The disaster problem

11:49Micah Loewinger:Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants. Some on the right pushing conspiracy theories that they're blocking aid and seizing land from people here in North Carolina, and that is not true. An anti-government militia group known as Veterans on Patrol is claiming Hurricane Helene was caused by government-controlled weather weapons. The group called Hurricane Helene an act of war.

12:19Eloise Blondiau:I knew from my years reporting on far-right militias that these groups often showed up after natural disasters to recruit, fundraise, and spit-shine their public image. But I never understood why they hated FEMA so much. So I started digging into right-wing media archives and found that the anti-FEMA lore went back decades.

12:41Micah Loewinger:People are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps, to the New World Order, to the troops on the streets.

12:47Eloise Blondiau:Alex Jones has made multiple films claiming to have discovered secret prisons operated by FEMA. And right-wing pundit Glenn Beck entertained this stuff when he was still on Fox.

12:59Micah Loewinger:If you have any kind of fear that we might be headed towards a totalitarian state, buckle up. There's something going on in our country that ain't good.

13:09Eloise Blondiau:Over time, these paranoias seeped into the waters of mainstream culture.

13:14Micah Loewinger:Are you familiar with what the Federal Emergency Management Agency's real power is?

13:18Eloise Blondiau:It was a major plot point in the X-Files.

13:21Micah Loewinger:FEMA allows the White House to suspend constitutional government upon declaration of a national emergency. Think about that.

13:28Eloise Blondiau:Even with Kristi Noem replaced at DHS by Republican Senator Mark Wayne Mullin, the future of FEMA is still in jeopardy. This week, the administration announced that it was patching up some of the Noem-era cuts, but agency insiders say that it may take years to build FEMA back up to fighting strength. About a month ago, Trump repeated his antipathy for the agency.

13:51Micah Loewinger:I've never been a big fan of FEMA. I like to keep it local. I like to see governors and neighboring states help each other as opposed to FEMA. FEMA is very...

14:02Eloise Blondiau:As I've followed the current day crisis at FEMA, I've wondered whether it can survive the stories that have been told about it, The misinformation, mismanagement, and genuine catastrophes that have made this agency one of the least popular among Americans. But for all its faults, and there are many, it's not clear we can afford to lose it. Extreme weather leaving so many across the United States wondering when they'll get a break. In July alone, there were five 1 ,000-year flood events.

14:32Micah Loewinger:Extreme heat is becoming a dangerous new normal.

14:35Eloise Blondiau:The record-setting storm measured not in inches, but in feet of snow. Hundreds of thousands are now without power in this freezing weather. The U.S. is experiencing a billion-dollar disaster every 10 days on average, compared to every 82 back in the 1980s.

14:54Eloise Blondiau:Over the next few weeks, we'll explore how the organization tasked with saving America came to be so despised and mythologized. for a series we're calling American Emergency, the movement to kill FEMA. We'll hear about FEMA's identity crisis during Hurricane Katrina, how conspiracy theories have fueled violent threats against federal workers, and how a group of anonymous employees are fighting to keep the agency alive under Trump. For this first episode, we're looking at FEMA's secretive origins and the moment when Americans first learned that the agency was hiding things from us.

15:40Eloise Blondiau:On December 1st, 1974, heavy rain and fog rerouted a passenger plane over northern Virginia, some 50 miles from Washington, D.C. On its descent, the aircraft dropped into the forest below, shearing off the treetops and crashing into the side of Mount Weather. The two pilots were killed first, lanced by trees that burst through the cockpit. The rest of the aircraft crumbled into pieces, a mangle of shrapnel on the body parts of the 92 passengers and crew members. There were no survivors. One woman, whose parents were on the flight, said it seemed like the mountain had jumped up and bit the plane.

16:25Eloise Blondiau:News coverage of the day quickly turned to the blame game and the miscommunication from air traffic control amidst a violent storm. But our focus is something that was buried in the reports. When TV crews arrived at the crash site, they discovered, rather ominously, that Mount Weather had already been sealed off on the orders of federal security agents.

16:47Micah Loewinger:The quick action was taken because the big jet had landed almost a mile away from a super-secret government installation, an underground complex of emergency offices set up for federal officials in the event of nuclear war.

17:02Eloise Blondiau:The crash had inadvertently uncovered a tightly guarded Cold War secret. Inside Mount Weather was a massive covert facility. And somehow that undersells it. Through a tunnel that burrows into the mountain and behind a 34-ton blast door lies a subterranean, strange-loving lair. A freestanding city with a hospital, a crematorium, an emergency power plant, and even a broadcasting studio. Everything that the White House and thousands of federal workers would need to run the country underground while millions melted on the surface. I expect your people to save our government. That's what President Dwight Eisenhower told the first director of Mount Weather after it was built in 1955.

17:51Eloise Blondiau:It's still operated by FEMA today. It's actually being renovated as I speak. But back in the 1950s, Mount Weather was run by FEMA's predecessor, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, the FCDA, which poured billions into making America nuke-proof, or at least lulling people into the belief that with enough preparation, they might survive atomic hellfire. Dum-dum, beetle-dum-dum. The FCDA was behind this delightful, if slightly morbid, PSA instructing schoolchildren to hide under their desks during bomb drills. There was a turtle by the name of Bert, and Bert the turtle was very alert.

18:33Micah Loewinger:When danger threatened him, he never got hurt. He knew just what to do. He ducked and covered.

18:42Eloise Blondiau:For adults, the FCDA organized Operation Alert, a series of dramatic exercises where millions of people acted out the day of their likely demise, emptying the streets of America's biggest cities.

18:57Micah Loewinger:While the sirens wail their grim warning, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers scurry for shelter against the attack. Riders and drivers taking cover in a realistic drill for a day all Americans pray will never come.

19:09Eloise Blondiau:Operation Alert was also the first time that Mount Weather saw action.

19:13Micah Loewinger:As soon as the alert sounded in Washington, President Eisenhower reached for his hat and strode to a waiting limousine to be driven to an emergency base of operations in the mountains outside Washington. Exact location kept secret.

19:25Eloise Blondiau:Kept secret until that terrible plane crash in 1974. Fortunately, nuclear obliteration never came and Mount Weather was never truly put to use. But there's something ironic and revealing That a single storm brought more death and destruction to the base Than 30 years of the Cold War By the 1970s, it had become clear that the nuclear preparations Had done little to protect America from an arguably greater threat Coming up, if our government could build a secret city It does kind of make you wonder, what else could they be hiding? This is On The Media.

20:28Micah Loewinger:Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting a business is not easy. It can come with a lot of self-doubt and questions like, what if I fail? Or what if nobody buys what I have to sell? But if you are a small business owner pushing through that self-doubt, Shopify wants you to know that it is there to help along the way. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. And according to their numbers, 10 % of all e-commerce in the U.S. From household names like Magic Spoon to brands just getting started. Their design studio lets you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style.

21:07Micah Loewinger:They offer a host of helpful AI tools, plus built-in marketing tools to help you create effective email and social media campaigns. And if you ever get stuck, their award-winning 24-7 customer support has your back. It is time to turn those what-ifs into Shopify today. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash unexplainable. Go to Shopify.com slash unexplainable. That is Shopify.com slash unexplainable.

21:49Eloise Blondiau:This is On The Media. I'm Michael Owinger. To better understand the current day crisis at FEMA and why so many Americans believe wild conspiracy theories about it, I wanted to dive back into the era it was created, when state leaders began to realize that all the focus on Cold War civil defense had left them vulnerable to Mother Nature.

22:10Micah Loewinger:We just didn't have that many nuclear wars, which is great, but we do have a lot of natural disasters.

22:17Eloise Blondiau:Garrett Graff is a journalist and author of a book about the origins of FEMA titled Raven Rock, the story of the U.S. government's secret plan to save itself while the rest of us die. Before the agency was created, America's disaster response system was, well, barely a system.

22:34Micah Loewinger:It didn't make sense for every state to be developing its own totally independent ability to respond to a hurricane because in any given year, most states don't get hit by a hurricane.

22:51Eloise Blondiau:Which became a big problem in the 60s and 70s when the country was rocked by a series of record-breaking disasters.

22:59Micah Loewinger:No one knows the full size of the disaster yet. In Betsy's wake, there's only darkness, confusion, and death. After suffering one of the most serious earthquakes in history, Alaska had to undergo the further ordeal of over 40 severe earth tremors. Imagine being there as the streets reared up around you like the scene of some terrible biblical retribution. They called her Camille. Born of the sea, she turned like a woman scorned. She screamed and ripped and flooded and killed.

23:36Eloise Blondiau:These big disasters overwhelmed towns and counties and states. The big ones often do. But when they asked for help, the federal government was too disorganized to act quickly or efficiently. Supplying extra ambulances, delivering food and water to survivors, fixing roads and power plants. Each piece of the emergency management process could come from a different office or department. A hundred agencies might play a role. Navigating this patchwork of services and jurisdictions was a major pain in the ass for local leaders, especially during a crisis when lives are on the line and every second counts.

24:13Eloise Blondiau:Like in 1972, when another big storm hit.

24:16Micah Loewinger:Many of the people here and others in the path of Hurricane Agnes were completely wiped out. Many of them feel that federal aid is too slow in coming and too little.

24:27Eloise Blondiau:Trump says FEMA should return its responsibilities to the states, which is odd because states often bring in FEMA when they're unable to respond on their own. And anyway, it was the states that asked for FEMA in the first place. In 1978, the National Governors Association drew up plans for a streamlined one-stop shop for federal emergency response and delivered it to a sympathetic White House.

24:52Micah Loewinger:President Carter proposed merging five big federal emergency preparation and disaster relief agencies into one agency as part of his reorganization plan. Civil defense experts say it will provide much-needed communication between the state and federal levels.

25:09Eloise Blondiau:In 1979, Jimmy Carter signed an executive order giving life to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA was a federal Frankenstein with a dual mission, Cold War civil defense and disaster relief. I wish I could illustrate this moment by playing you like a triumphant speech from President Carter or some colorful news footage, but either that stuff never existed or no one thought it was important enough to archive. Even the earliest employees at FEMA were confused about how to talk about it.

25:40Micah Loewinger:We had a new director there, and there was a message that went out to us that said that if we're referring to the agency publicly, we should say either Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA, because the word FEMA he thought sounded too much like a laxative.

25:57Eloise Blondiau:This is Leo Bosner, a retired FEMA official, who's taught me a lot about the earliest days of the agency. He was working as a flood insurance specialist with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in one of the offices that was folded into FEMA.

26:11Micah Loewinger:We're all working along in the office, and one day they tell us, OK, everybody go down to photo ID, you're getting new photo IDs. We walk down the stairs, get new photo IDs that say FEMA, turn in our photo IDs that say Housing and Urban Development, and then we're all told we're all getting new job titles, and our new job title is Emergency Management Specialist. And I'm thinking, what on God's earth as an emergency management specialist? Like, this is the end of my career. What kind of a dead-end job is it?

26:41Eloise Blondiau:Leo would spend the next 30 years at FEMA. He eventually found really satisfying work helping hospitals and medical organizations prepare for floods, wildfires, and hurricanes. But less than two years after he started getting the hang of his new job, FEMA fell into a decade-long tailspin. The big shift really didn't come until 1980.

27:04Micah Loewinger:Ronald Reagan appears to be heading toward a landslide electoral victory tonight across the United States. Ronald Reagan got elected president. And there's a super U-turn from Jimmy Carter, who was mostly all about social welfare, and Ronald Reagan was more about national defense.

27:20Eloise Blondiau:To run FEMA, Reagan picked someone who would stir up a lot of trouble for the agency, this man.

27:26Micah Loewinger:Only a masochist with a death wish would accept the job of directing FEMA.

27:32Eloise Blondiau:Army Colonel Louis Chafrida speaking here with a caller on Larry King's radio show. I really don't believe that we can be saved if there is a nuclear war.

27:42Micah Loewinger:I mean, how are you going to save me if you're blown up too? But you're not suggesting that because we both might be blown up by a nuclear war that we shouldn't have in place a system that would take care of us if there was an earthquake or a tidal wave or a hurricane or anything that sort.

27:57Eloise Blondiau:While Louis Gifreda paid lip service to FEMA's disaster relief mission, he was quietly funneling most of FEMA's budget towards Cold War civil defense. Leo Bosner.

28:08Micah Loewinger:All of a sudden, we start seeing all these military officers signing in at the login desk. We're going, why these military people here? What, military people go to floods or something? And then we learn, little by little, that FEMA's mission was really, really going to be to get ready for the big nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.

28:26Eloise Blondiau:In the early 80s, Leo started to hear whispers about classified programs at the agency. Every day on his trip up the elevator at FEMA HQ, he'd ride by a secret fifth floor manned by a security guard. Mostly, he rolled his eyes at all the Cold War theater, wishing FEMA would focus more on preparing Americans for natural disasters. But he still wondered, what were they doing in there?

28:51Micah Loewinger:The majority of its funding—

28:54Eloise Blondiau:Garrett Graff.

28:55Micah Loewinger:—and about a third of its workforce was actually hidden in the nation's classified black budget, the special budget that Congress oversees that protects our most secret programs and capabilities. And FEMA on a daily basis is in charge of tracking the whereabouts of everyone in the presidential line of succession so that in the event of a nuclear war, it knows where all of those people are, how to get them to secure relocation sites like the Mount Weather Bunker, and who would be best positioned to be the person who takes over as president of the United States in the event of a nuclear war.

29:41Eloise Blondiau:I wonder if this classified continuity of government planning helps explain why there was so little media about FEMA when it was first created. I think the feds just didn't want to draw attention to their secret plans. That said, the coverage did pick up when the agency launched a controversial new initiative.

30:00Micah Loewinger:The head of emergency management, Louis Gifreda, says the heart of the proposal is crisis relocation. What we want to accomplish is taking the maximum number of people from high-risk areas to areas of lesser risk.

30:15Eloise Blondiau:A mass evacuation program.

30:18Micah Loewinger:There was sort of this sense of, well, if you could just get 20, 30, 50 miles away from a major city, you would at least have a chance to survive the initial blast from the nuclear weapons and then live into nuclear winter.

30:35Eloise Blondiau:Government officials estimated that in the worst case, 60 million Americans could survive an attack. Can you imagine all those urbanites swamping small towns and rural areas? News reports at the time featured a mixture of fascination and incredulity.

30:52Micah Loewinger:My God, you're going to have modified anarchy after that sort of thing. How in the world are you going to coordinate the recovery and putting leadership back into place? How are you going to do that? 60 million is still a lot of people. That is the modern population of France. Those people would need a functioning government and functioning infrastructure afterward.

31:15Eloise Blondiau:This is where we start getting into the bizarre conspiracy theories that haunt FEMA today. In 1982, in an effort to game out some of these post-apocalyptic scenarios, President Ronald Reagan signed a secret executive order to create a covert program called Project 908.

31:34Micah Loewinger:That's 908, but they called it 908.

31:38Eloise Blondiau:It pooled billions of dollars in top officials from the National Security Council, FEMA, and the FBI.

31:44Micah Loewinger:The FBI was in charge of pre-identifying buildings that could serve as refugee camps.

31:53Eloise Blondiau:If I have this right, basically you had FBI agents working undercover for FEMA, traveling around the country, visiting warehouses, car shops, casinos, Walmarts, helping identify businesses that could be used to house citizens after a nuke was dropped on an American city.

32:19Micah Loewinger:Yes, and often without telling the businesses that they were being scouted for these purposes.

32:27Eloise Blondiau:There was thankfully never a need to construct these refugee camps. But the secrecy went way deeper and darker. Just five years after the launch of Project 908, a bombshell report from the Miami Herald revealed that before Jafrida was asked to help run FEMA, he'd written his master's thesis on how the military could quell race riots by detaining millions of black people and putting them in concentration camps. Members of Congress were given a copy of his thesis during Chafrida's confirmation hearings, a horrifying detail that makes me think they considered this to be part of his qualifications for the job.

33:07Eloise Blondiau:The most damning part of that Miami Herald piece, though, was news that Jafrida had worked with Reagan's National Security Council to write plans for declaring martial law and putting the country temporarily under a sort of shadow government. And not just in the case of a nuke, but also in a so-called national crisis, like a war.

33:29Micah Loewinger:A bunch of this comes out in the late 1980s amid the Iran-Contra hearings and investigations. It turns out that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who is the central figure at the White House of Iran-Contra, was also one of the planners for Project 908.

33:53Eloise Blondiau:Oliver North was asked about these martial law plans during the Iran-Contra hearings.

33:57Micah Loewinger:Colonel North, in your work at the NSC, were you not assigned at one time to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?

34:08Eloise Blondiau:North was questioned by Texas Representative Jack Brooks. We see North pause and whisper to his attorney. Then the chairman of the hearings, Daniel K. Enoway, jumps in to respond on the government's behalf.

34:22Micah Loewinger:I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area. So may I request that you not touch upon that, sir? I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan, a contingency plan, that would suspend the American Constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was, but I wanted to get his confirmation. May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage?

35:03Eloise Blondiau:The government never acknowledged any of this stuff until much of it was declassified years later, Louis Giofrida ended up resigning from FEMA for totally unrelated reasons following a congressional fraud investigation.

35:16Micah Loewinger:According to Senator Albert Gore, Giofrida had spent$170 ,000 of federal money to build a house on federal property for his own use.

35:25Eloise Blondiau:By the start of the 90s, FEMA employee Leo Bosner was beyond tired of the dysfunction and the kooky national security schemes.

35:33Micah Loewinger:Frankly, for me, once that stuff was in the rearview mirror, it's like, fine, that's the trash. I hope they come on Friday and pick it up and dump it to the landfill. There were some pretty nutty people working back there then. Fortunately, nothing much ever came of that, except they ate up most of our budget.

35:48Eloise Blondiau:He was eager for the agency to shift resources to preparing for floods and hurricanes. But all this doomsday planning had done a number on FEMA's reputation.

35:58Micah Loewinger:I would talk on my off-duty time to people on Capitol Hill, news reporters, and say, look, this is a dangerous thing. We're ignoring these natural disasters. And I was having lunch with a news reporter one day, and I'm telling him this. And the guy's looking really bored. He says, yeah, Leo, that's all really bad, but tell me about FEMA's secret plan to round up all the liberals in the country and put them in concentration camps. What? Yeah. Yeah. I said, buddy, these people are so inept, they couldn't organize a two-car parade. And they're never going to round up everybody in the country. Come on, get out of here, will you?

36:33Eloise Blondiau:Leo didn't know it at the time, but those FEMA camps conspiracy theories had started popping up in fringe message boards on the early Internet.

36:41Micah Loewinger:The FEMA plans to imprison American citizens have generated a lot of interest in locating the potential prison camps throughout the country.

36:49Eloise Blondiau:This woman, Linda Thompson, a sort of godmother of the right-wing militia movement, made a 1994 documentary, America Under Siege, which warned that FEMA was part of the New World Order, a global authoritarian takeover that would require rounding up anti-government dissidents.

37:08Micah Loewinger:These may be facilities that have other uses, but which could be quickly used to detain large numbers of people, such as this Amtrak facility in Beach Grove, Indiana.

37:16Eloise Blondiau:Following in her footsteps a couple decades later were militia leaders like Stuart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, one of the January 6th guys. A lot of this stuff is dual use. They put together a detention center or an emergency center supposedly for refugees from other countries. And as I mentioned, InfoWars host Alex Jones.

37:34Micah Loewinger:People are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps, to the New World Order, to the troops on the streets.

37:39Eloise Blondiau:These FEMA camps. And Glenn Beck, when he was still on Fox News.

37:44Micah Loewinger:I'm tired of hearing. You know about them? Sure. We've now for several days done research on them. I can't debunk them.

37:50Eloise Blondiau:After whipping up this paranoia, Beck did eventually debunk the theory with help from the editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics.

37:58Micah Loewinger:This is an Amtrak repair facility in Beach Grove, Indiana. We set a crew there the other day and we got... Is this your video? Yes. And sure enough, what did we find? They're repairing trains in there.

38:10Eloise Blondiau:Remember how earlier Garrett Graff told us about stores like Walmart's being scoped out by the government to be used as refugee camps? They don't exist, but people on TikTok and YouTube still like to make videos about them. It's like a military-style entrance, kind of like a FEMA camp. Why in the hell does Walmart Supercenter need that? See the Walmart trucks? These videos are low effort and easy to laugh off. But, I mean, if FEMA could operate a Mount Weather, why not a Mount Walmart?

38:41Micah Loewinger:The challenge of a lot of these conspiracies is that they have a germ of truth to them.

38:47Eloise Blondiau:Garrett Graff.

38:48Micah Loewinger:In the early stages of the Cold War, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI had pre-selected lists of suspected communists and political dissidents that he wanted to round up in the event of a nuclear war.

39:03Eloise Blondiau:Not to mention the fact that the U.S. imprisoned over 100 ,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

39:08Micah Loewinger:I think FEMA has always been in a difficult place. And this is true, by the way, across all of the continuity planning and doomsday planning. You just can't talk about these classified bunkers and classified operations, even if you're trying to debunk conspiracies.

39:28Eloise Blondiau:The secrecy in and of itself is naturally going to feed conspiracy theories.

39:33Micah Loewinger:Absolutely.

39:35Eloise Blondiau:The kicker to all this is that some of what the conspiracy theorists warned about is happening, just not to them. This past July, FEMA, under Kristi Noem's Department of Homeland Security, revealed a new program.

39:49Micah Loewinger:FEMA allocating$608 million in state grants for construction of detention centers.

39:57Eloise Blondiau:Migrant detention centers, part of Trump's mass deportation program. The announcement came right around when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis opened Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious facility in the Everglades. And while he built the jail using state emergency funds intended for natural disasters, he claimed that federal reimbursement was on the way.

40:19Micah Loewinger:A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirms Florida did submit an application to FEMA and were awarded two days ago the full amount Florida applied for,$608 million.

40:30Eloise Blondiau:The coverage made it sound like the money was in Florida's bank account. But at time of recording, those FEMA funds have actually been held up by Trump's Justice Department. Florida officials say the money is still likely, but who knows? Despite that uncertainty and many legal attempts aimed at closing it, Alligator Alcatraz remains open.

40:51Micah Loewinger:Amnesty International says immigrants held at the ICE jail in Florida were shackled inside a two-foot-high metal cage and left outside without water for up to a day at a time. In a new report, they also detail unsanitary conditions, lights on 24 hours a day, poor quality food and water, and lack of privacy.

41:10Eloise Blondiau:And while Governor DeSantis says the conditions are up to standard, the families of migrants being held inside are calling it a concentration camp.

41:18Micah Loewinger:That is the most real FEMA camp ever built.

41:21Eloise Blondiau:What do you think it says that FEMA would actually use public funds for the very thing that has been a far-right boogeyman.

41:32Micah Loewinger:I mean, there is something uniquely dystopian about a right-wing government elected on the backs of the anti-government conspiracies that it is now implementing.

41:52Eloise Blondiau:Coming up, for the first time, FEMA finds its groove.

41:56Micah Loewinger:They ought to change the name, because the old FEMA has a pretty bad name, and the new one they're running now is a crackerjack agency.

42:04Eloise Blondiau:This is On The Media.

42:19Micah Loewinger:Support for the show comes from Quince. The other day I was out shopping, picked up a cute dress, but I wasn't totally sure it was my style because I've been kind of moving away from sleeveless stuff lately. Then I brought it home and tried it on over a little lightweight black t-shirt that I got from Quince. And I am literally wearing the whole outfit right now as I record this ad. The shirt from Quince was just the perfect thing to pair with the dress to give it sleeves. And the shirt is light and breathable enough that I'm not, like, sitting in the studio too warm. So, as a person who loves to layer clothing, I really, really appreciate that Quince has a wide array of shirts and a whole bunch of different cuts.

43:06Micah Loewinger:Lots of options for people like me. But if you are looking for not just shirts, but a whole range of lighter, cooler wardrobe pieces as part of a summer refresh, Quince also has you covered. Quince can help you find some new, breathable outfits that are easy to wear and still look put together. Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to quince.com slash unexplainable for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. now available in Canada too. So that is q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash unexplainable for free shipping and 365 day returns. quince dot com slash unexplainable.

43:47Micah Loewinger:So good, so good, so good. New markdowns up to 70 % off are at Nordstrom Rack stores now. Stock up and stay big on shoes, tops, dresses, accessories, and more must-haves for summer. Join the Nordic Club to unlock exclusive discounts, shop new arrivals first, and more. Plus, buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack.

44:18Eloise Blondiau:This is On The Media. I'm Michael Loewinger, and you're listening to the first episode of our series, American Emergency, the movement to kill FEMA. In my reporting, I learned that FEMA's Cold War mission to save America from nuclear war was met with a lot of suspicion, and understandably so. Case in point, when I was digging around in the National Archives, something that caught my eye was a tape curiously labeled FEMA Blues.

44:48Micah Loewinger:Seattle, Washington. Now, Seattle did a spunky thing the other day.

44:51Eloise Blondiau:It turned out to be a comedy special from a guy named Mark Russell, which aired in 1982. He starts with this hokey bit about Louis Jafrida's nuclear evacuation plans. In an apparent effort to coax Seattle officials into participating, FEMA had offered to subsidize the city's mass relocation, which the city refused.

45:13Micah Loewinger:They turned down their allotment from the Federal Emergency Management Administration. I think it really stands for feeble exercise in mindless administration. You know what Seattle's allotment was? $17 ,000. Can you imagine that? I guess the money went to provide each resident with a free road map and a granola bar.

45:36Eloise Blondiau:After a bit of vamping, Russell calls up his band, The Buzzards.

45:40Micah Loewinger:It's our spunky, feisty little band. We only do this once a year.

45:43Eloise Blondiau:To perform a song that I think captures the zeitgeist in the 80s. Hit it, fellas!

45:49Micah Loewinger:I got those federal emergency management administration blues, blues, blues, blues. Cause when you're hit, that's it. You either sit or stand and melt down in your shoes. Ooze, ooze, ooze. Don't need no federal bureaucrat to tell me where to go. So I can have my choice of roosting fast or slow. The federal emergency management administration blues.

46:18Eloise Blondiau:According to its critics, FEMA's leaders were either mounting a comically pitiful defense against the nation's most pressing threat, or they were burning resources that would be better spent on responding to Mother Nature. Leo Bosner, that OG FEMA employee, was in the latter camp. As the 80s went on, he was busy trying to warn the press.

46:38Micah Loewinger:I was kind of in my whistleblower mode, letting them know that FEMA was spending all of its time doing nuclear stuff and not doing anything for these natural disasters.

46:47Eloise Blondiau:If Ronald Reagan's FEMA was too active, too conniving, George Bush Sr.'s FEMA had the opposite problem. It was out to lunch. Daddy Bush left the agency leaderless for over a year, and he was punished for it in 1989 when a Category 5 storm came barreling off the Atlantic.

47:06Micah Loewinger:Two weeks after Hurricane Hugo hit South Carolina, it's FEMA that is in the eye of the storm. Only about 20 % of FEMA's budget goes for disaster relief. FEMA is trying to live down a reputation for being slow, stingy, and distracted. South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings today accused FEMA of raw incompetence. They're the sorriest bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I've ever worked with in my life. FEMA did a terrible job. Leo Bosner. But I think the feeling was, well, that's a once in a hundred years thing, except three years later, Hurricane Andrew hit in 92. Another Category 5, one of the strongest in Florida's history.

47:45Micah Loewinger:And FEMA was on the front pages. A barrage of criticism for its handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew. If we do not get more food and water in a very short period of time, we are going to have more casualties because we're going to have people who are dehydrated, who are without food.

48:01Eloise Blondiau:After the storm, as journalists started digging into FEMA's dysfunction, they discovered a political backwater filled with unqualified Bush appointees. Congressional records show that while at most federal agencies

48:13Micah Loewinger:there is only one political appointee for every 3 ,000 government agencies, at FEMA there's one for every 300. So the election for the president was only like three months later. This election is a clarion call for our country to face the challenges of the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the next century.

48:33Eloise Blondiau:Bill Clinton, the first Democrat to take the White House in 12 years, had seen how FEMA's reputation had dragged his predecessors. Unlike them, he understood that natural disasters are media spectacles. Predictable, high-stakes dramas that generate a steady stream of coverage. So when Clinton came into office, he did something radical. He appointed somebody actually qualified to run FEMA, somebody who would fundamentally transform the agency from a liability to a government success story. A man named James Lee Witt, who had served as the Arkansas Director of Emergency Management when Clinton was governor.

49:13Micah Loewinger:As governor of Arkansas, when I went to work for him there, he said, if it affects people's lives, and it's going to be in the media, then I want to know about it.

49:23Eloise Blondiau:This is Witt speaking with C-SPAN in 1996.

49:26Micah Loewinger:Can you tell us the story of your very first meeting with Bill Clinton? Absolutely. I never will forget it. It was in 1974. And I was coaching a Little League baseball team in Dardanelle, Arkansas.

49:39Eloise Blondiau:When they first met, Clinton was a law professor and congressional candidate, and Witt ran a local construction company.

49:45Micah Loewinger:You didn't go to college. No. Do you ever have any second thoughts about that? Sure, I guess anyone that has never been to college wished they had gone. But when I grew up, I was working. What did your father do? He was a farmer.

50:00Eloise Blondiau:Suffice to say, Witt's humble beginnings did not hold him back. And when he came to FEMA in 1993, he became the first leader in the agency's 14-year history with any professional experience managing domestic disasters. Witt comes in, and that's when he totally started turning everything around.

50:18Micah Loewinger:How did he do that? Well, a lot of it was really common sense. He knew there were all kinds of problems internal to FEMA. So he sends a memo to all hands, first official action, open-door policy. So all of a sudden, he's getting all these employees coming in and giving them an earful of all the problems in the agency.

50:38Eloise Blondiau:He collected all these ideas and got to work reorganizing the agency for what he called an all-hazards approach to emergency response.

50:46Micah Loewinger:Okay, if the FEMA employees might be needed in a disaster, what kind of jobs are they going to have to do? Let's train people for those jobs. He also made rosters of who would be on duty when during the disaster. And he said, okay, we're going to divide the employees here like into three teams, the red team, the white team, and the blue team. Yay, the flag, right? If you're on the red team, you're on call for disasters during January. February, if you're on the white team, you're on call. then he even breaks it down into night shifts and day shifts. Now, this does not take like a PhD in higher mathematics to come up with this.

51:23Micah Loewinger:And people could say, God, this is common sense. And my answer is, yeah, but nobody did it before. And when did you get a sense that like people out there in the public were taking notice? Well, there was one of the other really smart things that Mr. Witt did. Back in the Cold War days, FEMA kept the news media at bay. Go away. Keep out. Keep out. Keep out. And so that just added the suspicion. Well, Witt opened the doors to it. The news media could come into our emergency operations center right there in Washington, D.C., and they could observe things and they could even interview us.

51:58Eloise Blondiau:Witt relished speaking with the press. He seemed to genuinely want to explain how the agency worked. Within a year of joining FEMA, he began chipping away at its secret black budget, declassifying much of that doomsday planning and diverting a whole bunch of its resources to natural disasters. The agency began to see the fruits of all these new reforms during Witt's first major test as administrator.

52:22Micah Loewinger:It started in 1993 with the flood on the Mississippi River. Affected nine states. And the devastation was just unreal. The water kept on coming. Small river towns were swallowed up. Over 54 ,000 people were forced to evacuate and leave behind homes and belongings.

52:43Eloise Blondiau:Though it was far from perfect, a New York Times headline about FEMA's actions following the floods reads, in this emergency, agency wins praise for its response. The tide was turning for FEMA's reputation.

52:55Micah Loewinger:They ought to change the name because the old FEMA has a pretty bad name and the new one they're running now is a crackerjack agency. President Clinton and I was talking about it in Governor Carnahan, Missouri. James Lee Witt. And I said, you know, Mr. President, we can't let people build back in those areas that flooded. And we were able to buy out on a voluntary basis and relocate people out of the floodplain so they'd never flood again. In Missouri alone, we bought out over 4 ,000 pieces of property.

53:28Eloise Blondiau:30 years later, this type of policy is considered a core tenet of good emergency management. Recent studies vindicate Witt's approach. Research shows that for every dollar spent on mitigation,$6 are saved down the line.

53:43Micah Loewinger:During the 90s, FEMA had gotten to be so well known. In 1996, President Clinton publicly elevated James Lewitt to cabinet level, saying he's done such a great job here. That's how it was.

53:56Eloise Blondiau:You can probably tell from the way he talks about it, Leo Bosner was so proud of his agency during the 90s. Some of its greatest work, he says, was visible on one of the darkest days for the country. That April morning in 1995, we're all at work like normal, all of a sudden.

54:11Micah Loewinger:A plume of smoke rising in the air. If you are anywhere downtown, you probably heard it and felt it. An explosion of some kind. People are yelling because on the TV screen, oh my God, there's been a bomb in Oklahoma City. We have been able to confirm right now an explosion at the federal court building downtown. Within like a few minutes, my pager's going off. We're seeing all this action suddenly, very organized action going on. Our regional office in Texas, within one hour, was on the phone with Oklahoma. And they decided that what was needed most from FEMA was our specialized search and rescue teams who had special tools and training to go into collapsed concrete buildings, which is not a simple thing to do.

54:54Micah Loewinger:And our search and rescue teams were then deployed there within a couple of hours. So they were quick. Oh, yeah. That's when you could really see that FEMA is real and we could do things. The reinforcements showed up tonight. At the center of it all, of course, is the bombed-out shell of the federal office building and in its shadow the exhausted, who for a day and a half now have sifted through its debris and counted its dead and seen up close why they call it terror.

55:22Eloise Blondiau:The bombing was part of an alarming trend. Anti-government extremists were becoming more active and more violent. After the attack, the White House brought in a new number two official at FEMA, a man with experience monitoring and investigating terrorism, including far-right militias.

55:40Micah Loewinger:I'm Mike Walker, the deputy director of FEMA, and I'm one of the newest employees of FEMA.

55:45Eloise Blondiau:Mike's a legend in the business. Tim Manning held the same deputy director role during the Obama administration. Now he's a professor at Georgetown University, but earlier in his career, Mike Walker was his mentor.

55:58Micah Loewinger:Mike's been confirmed by the Senate. He's held a number of senior roles. He's been around, seen, and been part of just about everything in the past 40-plus years of emergency management and homeland security.

56:08Eloise Blondiau:When Tim was preparing for his own Senate confirmation hearings, Mike warned Tim about the job he was about to take at FEMA. Mike told him a story that's never been reported before now. It happened in 1999.

56:22Micah Loewinger:He's in the new role at FEMA. He was gone a lot. These are very demanding jobs.

56:27Eloise Blondiau:Traveling around the country, dealing with disaster response. He was commuting often between FEMA headquarters in D.C. and his home in West Virginia, where he lived with his wife.

56:36Micah Loewinger:He needed help around the house, and there was a person in the neighborhood who came by and offered his services as a handyman.

56:42Eloise Blondiau:For a few weeks, the handyman comes by to repair windows, fix doors, whatever it might be. And Mike and his wife were pretty happy with his work. until he got a call from the FBI one day

56:53Micah Loewinger:asking if he knew who this person was. Mike said, well, yeah, he's our handyman doing work for us. And the FBI said, well, he's not. He's actually undercover. He's a militia member who was sent here to get close to you and watch your movements, figure out your patterns, try to collect information. He's there surveilling you as a spy. Oh, my God. Fortunately, nothing dangerous ever happened for Mike or his family. I suppose having an undercover militia operative in your home for a time is dangerous in itself. I don't know whatever kind of dangerous plots might have been in the works before the FBI figured out who he was and what was happening and interdicted.

57:36Eloise Blondiau:I mean, when I hear this story, it doesn't sound real. It sounds like a movie, like noir. Yeah, I wish it was a noir fiction.

57:45Micah Loewinger:And it's the kind of thing that you're always worried about. And, you know, you think about in the middle of the night, is my family safe? And am I doing all the right things? And you think about that as like, oh, that's so far-fetched. That would never happen. But, you know, here it did happen.

58:05Eloise Blondiau:When I first heard this story, I thought it could be explained simply by the rise of extremist militia groups in America. But the more I learned about FEMA, its secretive origins, its unhinged leadership under Reagan, the more I realized that the agency that was born of the paranoias of the 20th century had been met with paranoia in return. While reporting this series, I spoke to FEMA workers from just about every era of the agency. And I've heard too many stories of threats from conspiracy theorists to chase them all down. But for now, here's one more. A FEMA official from the 90s told me that he'd seen FEMA head James Lee Witt walking around with a U.S.

58:47Eloise Blondiau:Marshal security detail, but never learned why. After some digging, I discovered that in 1998, Witt was asked to meet with the FBI. An agent told him that a militia group had been selling VHS tapes with his home address and information on his kids and wife. The death threats were credible enough that Witt was told to stop taking public transportation to work early in the morning. As you'll learn in the coming weeks, these plots against FEMA's leadership foreshadow its current day unraveling. But in the early 2000s, as FEMA was forced to shapeshift after 9-11, it wasn't anti-government militias that ultimately took down the agency that James Lee Witt built.

59:31Micah Loewinger:FEMA as an independent agency, as an organization that responded for eight years to the American people's needs, that has been destroyed. it. It's not there now.

59:41Eloise Blondiau:Next week, in episode two of my investigation, American Emergency, FEMA gets swallowed up by the Department of Homeland Security and the war on terror.

59:51Micah Loewinger:They have driven a stake in the heart of emergency management in this country as we know it.

59:59Eloise Blondiau:That's it for this week's show. This series is reported and hosted by me, Michael Owinger, with additional writing and reporting from me, Eloise Blondio,

1:00:08Micah Loewinger:On the Media's senior producer. Jared Bartman designed the artwork for the series. Our fact checker is Tom Colligan. Original music and mixing from Jared Paul. American Emergency was edited by executive producer Katya Rogers.

1:00:25Eloise Blondiau:Special thanks to Samantha Montano and Michael Cohen. On the Media is produced by WNYC. See you next week.

1:00:39Micah Loewinger:This Father's Day, when you ship UPS Air at the UPS Store, your items arrive on time with your money back, guaranteed at no extra cost.

1:00:46Eloise Blondiau:It's like the father of all shipping services. It shows up to the airport way too early just to play it safe. It's overprotective about all the things that truly matter. And it's always prompt, especially to be with family. Make it your first choice to celebrate your dad. Ship UPS Air with our money back guarantee, exclusively at the UPS Store U.S.

1:01:04Micah Loewinger:retail locations. Visit the upsstore.com slash air shipping for full details. Terms and conditions apply.

1:01:10Eloise Blondiau:There's a new way to Sweetgreen. Meet Wraps. Handheld, hearty, and made for life on the moon. With bold, chef-crafted flavors, fresh ingredients, and over 40 grams of protein, they're built to satisfy without slowing you down. Try Wraps today in the app or at order.sweetgreen.com. Available at all participating locations.

1:01:37We'll be right back.