local emergency manager in New York City. So I know what it’s like to be a customer of FEMA. In my very first year, I visited a lot of our joint field offices to hear from people and hear some of the challenges that they were facing. 

I think that lens helps us keep it at the top of our priority list, and helps us keep focused on putting people first, and always trying to understand their barriers, and knowing that we can’t just have a one-size-fits-all approach to the delivery of our programs. So I think a lot of it really has to do with the fact that we’ve had a lived experience of being on the other side.

Q. FEMA’s resilience programs allocate billions of dollars to climate adaptation and disaster preparedness. But a large share of the money from programs like Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, goes to white and wealthy areas, and there are a few “superuser” states that get a lot of the money. I’m wondering what FEMA has done or could still do to address those disparities.

A. When I came in, the first round of BRIC money was going out. Under a previous resilience program, there was a cap of $5 million federal spending, and BRIC gave us a $50 million cap, so people were really excited. But we saw from the first round that the structure that we had put in place was certainly not representative of all communities across America, and it really seemed to favor some of our coastal communities. So every year we have made adjustments to ensure everybody has a fair chance in the competitive side of the program. We have direct technical assistance, which is also making a big impact — bringing in experts, especially for our most under-resourced communities that don’t necessarily have the expertise or the personnel or the time to be able to think about the next mitigation [project] that they can do. We continue to expand that every year. 

What I’ve asked my team to do now is to study the return on investment of resilience projects to see what’s working. We want to see projects succeed, and sometimes we see projects that don’t get across the finish line because of a poor start. We’ll continue to refine the way that we are scoring these projects to ensure that communities that have the greatest need can get some of the benefit — for instance we’re adding points to the score for new applicants, or if you’re in a [vulnerable area].

Q. In response to protests from environmental groups and cities such as Phoenix, which have criticized FEMA for not responding to heat waves, FEMA has said that it can only declare a disaster when state and local financial resources are exceeded. But few communities apply for heat disaster declarations because it’s difficult to show how heat waves overwhelm local finances. Do you think FEMA can or should modify its threshold for declaring a heat disaster? And if it did, what could FEMA do to help residents during a heat wave? 

A. I’m going to start with the preparedness side. We know heat comes every year, just like we know hurricanes come to the Gulf Coast and the East Coast every year. So the individual preparedness piece is really important, and we can’t negate that. We need people to know what their risk is, know what kinds of severe weather events are going to impact them, and what their personal needs are. If I know that I have a condition that makes me more vulnerable to heat, what am I going to do during extreme heat days if my power goes out? We also can help reduce the impact through our mitigation programs — we’ve got many communities that are using BRIC funding to plant tree canopies to reduce the impact from urban heat islands, or painting roofs white, or putting in place splash pads for kids. That reduces the overall impact.

But let’s go into emergency response. I was working in New York City during COVID, and we were very concerned about the number of people that didn’t have air conditioning and the fact that we didn’t want to put them in congregate settings. So New York City utilized money [from the federal housing department’s home energy assistance program LI-HEAP] to put air conditioners in people’s homes. From a cost perspective, if that was a disaster declaration, could FEMA have reimbursed the city for the air conditioners that they put in? I don’t know. Perhaps, but it also takes other agencies, right? We need a whole-of-government solution to help these communities. 

I think about what happened in Houston with Hurricane Beryl recently, and the power outages. What could we or could we not do there? We could use some of our programs to perhaps help individuals that are vulnerable make sure that they have a place to go, like a cooling center, or if it’s a long period of time and they have to relocate somewhere, perhaps our programs could help there. We are not opposed to having a state come in and ask for a heat declaration. I just need to know what I’m reimbursing them for that isn’t part of their normal budget. Some of the things that I read are like, “We want FEMA to be able to pay for cooling centers.” Well, I don’t like the phrase “pay for a cooling center” because it makes it sound like I’m building something brand new, and really I’m just opening up the library, or I’m having people go to the library.

Q. Since Hurricane Ian struck Florida in 2022, I’ve heard from people trying to rebuild in Lee County that rising flood insurance costs are prohibitively expensive and rebuilding a house to code is really, really costly — so much so that a lot of people just can’t afford it. To what extent is that the intended outcome of these programs — to discourage this kind of waterfront living? How much is this something that you think FEMA or Congress should try to address through affordability mechanisms?

A. I get asked all the time, “Should we let people rebuild there?” And in some areas, I say probably not, and that’s why we have programs to help buy people out and move. But most of the time it’s not a matter of where, it’s a matter of how. When we look at what’s going on in Lee County right now, we don’t want people to rebuild and put their lives at risk. It’s not just about how much it’s going to cost to rebuild that home: During Hurricane Ian, 150 people lost their lives. They were in homes that weren’t elevated high enough, or they chose not to evacuate. 

So this is about not just the cost of rebuilding, but also about: How are we doing everything we can to protect the lives in an area that’s prone to a severe weather event? This is about protecting lives and saving the people that live in those areas, and people will have to make personal choices about whether or not this is the right location for them to live based on what that’s going to require. 

But to your last point about affordability [of flood insurance], we do believe that there are certain communities across the U.S. that are certainly in an area that is at high risk, but they came to be there through an environmental injustice — they’re low-income neighborhoods, but they’re at a high risk, and so their costs are really high. So we do believe an affordability plan is needed to ensure that people can get the type of protection that they need. But we also know that we have homes that are high value and high risk, and we were subsidizing their rates prior to this.

Q. For the second year in a row, FEMA has run low on money and Congress has not acted to replenish its budget. As a result, the agency has once again had to implement “immediate needs funding,” which means it has paused almost all its recovery and resilience projects and restricted spending only to emergency response operations. With peak hurricane season approaching, what’s the realistic worst-case scenario here, and what can FEMA do about it without action from Congress?

A. We’ve done immediate-needs funding in the past, but it has usually been after a major weather event has caused us to expend the funds that we have. What we’re finding right now is, as we close out COVID-19 [reimbursements], all of those bills are coming in. We always want to make sure that we have enough funding to support immediate responses to big incidents like Hurricane Ian, and we go into immediate needs when I reach a balance that’s going to allow me to respond to one of those events. That’s where we’re at now.

On the response side, I keep enough money to respond to one event. As we were watching Hurricane Debby, I was really concerned, because it was going to hit Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and then on up. If it had materialized as we thought it might, that could have drained the rest of the money that I have available very quickly. There’s not much that I can do other than getting a supplemental [appropriation] from Congress, and I have walked the halls of Congress to make sure that they know really where we’re at — once I have that one big event, or maybe two events coming back to back, I’m going to have to come back to them, and they may have to act faster than they’ve planned.

This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/extreme-weather/deanne-criswell-biden-fema-interview-flood-insurance/.

Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at Grist.org