The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, coordinates responses to large disasters that exceed state and local capacity. In recent months, the Trump administration has floated the idea of abolishing the agency. On this episode of Policy Outsider, Rockefeller Institute President Bob Megna is joined by Jackie Bray, commissioner of the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, to discuss what it might mean to eliminate or drastically reduce the scope of FEMA.
Guests
Transcript was generated using AI software and may contain errors.
Joel Tirado 00:00
Welcome to Policy Outsider presented by the Rockefeller Institute of Government. I’m Joel Tirado. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, coordinates responses to large disasters that exceed state and local capacity. In recent months, the Trump administration has floated the idea of abolishing the agency on today’s show, Rockefeller Institute President Bob Megna is joined by Jackie Bray, Commissioner of the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, to discuss what it might mean to eliminate or drastically reduce the scope of FEMA. That conversation is up next.
Bob Megna 01:00
so I want to welcome Jackie Bray to this podcast that we’re doing where we want to talk a little bit about, you know, what’s going on at the federal level with FEMA, and what are the implications if FEMA was eliminated or drastically cut back. So Jackie, what do you think the impact would be if FEMA was eliminated? Or, you know, what? What kind of impact would it have on New York and maybe the other states?
Jackie Bray 01:32
Yeah, well, first, thanks for having me appreciate the chance to have a have a fun conversation with you. Um, you know, I think when we think about disasters and response and recovery, we sort of think of in four buckets, right? We think about preparedness. Are you ready? We think about response, reactive during the event, we think about recovery, so the cleanup, the rebuilding, and then we think about mitigation, right? How do you reduce the chances it’s going to happen again? And what the federal government has been really clear about, you know, what the Trump, Trump, White House and Secretary Nome have been really clear about is that they want to get the federal government out of each piece of this, and pulling out of each piece of this or reducing their role, will have different impacts, right? In response, the immediate response to an event, it’s unlikely to have a massive impact, because I do think we’ll still see the Feds show up. You know, if we’ve got seven days to prepare for a hurricane, they’re going to still send people right in recovery. What they’ve been clear about is they want to really reduce the amount of resources available, not eliminate them. But say, right now, the Feds pay for about 75% if you if a bridge is washed out, feds will pay for 75% of the cost to rebuild it. They want to, you know, we think they want to cut that to like, 50% and limit the total. But we also think in recovery, what they want to do is increase those, what we call the threshold of how big the event has to be for them to even come in. Right last year in New York State, we had three federal disasters, all three of which cost us about $100 million and once a disaster in New York costs anywhere between 30 and 40 million. Usually the feds will come in and help. But the feds are saying now is that number is going to go to like 202 50 million. So in all three of the instances, that was stony broke down in Suffolk County. It was canistil in Steuben County. It was Lowville in Lewis County. The federal government, you know, potentially, in this future state, would not have come in, and that would leave at, at a minimum, in Steuben and Lewis County. These are rural counties. They are income constraint counties that would that would leave incredibly difficult decisions. Do you rebuild? And then, of course, you know cuts to mitigation, cuts to preparedness, to me is like, what are? What are we? Are we cutting off our nose to spite our face, right in a moment where extreme weather is more likely, in a moment where the violence threats are growing. We really want to be less prepared as a nation. I just think it’s makes no sense. Yeah,
Bob Megna 04:28
no, that’s interesting, and maybe it ties to something else, like maybe you could tie it to what’s happening right now in Texas, for example, where that’s a rural part of Texas. And so it kind of ties to what you’re talking about rural parts of New York. It sounds like it’s more than $100 million event, but you know, how would you think about that? And,
Jackie Bray 04:53
yeah, I mean, man, the what’s happening in Texas is heartbreaking and gut wrenching. Um. And, you know, certainly that is a catastrophic event, and a once in 100 year once in 1000 year event. The way I think about the federal cuts as it relates to Texas are really, you know, one are the right people in charge, like emergency management is a profession, you get good at it, and you want emergency managers leading at every level of government during an event that is as catastrophic as what we saw in the in Kerr County and hunt and so are the right people in charge. You know, there’s reporting now that it took FEMA 72 hours to get their search and rescue teams on the ground and their staff on the ground because of cost control measures, professional emergency managers know that time really matters, that pushing decision making down to the lowest level you can reasonably push it down really matters that you have To be willing to move fast and break a few eggs and get on the ground. And so the idea that in a department the size of the Department of Homeland Security, that would all get held up in a moment where it is a really catastrophic event in Texas, in a state that is aligned with this White House, is terrifying when you think about moderate sized events in other states, right? So, I think that’s like real. I think the other thing that’s real is, you know, I think about Texas, there’s all this reporting about the National Weather Service Warning Coordination Meteorologist, and what was the fact that he left under the doge cuts, relevant or not. And you know it would take, or it’s gonna take us a while, to figure out if it was relevant or not. In terms of when warnings were issued, it’s clear the Weather Service did issue warning, and they issued them as they had the information to shoot. But what is real is like if that person with all that institutional knowledge goes away, even if you replace that person, all of that institution, knowledge, all of those relationships matter in events like this. So you know, I call the meteorologist in charge at the Albany forecast office, I call The Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the Albany Forecast Office. If those two guys retired, even though I talk to these guys all the time, it would take me a beat to know who to call. Yeah. And the idea that we have federal leadership who thinks that all of those that institutional knowledge, all of those relationships that are built up over decades of working in the trenches together simply don’t matter, can simply be cut and replaced, is demoralizing, but it’s dangerous. And so I think that I often think that the government work, the public sector work, the sort of public response is really focused during disasters. We see government during disasters. And I think that the intangible of those relationships that trust, that ability to pick up the phone and say, did you send a reverse 911, did you sound the sirens? I’m worried, and have that mean something,
Bob Megna 08:19
yeah. I mean, it’s hard to I always find this too, even even in areas that I know something about, is you don’t know what your value added is sometimes, until the event actually occurs. And then you’re actually doing things that just are natural to you, but are not to the people that are on the ground. Sometimes, yeah, yeah, even, yeah. You know, it’s interesting what you’re saying, and you are an expert in this area. What are some of the things FEMA could do to be better? What are some reforms that might make sense.
Jackie Bray 09:01
Well, listen, there is a ton of room for improvement in the federal bureaucracy that oversees disaster recovery, right? So it is so hard to there is so much work involved in in pulling down federal disaster recovery dollars and streamlining that process is something we should all do, and I think everyone’s on board with and I at you know, and their point is, there’s so much red tape we get. We should get rid of the red tape, right? It should not take years to get checks out the door. We are still paying on sandy projects, right? We shouldn’t be doing that, but that’s actually not what they’re doing right now. Like they could change some of that stuff right now. They haven’t changed that stuff, right so I think that there, you know, I do. I believe that states and localities should invest more in emergency management. I do. I don’t think we can only rely on the federal preparedness grants to fund Emergency Management two years. Ago, Governor Hochul increased the State Office of Emergency Management by 50% increase our headcount by 50% we doubled our field staff with that money, and that was an important state investment in emergency management. I think that we’ve lots of counties across the state whose emergency manager is also their fire coordinator is also their 911 coordinator. I’ve got one county where it’s literally off, also animal control that’s not appropriate right now, right? Like there’s too much going on right now, and so at every level governor, we need to make investments in order to maintain our safety, maintain our preparedness. But saying, I can say that and believe that, and also not think that the Fed should pull out. And what’s happening is, I do understand feeling like if I were running FEMA right now, feeling like states have not invested enough in emergency management preparedness, but then help us invest more. Make that point. Don’t make that point by cutting people off in a minute, in a moment where emergency managers are being asked to do more and more.
Bob Megna 11:09
No, that’s interesting and and you know, talking to you about the Texas situation makes me think back. This was before you were in this role, but when we had the storms hit the Catskills a few years ago, this whole question of having the right alarm system and things like that were were we as prepared back then, as as we should have been, were there? I know that wasn’t as traumatic a situation, but there was a lot of damage. And, yeah, my recollection visiting the site is, you know, this was coming into folks homes and and was a very dangerous situation.
Jackie Bray 11:56
Yeah, I, you know, I don’t know that event well enough to speak to it, but let me speak to Ida, right? I was in New York City for hurricane Ida, and 18 people died in New York in during Hurricane Ida, 13 in New York City, five in Westchester. And when you look at the data of how people died in their basements, largely in New York City, and because they were living in their basements, and they either didn’t get warnings, or if they got warnings, they didn’t know how to use those warnings. And one of the learnings after Ida is that it was a large population of folks living in basements who, who’s for whom English wasn’t their first language, right? And one of the things that New York City did, and New York State did, is ask ourselves after that, what could we do next time. And I know was a situation in which it was catastrophic flooding. It was flooding that New York City has never seen before, like it literally was more rain than we’ve ever measured at one time in New York City. And so what would we do? What would I do today? Well, here’s a couple things that we’ve done right the New York City emergency management team’s done, they’ve they’ve figured out how to send drones to neighborhoods with pre recorded messages in multiple languages that say, move to higher ground. Now you could imagine identifying first responders across the city, whether it’s NYPD or FDNY who speak one of the 13 most spoken languages in New York City, and if you knew where those people were, even if you only had two hours, you could put those people on a fire truck and literally simply drive around the neighborhood on a fire truck, on the public address system, on the fire truck, and say, move to higher ground. Yep, that’s a high tech solution and a low tech solution, right? Yes, all of those take work ahead of the event. If you had not pre recorded the drone messages, bought the drones, trained the drone pilots, you couldn’t do it. You could not do all of that in two hours. If you had not pre identified the first responders, put in the procedure book for the FDNY that that in advance of a catastrophic flood, this is what they’re going to do. Here’s where the people are. Here are their phone numbers. Get them on you couldn’t have done. And so I think that I never think we’re prepared enough. I will never say we’re prepared. Now, sometimes the governor asked me, Do you feel safe today? And I say, you pay me not to feel safe, right? You pay me to be freaked out, right? But I think we’ve gotten much, much better in this state, because I think we’ve taken seriously how to both leverage federal support and federal partnership, but also make it a real estate mission.
Bob Megna 14:39
Yeah, you know, that’s interesting, because I think it raises two points. You know, what you’ve just explained, but every one of these events is different, right? There’s, there’s some aspect of it you haven’t prepared for. How do you how do you think about that? How so that’s. Really more a response. How do you put your arms around that? All right,
Jackie Bray 15:04
we’re gonna do a little emergency management history. So emergency management as we know it today forms sort of after 911 right? It’s the first time the Feds put real money into it prior to 911 emergent like what you would think of as the emergency manager role today, often is called civil defense, coming out of the like Red Scare, right, coming out of nuclear preparedness drills. So after 911 so we’re sort of federal government starts funding this interagency coordination, the facilitation, the communication, the helping decision makers gather all the information, getting people to work together, right interoperability. But still, in that era, you have people. You have some experts that are Weather experts. You get some that are terrorists, and you get some that are chemical, biological, nuclear experts. You’ve got people that are hazmat experts, after Katrina, led by FEMA. I mean, right, Katrina was a disaster for the local, state and the federal emergency, but in the aftermath of it, you have a profession that evolves to be what we call an all hazard response sort of framework. And what that means is that there are fundamental skills that you need, whether or not you’re responding to a mass shooter or a tornado or a train derailment with a hazardous chemical. And you can take, you can train for, frankly, any of those. And if you’re good at one of them, you’re probably going to be good at the others, and you know who to call. So I have, like, I have these sheets of paper that take our plans for everything and boil them down into two pages. Because I think 80 page plans are ridiculous. You never reading an 80 page plan in a disaster and and a piece of one of those pages is, literally, who do I call? Who are the experts? What, what emergency managers know how to do is we know how to get the right experts in the room. We know how to what information we need in order to know how to deploy resources. We know who has what resource right. We know who to call for what resource, not just who to call to tell us the the technical detail. We know how to communicate, we know how to make decisions, we know how to give direction. We know how to deploy people, but we are rarely like, you know, I happen to be a weather expert, but we are actually rarely a weather expert. We’re rarely a pandemic expert, we’re rarely a, you know, mass migration expert. We’re the hub. Yeah, and it was after Katrina that people started thinking about it that way, thinking, okay, there is a certain skill set here. You could do it regardless of what the disaster is. So that’s how we approach it. We don’t try to be experts in each type of hazard.
Bob Megna 18:00
So that’s interesting. It’s interesting how it has developed. And I feel sometimes like I know how government works, but I really didn’t realize that this whole question of emergency management really is pretty recent. Just said
Jackie Bray 18:20
it’s super recent, and it’s and it’s needs to mature. It is maturing. It needs to mature. You have a generation of emergency managers who were very good at their jobs, but they were also the retired Sheriff, the retired fire chief. Those guys still exist, and some of them are fantastic, right? But that’s a particular skill set, and it’s not necessarily the skill set someone like me brings to the child, right? I’m not a retired fire chief. I’m not a retired sheriff. I am a total expert in how do you make decisions with uncertainty. I’m a total expert in how you communicate to the public to help them take action, right? Because saying something is bad. You know, one of my favorite examples here is the National Weather Service. Back in the 20 in the early 2000s early 2010s used to say, you know, it’s an EF five tornado with 200 mile an hour winds. Do you know what that means? Because I don’t know what that means. But if I said this tornado is unsurvivable above ground, do you know what that means. I know what that means. I better get underground, yeah. So, you know, we become experts in that. We become experts in running the process. Sometimes, that’s sometimes the, you know, retired police officer is, is great for that. Sometimes you want someone who’s a, you know, pandemic expert, or a weather expert or a comms expert, and I think the whole discipline of emergency management is evolving. I don’t know what it it’s going to mean for us as the Feds pull more and more out and more and more back from it, but I think it’s new. It’s new well,
Bob Megna 19:59
that that tells. As to my next question, what, what? What are you going to recommend to the governor and this environment? How are you going to think about, you know, what New York should do? Should we change what we’re doing? Should we emphasize different things? How do you think about that?
Jackie Bray 20:19
Well, I think, yeah, we’re gonna have to change what we’re doing. There’s no way we sort of are. I mean, I could pretend that, like I’ve got some plan to not have a disaster in the next four years, but, oh, boy, would you know? Would the world prove me wrong? No, we’re gonna have to change what we’re doing. I don’t. I’m thinking a lot about models to change what we’re doing. So last year, two years ago, for the first time, last year, in the actual executive budget, the governor supported a resilient and Ready program that sets aside about $40 million to help individual homeowners, both before a storm and then after a storm. First time we’ve done that as a state. Last year, we paid out about $11 million dollars in that program. That program somewhat mirrors a federal program called individual assistance. Now, it doesn’t fully match it, right, and but New York rarely gets that program into the state, and so it felt like we had a gap, and we needed to do something there. You know, in the previous administration, sometimes you would see special session, something a disaster would happen. You see a special session, people would come back and appropriate funds for disaster relief. You know, we’re going to have to look at different models. Many states have state disaster relief funds. New York doesn’t. Right now, in Arkansas, I think they have a fund that’s like, capped at a certain amount of money, and so, and they match a locality, you know, state puts in about 35% right? So not, you know, they sort of give a little, but not a ton. But that it does mean that if you have a disaster early in the year, you get covered, and later in the year you don’t, right? So we’re going to have to look at models around the country of what other people do and decide how much we want to sort of pre plan that, or react and respond. I do think we will also have to rely more and more on mutual aid. So I’ll give you a good example of that. In New York City, they have what’s called Task Force One. It’s the largest urban search and rescue swift water rescue team in the state. And in the state, we used to have task the state used to run Task Force Two, which was a smaller but still pretty robust Urban Search and Rescue swift water rescue operation. And over the last decade or more, it’s been harder and harder to staff Task Force Two, but we had two options for re establishing and reinvigorating Task Force Two, I could go and say, I need x more firefighters, and why? More equipment, and please give it to me. We didn’t do that. What we decided to do was the sort of harder, longer process of entering into agreements with localities, which we’re in the process of doing. We’re going to do it all across the state, so that if something happens, I can pull buffalo fire, I can pull Syracuse fire, I can pull Rochester fire, I can pull Plattsburg and Binghamton into a centralized team. And you know, so that’s mutual aid. We’re going to have to do more and more of that, both locality, locality, state and locality. But then I think interstate too, because if we can rely less on the federal government, we’re going to have to rely more on each other. Yeah,
Bob Megna 23:36
and you know, New York is especially your experience in New York City, you know, when we did colonial designations, or the British did them, whenever they did them in the 1600s you know, New Jersey, Connecticut and New York seem to be pretty close together in those kind of arbitrary lines. So these are kind of shared responsibilities, right?
Jackie Bray 24:05
Yeah, yeah. I, you know, I talk, I talk to my counterparts in other states. Our Director of Emergency Management, who, right now is a guy named peach Ketty, really good at his job, talks to his counterparts in other states all the time. And I do think you take the Vermont floods from what was it two years ago? Yeah, you know, when that happened, Vermont sent a call out through the there’s an existing system called EMAC. EMAC, they’ve sent a call out saying, we need swift water rescue teams here. And we didn’t send teams because we actually were also getting that type of flooding. That was that storm straddled our state line, and other people sent teams. But the reason states are always willing to send teams is because the feds, ahead of event, will say, yeah, we’ll cover it, right? So you know, if you’re an Ohio swift water rescue team and you’re going to spend half a million dollars going to Vermont. But you know that the feds are good for it, FEMA is good for it, right? And we’ve said, if we don’t know that, if we’re not assured of that, moving forward, you know, we’re we have, I will feel a responsibility to to go anyway, right? Yes, I don’t have a mechanism to pay for that. You are a former state budget director. I don’t have a mechanism to code. I went over and, you know, did swift water rescues in in Burlington, but you but I also know that, like New Jersey, Connecticut, Vermont, you know, I will feel, we will all feel the governor. We will all feel like we got a pitch in Massachusetts. And they’ll feel the same way. If we’re underwater, they’ll come absolutely but we can do that in New York because we have the resources already right. As the federal cuts to other places, to health care, to food to housing hit, will we be less and less able to do that, and other states will absolutely not. You know, our counterparts in Vermont will want to send a boat. They won’t be resourced to send a boat.
Bob Megna 26:07
No, I think that’s an excellent point. I think, you know, again, that’s my budget head, right? People think these are independent decisions, but they’re not. They’re all tied into Where are you going to put your priorities? And if money gets tight because Medicaid got cut by a billion dollars, it makes it harder to do other things everywhere. I mean, that’s absolutely true. That’s
Jackie Bray 26:32
exactly right. And you know, in my business, for better or worse, I understand when a local county executive or a you know, village clerk, when they decide to pave the road instead of invest in siren system, I sort of get it right. You get it. It’s like people are going to be mad about that, those potholes in that road. 100 times I have about one disaster, right?
Bob Megna 26:59
I have lived my entire public life with that conversation, because the part of the public debate that I think often gets glossed over is these are all no one. We’d all love to fund everything, but you can’t, right? And so you are forced into making choices. And I think people forget that these choices overlap in ways that are often very complicated. But let me
Jackie Bray 27:30
complicated. And you know, the resource is not infinite. Everything do, right? Just
Bob Megna 27:37
ask the Just Ask the taxpayer, and they’ll tell you, you
Jackie Bray 27:42
know, and every New Yorker wants those resources to be finite, right? We don’t want, you know, I think, like, I mean, I don’t, I think emergency management is really not a political, you know, it’s not partisan. It’s there are politics involved. It’s not partisan. But I, and I’ve worked for many principles, many elected officials. I talked to many elected officials all the time, and I will often say, particularly local elected officials. Listen The guy sitting next to me, you know, if it’s the if it’s the county emergency manager, the town emergency manager, I’ll say the guy or gal sitting next to me is not going to win you a single vote. They cannot win you a single vote. They will lose you an election, though, if they’re not ready, right? And that can be hard for emergency management because we’re the, you know, we’re the bad day team shows up on a ballot. Exactly
Bob Megna 28:29
No, it’s absolutely true. And you know, politics has to go out the window when it comes to some of these things. And I, my experience in New York is it does absolutely
Jackie Bray 28:41
I have, I have wonderful relationships, regardless of party across the state, because I have to, it’s, it’s required. And I, you know, I will tell you, one of the things that scares me the most about what the White House is doing and what FEMA is doing right now is, you know, they are saying, and they should, Texas should get all of the federal resources that they need to respond, but they’re sitting on 10s of billions of dollars that they’re not releasing to LA for the fires because of disagreements about unrelated policy issues with California. That’s terrifying to me. Yeah, I don’t want a Democrat to ever be able to say I’m not paying to rebuild your schools after a flood because I disagree with you on reproductive rights, and I never want a Republican to be able to say I’m not paying to rebuild your bridges because I disagree with you about border enforcement, it’s unacceptable,
Bob Megna 29:46
yeah, and in fact, maybe that ties into the last thing I’ll ask you about, which is, why is it that FEMA, in some places, has this kind of you? I don’t know reputation almost as like a secret government or something, when these are folks that are coming to help you out in an emergency. How did, how do you think that happened? And it seemed, when that happened in North Carolina or that it was very counterproductive?
Jackie Bray 30:22
Yeah, I think so. First of all, complicated question, right? Tough question. And I’m not, I don’t know that I’m the expert in how that sort of happened, but I think three things. The first is that there is a very well documented I happen to oversee Emergency Management state. I also oversee Homeland Security, and I know in my homeland security hat there’s a very well documented increase in misinformation, disinformation, Mal information, so purposeful lying and obscuring facts during disasters that it becomes a sort of ripe opportunity for bad actors to do two things. One, for scams, right? Just straight up monetary fraud. But two, and we’ve seen it documented over and over again, for our adversaries, often nation state adversaries, to undermine Americans faith and trust in government, sort of going back to disasters and emergencies are often a place where the the residents, the citizenry, see their government quite active. And so we know that these disaster post disaster online spaces fill with misinformation, disinformation about what’s going on, and both, you know, the local, the state and the federal responders get tagged with that. We saw that hugely after the East Palestine train derailment in Ohio. We saw that to terrifying levels after the fire in Maui in Hawaii. So we, you know, we see it happen. So I think that really hurts FEMA, right? I think the other thing is that the Bureau, the FEMA bureaucracy, is really a maddening bureaucracy. I mean, people are not crazy about that. People are not wrong about that. It is maddening. It is, you know, it’s hard to make sense of. I mean, we hire a whole team to make sense of the FEMA bureaucracy. And I do think that people know when they’re vulnerable, when they’re sort of getting a bureaucratic runaround. We should fix that. We can fix that without saying the Feds should not help. But I think those two things play a really big role in why people think it’s, you know, a sort of shady place or shadowy place. And maybe the other thing is that, you know, unlike fire, unlike EMS, unlike police, unlike 911, emergency managers are relatively new to the scene in on public safety. I mean, 30 years, 40 years. But you know that, that when you compare it to law enforcement, is relatively new to the scene, and how do you articulate what we do? You know, the department transportation plows the roads right, and during a storm, they plow the road, and the police officers go out and rescue people on the roads right, and the Division of Environmental Conservation goes out and cuts the trees that are lying across, or they cut them down, and they move them away so that people can pass and and the, you know, Department of Public Service get the lights back on. They get the utility right. What do I do? It’s let it’s more in the background. It’s more a management function. And I think when, when you are more in the background, when you are left. It is less tangible. Although I would say it is equally as important, if not more important, to be incredibly competent in that space. It’s easier for people to grasp onto you, whatever they want to graft onto
Bob Megna 33:54
No, that’s true. I think the other deal, my experience, of course, with with FEMA is always far in the back end, right when it’s reimbursement, yeah, and I think that becomes part of the problem too. I think I understand it kind of from their point of view, which is, how are you going to document what you actually did and how much it cost? But the idea that your multiple years after an event is crazy, trying to figure it out is crazy. It
Jackie Bray 34:27
is crazy. It’s really crazy, you know. And I’ll tell you, we just submit. We just made the June 30 deadline for for the nearly end of the COVID disaster, for the FEMA reimbursement. Across the COVID disaster, there’s, you know, New York State had about four had about 4000 projects. There’s maybe 50 still outstanding, but they weren’t what FEMA calls obligated. They’re not due yet, right? That’s all good. So we made this deadline. First time that we can remember my some of my staff have done this for decades. First time that they can remember that FEMA held us to a deadline. So. Of course, the deadline to deadlines. I’m so glad that we made the COVID deadline. I’m so glad that everyone got their paperwork in and that we made it happen, right? Yes. So we should have deadlines. You should hold us to account. No, very different plan than you should reduce your role or eliminate your role.
Bob Megna 35:24
I think people often confuse when government is not as good at something as it could be with well, they shouldn’t be doing that. No, they should probably be doing it better
Speaker 1 35:42
or more cost effectively, yeah, but they probably should still be doing it, yeah, yeah. But
Jackie Bray 35:50
it’s, you know, it’s not like, I mean it, you know, it’s sort of like, okay, so FEMA, FEMA doesn’t do it. FEMA doesn’t pay to rebuild the bridge. What’s going to happen? Well, either the local pay to rebuild the bridge, locals will, or the counties will, or the state will, or the bridge won’t get rebuilt. And you and I both know that, depending on how much else is going on, depending how big those Medicaid cuts end up being, depending how big, you know, how much we’re, you know, making up for a lack of counterterrorism funding or right, some of those bridges aren’t going to get rebuilt.
Bob Megna 36:20
Well, I mean, even I don’t want to get into the state level politics of what they want to spend money, what different states want to spend money on, I’ve always been a great believer in, you know, let the states experiment a little bit on what they’re going to do, but I don’t know it’s going to cost Texas a lot of money, I would imagine, to fix some of the things that probably they’re going to themselves they need to get fixed. Yeah? And I can’t imagine they won’t want federal help to do that.
Jackie Bray 36:53
Oh, yeah. They’ll want it, and they’ll need it. Yeah,
Bob Megna 36:57
yeah. Listen, Jackie, I want to thank you for doing this, and as always, you are both generous with your time and also so clearly an expert in the area. So thanks a lot.
Jackie Bray 37:10
Thanks for having the conversation.
Joel Tirado 37:20
Thanks again to Jackie Bray, Commissioner of the New York State Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, for joining us to share her perspective on how a reduced role for FEMA might reshape emergency management and disaster response. If you liked this episode, please rate, subscribe, and share. It will help others find the podcast and help us deliver the latest in public policy research. All of our episodes are available for free wherever you stream your podcasts and transcripts are available on our website. I’m Joel Tirado; until next time. Policy Outsider is presented by the Rockefeller Institute of Government, the public policy research arm of the State University of New York. The Institute conducts cutting edge nonpartisan public policy research and analysis to inform lasting solutions to the challenges facing New York state and the nation. Learn more at rockinst.org or by following RockefellerInst. That’s i n s t on social media. Have a question, comment, or idea? Email us at [email protected].
“Policy Outsider” from the Rockefeller Institute of Government takes you outside the halls of power to understand how decisions of law and policy shape our everyday lives.
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