Restoring Responsibility: DOGE Should Return Disaster Management to State and Local Hands

In a recent address, President Biden remarked “workers are still coming home on a dirt road and without electricity, a village without a school, a city without a hospital, or a country under crushing debt.” His speech could have easily been about the hurricane-stricken communities of Appalachia, in dire need of help from a nation that has drained its coffers elsewhere.

But, despite the fact that countless North Carolinians have been left to endure the impending winter without shelter, it turns out the president’s comments were not at all about North Carolina, but about the West African country of Angola. Yet Biden’s seemingly newfound compassion for the people of Angola did not stop with evocative descriptions of distant, destitute rondavel villages. The White House also announced an astounding $1 billion in U.S. humanitarian aid to Africa — nearly double the $536 million FEMA claims to have provided Americans impacted by Hurricane Helene and related recovery projects.

FEMA — according to its recently published figures — has only provided 42 households to victims of Helene, many of whom are still living in tents. These reports come just weeks after a FEMA employee was scandalously terminated for directing relief personnel to avoid properties with Trump flags, prompting an investigation by the U.S. House of Representatives.

This is bureaucracy at its worst: politicized, incompetent, and indifferent to the people it claims to serve. While the formation of Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) may tempt one to expect a reprioritization of American resources, foreign aid is not disappearing any time soon. On the domestic spending front, however, this new agency could inspire a national conversation as to whether FEMA — and the centralized disaster response monopoly it represents — are necessary at all, or if state and local authorities are better-suited to lead such recovery efforts.

Local governments are heavily dependent on federal funding for their emergency management functions, not just for large projects or specialized equipment, but on FEMA or Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grants covering emergency management staff. This leaves city and county officials with little autonomy, caught in a web of nebulous regulatory entanglements. A near-perfect example of this occurred in October when the emergency manager in Lake Lure, Tennessee threatened to arrest volunteers for not coordinating with the Federal Aviation Administration.

In the years after 9/11, municipal governments — caught in the frenzy of the “war on terror” — began exchanging their sovereignty for federal funding. Inspired by a vision of a robust, militarized national disaster response apparatus impervious to the next terrorist attack, mayors and governors reduced their offices to little more than federal outposts.

These leaders often make the needs of their own communities secondary to the demands of the national government; in other cases, officials in disaster-stricken areas are powerless to criticize mismanagement at the national level out of fear of losing federal funds. Last week, the mayor of Black Mountain, North Carolina went on live television to defend

FEMA’s infamously in adequate response to his community. Instead of outrage because many of his constituents have spent over 60 days living in tents, he defended the agency, saying, “It takes a while to do this.”

Biden’s billion-dollar gift to Africa would have likely gone unnoticed if not for the people freezing at night in North Carolina. To avoid this dreadful state of affairs in the future, the DOGE must correct incentives so that local and state governments’ focus is on the people who elected them. This means returning responsibility for emergency management back to the levels of government closest to the people, taking advantage of the unique understanding resident leaders have about their own neighborhoods.