A tangle of investigations at every level of government defined the years after the floodwaters receded, informing a wide-scale rethinking of federal government disaster response.
“Katrina is kind of the event of record in modern US emergency management that has kind of guided the work of the field the past 20 years,” Montano said, pointing to an increased emphasis on expertise, research and the professionalisation of the emergency management field, as well as increased emphasis on equity and a pivot towards more preventative measures.
During Trump’s first term, in 2020, FEMA launched the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) programme, aimed at pre-emptively building resiliency against natural disasters. The administration of former President Joe Biden surged funding to mitigation programmes, with a renewed emphasis on climate change resilience.
But even as the woes unveiled by Katrina continued to resonate, a counterforce in US politics, fuelled by unrest over the rising price of emergency response, continued to grow.
Despite the federal government’s shortcomings ahead of Katrina, federal disaster response had for decades been seen as a relatively bipartisan issue, Loyola’s Jerolleman explained. Increasingly over the last 10 to 15 years, it has been lumped into wider criticism of social safety net programmes, which have been largely curtailed under Trump’s second term.
Indeed, Project 2025, a conservative policy plan that has had an outsized influence over the Trump administration, envisioned seriously shrinking federal spending on emergency management and disasters.
This includes creating a higher threshold for emergency declarations, which activate federal resources, terminating disaster prevention grants, and doing away with the federal flood insurance programme.
“There is certainly an ideological split in this country with regards to how much responsibility there is to people, how much we should have a social safety net,” Jerolleman said.
“And within that is this question of ‘deservedness,’” she added. “This question of ‘Should people be doing more to help themselves? What does that look like?’ – and that is an underlying tension in our democracy that has had an impact on disasters.”
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