Few public organizations have attracted the ire of the Trump administration like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). America’s premier disaster response unit found itself the target of right-wing conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 election, and earned a seemingly intractable enemy in the president himself following allegations of political bias.

Now, FEMA is in limbo, with staffers anxiously awaiting how the new administrator — Cameron Hamilton — will implement recommendations made by a White House review council on its structure and operating model.

Andrew Rumbach — Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute — joins the pod to unpack the proposed changes and evaluate the performance of FEMA under Trump 2.0. Andrew brings more than two decades of research on disaster recovery and finance to the conversation, along with the real-time, data-driven perspective he shares each week in his newsletter, Place + Resilience.

He explains the mechanics of the major disaster declaration process, and walks through evidence showing how declarations are taking significantly longer under Trump relative to other presidents. He also touches on reporting of a partisan divide in the allocation of FEMA resources — with Democratic states missing out on much-needed disaster recovery assistance.

Andrew then turns to the broader architecture of disaster recovery finance, explaining how a long-awaited change to the Community Development Block Grant–Disaster Recovery program — brought into effect by Congress earlier this year — could change the flow of dollars through the system for the better.