Terry Gerton  FEMA has had a tough 18 months. They were significantly affected by the workforce drawdowns in 2025. They haven’t had a confirmed director or administrator. They were in the middle of the government shutdowns, both the government-wide shutdown and the 76-day DHS shutdown. And now they’ve got the FEMA Review Council report out there and some competing legislation. Tell me from your perspective, as you’ve looked at this really kind of across the space, what are the competing visions for what a reformed FEMA should look like and what it should do?

Andy Winkler No, that’s a great question. And to be fair to FEMA, I think they’ve had harder than the last 18 months. They’ve had a rough few years. It’s an agency. I think people uniquely know what FEMA is, but they don’t exactly know what all FEMA does. And they don’t know what All FEMA has been tasked with, which I think is part of the problem. Over the years, their mission has grown and grown and grown without either the workforce or the resources to match the demands that are put on the agency. And so when we think about the problem structurally that it has managerial, managerially that it has, you know, these are longstanding challenges that have only gotten worse over the years. And yes, acutely worse in the last 18 months. I think when we talk about the FEMA Review Council and the legislation that’s been proposed in Congress. There’s pretty broad sort of alignment on the diagnosis of the problem. We don’t always think that, but I think there’s actually a lot in common between both of their visions. They both see and agree, I think, that FEMA’s programs are administratively burdensome, that disaster assistance coming out of FEMA reaches survivors far, far too slowly, and that states need greater flexibility and support. How they get to those places, their exact sort of structural changes they’re proposing, do diverge. And I think that’s where we spend a lot of our time thinking about how we can bring what is a pretty broad view that FEMA needs to change to align those specifics on how they get that change. I think I can go down a few sort of structural differences between their competing visions, as you would say, of what FEMA’s future is.

Terry Gerton This seems like a classic public administration case study. And one of the places you could start is its organizational alignment, right? Some have a vision that it stays in DHS, some have a mission that it would come out and be its own independent agency. From your perspective, what are the pros and cons of both of those options?

Andy Winkler I actually think, so you brought up the last 18 months, there’s no perfect kind of case study of why FEMA shouldn’t be in DHS, than over the last eighteen months. You know, we saw FEMA funding, not really politically divisive, but tied up in broader conversations, political conversations about other sources of funding to DHS. I think that’s a great example of some of the challenges that FEMA faces, not always of its own accord. So when we talk about kind of structural differences, pros, cons between where FEMA sits within the federal government, you know I think a lot of people that you talk to who have worked at FEMA or who have work in the federal government sort of recognize that moving FEMA out of DHS could be very difficult. You know, not from any sort of of policy reason other than there are some practical things about sitting within an agency, you know, who covers the payroll and the technical IT systems you use and these sort of kind of nitty-gritty things that would be operationally difficult to unwind having had FEMA sit within DHS for so many years. So I think that is one key consideration. It’s just mechanically, We don’t very often move sub-agencies out of federal agencies. It’s practically difficult. And politically, there are some differences of opinion. You know, some people see FEMA’s alignment with DHS on cybersecurity and other issues that are newer challenges that we face as a country as beneficial. But then to your point, you know that we talked about earlier, there are other things like the funding question that kind of show you how FEMA can get tied up with things unrelated to it that actually disrupt its mission and disrupt it from being able to accomplish it. I think there are probably some more there, but those are the big ones.

Terry Gerton Andy Winkler is the managing director of housing and infrastructure policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center. So let’s think about the FEMA Review Council Report that’s out there, HR 4669. If by some strange stroke of luck we actually could get agreement and legislation on a FEMA reform package, your report makes the point that this is not an overnight transformation, that it is going to take years. What would have to happen? Even in the case where we did have an agreement on new mission alignment, whatever, to actually make the changes.

Andy Winkler I mean, I think for one, you have to have a FEMA workforce that, you know, has the capacity to help train and get states ready to take on the burden of what it does already. You have a lot of states who I don’t think necessarily have done the legwork of a Florida, California, Texas, et cetera, because they haven’t had many catastrophic disasters. That doesn’t mean they can’t have one in the future. It’s for most states, not a question of will they, it’s when will they. And so building that capacity when people don’t see the risk, I think is very difficult, and there needs to be sort of incentives or, you know, carrots or sticks to get states to where they need to be. And that’s a process that takes time when, you know, state budgets are trapped, and they have processes that don’t go all year and you know these are things to align everything in a perfect way, it will just take time. Things don’t move that quickly.

Terry Gerton Let’s take the opposite side of that coin. There’s a lot of political pressures and a lot different things for members of Congress to pay attention to. What if we just keep kicking this can down the road and we don’t come to an agreed upon position on what FEMA should look like and how it should be structured? What is the impact for future disaster response?

Andy Winkler I think the agency, by being in this holding pattern, you know, first we were waiting to kind of figure out where the administration stood on a lot of these issues. We were waiting for the FEMA review council report. We have the clarity of the administration’s position through that report, but we are kind of still in the same place if we think about it. You know, the administration is making some changes, it can administratively. You know, Congress is doing the same thing it usually does. It’s giving the money, but it’s not really changing the programs. And so as an agency, it has all the same challenges. It’s still losing workers. There’s still a lack of clarity around what qualifies as a, you know, federally declared disaster, what doesn’t, what gets money, what, doesn’t. There’s, still burdensome processes for individuals and for localities that are facing a natural disaster. So nothing has changed and the severity of the challenges that we face will only get worse. We’re seeing more wildfires, more devastating hurricanes, all of that, you know, we really need to be prepared and start to think about not just at the federal government, but at every single level from the individual household up.

Terry Gerton Do you have a professional prediction on which way it will go?

Andy Winkler See, I work at a bipartisan organization, so I’m inherently an optimistic person. I do think, particularly after major disasters, major catastrophes, we have a tendency to regroup and think about what went wrong. If we think about all the past big disaster reform bills, they happened after really big disasters. My concern is I would love to do the hard work to hash out these differences before we wait for a disaster, instead of rushing something after, we’re forced to reckon with the failures of our system. But sometimes that’s what it takes to get us to do the right thing.