Hurricane Katrina fueled major reforms at FEMA. Now, its future is uncertain

The Brief

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency became synonymous with chaos and dysfunction that crippled response efforts and left people stranded on rooftops for days.

Twenty years after the nation’s most destructive disaster killed roughly 1,400 people, experts have a much clearer picture of what went wrong, and whether FEMA was a scapegoat for massive failures at all levels of government.

Now, with the Trump administration slashing billions of dollars from disaster preparedness programs and floating the idea of dismantling FEMA as a whole , emergency management workers fear drastic cuts will only shift the financial burden from paying the cost of disaster resources – to paying the cost of human suffering.

"We always pay for these events. It'