There Are Too Many Federal Disasters
In order for FEMA to take care of large-scale catastrophes, state and local governments have to take responsibility for smaller ones.
The federal government is mobilizing its resources as Hurricane Florence bears down on the Southeast. Cleanup and recovery are likely to be enormously expensive, and if the president formally declares it a disaster, the federal government will foot most of the bill. In recent decades, though, such disaster declarations have proliferated, leaving the Federal Emergency Management Agency spread thin, and straining its resources. If the government is going to continue to meet the challenge of potentially catastrophic events like Florence, it will need to retune its approach to smaller-scale disasters, so that it can focus its
