Quick, imagine a disaster. What comes to mind? If you’re of a certain age and have lived in the United States, Hurricane Katrina in 2005 might be imprinted in your memory, with images of New Orleans’ failed levees, miles of cars trying to evacuate, flood waters reaching people’s roofs, and bright-colored “Xs” marked on the side of houses. Or you might think of Hurricane Sandy, which hit the Eastern Seaboard in 2012, with its power outages, food shortages, flooded subways, and premature babies bundled out of hospitals.
In America’s collective imagination, a disaster is a massive, extraordinary event that is tragic but fundamentally rare. The policy and programmatic infrastructure for disaster recovery in the United States is also based on this image of disasters. But the reality of disasters has changed dramatically in the last two decades, presenting new challenges for governance, democracy, and national security.
This article examines four major risks to national security that result from the increase in climate-driven disasters: 1) loss of confidence in basic governance, 2) increased inequality, 3) internal and external climate migrants, and 4) corruption in a disaster-capitalist system. It ends with a reason for hope: a discussion of how disasters can bring people together in multiracial coalitions that present a pathway for bridging the divides that currently characterize an embattled American democracy.
These arguments draw on my experience working on recovery from Hurricane Harvey, which hit the Texas coast and the Houston region in August 2017. In 2018 and 2019, I led policy and communications for the City of Houston’s Housing and Community Development Department, where I focused on negotiations with the state and federal governments over the control and direction of $2.5 billion in long-term recovery funding for housing and community development. Before moving to Houston in 2017, I worked in international relations and national security for more than a decade, providing a baseline for drawing connections and comparisons between these policymaking communities.
How Disasters Have Changed
Hurricane Harvey is a good example of how disasters have changed in recent decades. That storm was not a major hurricane with high winds. Instead, it brought many days of heavy rain, dumping 54 inches of water in parts of Harris County. This kind of slow-moving, high-volume rainstorm is similar to events in recent years that caused major flooding in the U.S. states of California, Kentucky, and Missouri, as well as in Germany and the United Kingdom.
Hurricanes and flooding are the major drivers of federal emergency spending for disaster recovery in the United States, through both the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s Community Development Block Grant Program for disaster recovery. But other kinds of climate-driven disasters are also becoming more frequent, most notably wildfires in the West, droughts in the Southwest, and extreme heat and extreme cold throughout the country. In the current recovery framework, these disasters tend to draw on insurance as the primary source of recovery funding, though that system is under strain and may change in the coming years. This article focuses on costly disasters with limited insurance coverage— typically hurricanes and flooding—which consume the bulk of federal spending.
The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization published a paper in 2021 documenting how the increased frequency of climate disasters affects global agriculture. The paper concluded that four times as many disasters occurred globally in the 2010s than in the 1970s. Similarly, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has documented an increase in coastal flooding as a result of sea level rise, especially along the East and Gulf Coasts. Hurricanes are also becoming more severe because they draw their strength from warm water and warm air, which holds more moisture as it gets hotter.
Since 1980, more than 15,000 people have been killed in major disasters in the United States, and the federal government has spent $2.2 trillion on disaster recovery through emergency appropriations. Disasters are getting more expensive as people continue to build in harm’s way; in 2022 alone, the United States experienced eighteen disaster events that cost at least $1 billion.
A Brief Overview of the U.S. Policy Infrastructure for Disaster Response
In the United States, the policy infrastructure for disaster response—personnel, oversight committees, think tanks, and offices within the executive office of the president—has remained small relative to the impact that repeated disasters have had on the country’s most vulnerable regions and the federal budget. The Barack Obama administration started a directorate within the National Security Council (NSC) for “resilience and response,” with a broadly defined mandate around critical infrastructure and risk management. It is not clear how climate disasters fit into the directorate’s mandate, and the directorate does not appear to play a strong coordinating role on disaster policy among federal agencies.
For national security policymakers beginning to focus on disaster response and recovery, an early challenge is understanding the policy landscape that connects local, state, and federal governments responding to and recovering from a major event. For federally involved disasters, especially those involving flooding and hurricanes, there is no permanently authorized long-term recovery program. As the Government Accountability Office reported in 2021, “because disaster recovery block grants aren’t part of a permanent program, grant requirements have to be customized for each disaster. This is time-consuming for the agency and grantees—leading to delays in receipt and use of the funds.” Recent efforts to establish a permanent program in the 2023 omnibus budget were not successful.
Hurricane Ida—which hit Louisiana in August 2021 as a Category 4 hurricane and was the second-most-damaging hurricane to hit the state, behind Hurricane Katrina—is one example of this problem. While FEMA had sufficient balances in its Disaster Relief Fund to conduct immediate disaster response, it wasn’t until almost seven months after the storm that Congress first appropriated long-term recovery funds. And it was a full year later, in September 2022, that Congress appropriated major long-term recovery block grants.
Figure 1 provides a basic roadmap for how funding and decisionmaking flow at different levels of government for short- and long-term recovery after high-cost disasters.
Each round of funding requires Congress to write an emergency funding bill, often after significant lobbying and debate. (The increase in disasters in recent decades has coincided with a decrease in the ability of Congress to pass legislation, including such appropriations.) This funding is then routed through various federal agencies that must write their own rules for the special funding, further delaying the arrival of assistance to help disaster survivors.
For long-term recovery programs, federal agencies can either designate the state as the primary grant recipient or direct programs to large cities and counties with the capacity to manage large federal grants. The decision of whether to administer federal programs at the local or state level varies by administration, with Republican administrations more often choosing states as the administering entity and Democratic administrations giving preference to cities and counties. This distinction has political relevance in regions such as the Gulf South, where major disasters are more frequent than in other regions and where states tend to be Republican controlled and large cities and counties tend to have Democratic leadership.
Four Risks for U.S. National Security
Four risks for national security arise from a repeated and increasing cycle of disasters. The risks paint a challenging picture, full of hurdles that will require considerable effort to overcome.
Loss of Confidence in Basic Governance
Nowhere is more emblematic of a loss of confidence in government than Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Maria made landfall on the island in September 2017, just weeks after a previous hurricane left approximately two-thirds of the population without electricity. Maria completely knocked out the power grid, cell service, and access to clean water.
Five years after Maria, Puerto Ricans still lack reliable, affordable access to power, and they pay more than twice as much as mainland customers for electricity (35.45 cents per kilowatt hour in Puerto Rico versus 15.46 cents on the mainland, as of July 2022). In 2020, the public power company was privatized into LUMA Energy, which failed to restore reliable electricity when Hurricane Fiona hit in September 2022.
The power grid’s failures have become a symbol of corruption and mismanagement. In October 2022, 4,000 people marched in San Juan to protest LUMA, building on weekly protests at their offices. News stories regularly report the frustrations of Puerto Ricans who bear the costs of more frequent and longer outages. Costs include damaged computers, a lack of air conditioning for older residents, and spoiled food and insulin. The lack of services is mobilizing a political movement.
The political frustration in Puerto Rico echoes the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when then president George W. Bush commended FEMA director Michael Brown as “doing a heck of a job” in the days following the storm. It was obvious at the time that Brown and FEMA were failing in the basic functions of disaster response: people were stuck on rooftops, hospital patients were stranded without care, and survivors quickly ran out of food and water. Polls showed that the bungled disaster response pulled Bush’s approval rating down to 42 percent, the lowest of his presidency by that point, even after the invasion of Iraq.
In recent years, a growing mutual aid movement has arisen in the United States. Building on long-standing practices in Black and Indigenous communities, the movement recognizes that the government and other actors frequently fail disaster survivors, and it offers community-driven assistance in the void left by absent government entities.
The concept of national security is premised on the idea that the government is a legitimate entity in protecting the security of the nation and its people. While few people see the national security infrastructure at work on a regular basis, an increasing number of Americans do see how the government responds, or doesn’t respond, after disasters. When the government is widely viewed as failing to protect, it loses legitimacy and people turn to other sources of aid to get them through crises.
It can be tempting to view these coping mechanisms for government failure as inspiring stories of community agency. But there are serious risks to accumulated, frequent, and widespread experiences of disasters and their aftermath across the United States. Loss of legitimacy hampers the federal government’s ability to mediate contests over resources between different states and communities. And these failures can contribute to increased polarization as communities—sometimes divided along racial or partisan lines—feel the need to take matters into their own hands. Loss of legitimacy increases political instability and reduces the trust that people have in the federal government’s ability to effectively meet other needs.
The United States is not the only country struggling with this challenge. Indeed, the era of perpetual disaster has implications for how citizens and governments around the world understand state sovereignty, given the historical centrality of physical security in the obligations that states have to their citizens.
Increased Inequality
At a time when intense storms are occurring more frequently, there is a growing body of evidence, derived from FEMA data, that shows that the agency helps White disaster survivors more than Black and Latino survivors, and higher-income survivors more than low- to moderate-income survivors, even when the damage incurred is the same.
In a 2018 study, Junia Howell and James R. Elliott illustrated how FEMA’s assistance programs have the effect of widening the racial wealth gap over time. In communities that received high levels of FEMA aid during the 1999–2013 period, Howell and Elliott found that White people accumulated $55,000 more wealth than similarly situated White people in communities that received the minimal amount of FEMA assistance. Black people in communities that received high levels of aid accumulated $82,000 less than similarly situated Black people in low-aid communities. The study concluded, “The two defining social problems of our day—wealth inequality and rising natural hazard damages—are dynamically linked.”
Disasters widen inequalities in other ways, too. The gap between homeowners and renters is particularly significant. Renters in precarious living situations are especially vulnerable during a disaster. During Hurricane Ida, at least forty-three people were killed in the Northeast, many of them living in substandard basement apartments. Meanwhile, federal direct-assistance programs tend to favor homeowners and landlords because they can receive direct payments for home repair.
The most pronounced gap in the national recovery framework is between high-income and low-income households. In 2021, NPR reported on internal FEMA documents that analyzed 4.8 million registrations for disaster aid between 2014 and 2018 and compared applicants’ incomes. The findings emphasize just how widely divergent disaster recovery can be depending on income level. As NPR reported, low-income survivors were twice as likely to have their assistance claims denied because FEMA assessed their housing damage to be “insufficient.” Moreover, high-income homeowners received about twice as much financial assistance to rebuild their homes than the poorest homeowners, a finding that researchers said could not be explained by relative repair costs.
In 2018, the City of Houston published a detailed analysis of the impact of Hurricane Harvey that took into account preexisting social vulnerability.1 The study found that 64 percent of the land area within city limits was flooded during the storm and that 27 percent of households were affected by floodwater. This kind of widespread impact is typical of long-lasting rain events. While the damage was widespread and affected people of all income levels, the study focused on how households with preexisting social vulnerabilities and low incomes lost a relatively greater amount than high-income households. In high-vulnerability census tracts, a third of all households “experienced loss on average of more than 50 percent of the area annual income due to Harvey.”
FEMA’s impact assessment methodologies require households to meet a threshold of $8,000 in verified loss for that loss to be considered serious. FEMA inspectors must visit every damaged property to determine the level of loss, and they often deny assistance to low-income residents, sometimes because their homes were in poor condition before the disaster. In a 2019 interview with Houston resident Malberth Moses, reporter Sarah Smith related how “a FEMA inspector needed just a few minutes—five minutes tops—to walk through his 95-year-old mother’s living room and kitchen before deciding the buckling ceiling and cracks in the wood were preexisting conditions. She didn’t qualify for assistance, [the inspector] concluded.”
The U.S. government’s own disaster assistance policies are accelerating and hardening disparate racial wealth trajectories and income disparities. While there is a growing body of reporting and advocacy about the way assistance is distributed in the critical months after a disaster event, FEMA policies remain largely unchanged, despite the recommendations of its own advisory panel on racial equity.
Widening inequality and racial divisions pose long-term risks to social and political stability in the United States. They also undermine the United States’ image in the world and its soft power. Many advanced economies are currently going through a social, political, and intellectual reexamination of the neoliberal economic policies that have dominated U.S. domestic policy since the 1980s and that have been the principal frame for the expansion of global trade in the wake of the Cold War. The Joe Biden administration has signaled a shift: committing to a “foreign policy for the middle class,” generally eschewing new free-trade deals and supporting major spending bills that include significant investment in industry and jobs in the United States.
A disaster response infrastructure that exacerbates inequality is working against this new direction. Widening inequality undermines social cohesion and faith in democratic institutions and, therefore, is not only a social and environmental justice issue but also a national security concern.
Internal and External Climate Migration
Disasters and the loss of habitable land force individuals, and even entire communities, to relocate. There are two dynamics here: people living outside the United States are being pushed by climate disasters to migrate to the United States, and people living within the United States are being forced to move to other parts of the country.
To date, the national security policy debate about migration and asylum has focused on people migrating to the United States from other countries. Climate change is an important driver of such migration. In a 2022 interview, Duke University Professor Sarah Blodgett Bermeo identified that “farmers in Central America have experienced multiple droughts since 2014, resulting in crop losses of 70 percent or more during some harvests . . . . When crops fail, subsistence farmers cannot grow the food they need to feed their families and those who farm for wages lose their livelihoods. . . . Droughts were likely a key driver of large increases in family migration from Honduras and Guatemala to the United States in 2018 and 2019.”
The combination of climate disasters, rural poverty, food insecurity, and urban violence are driving migrants from Central America to Canada, Costa Rica, Mexico, and the United States. “Climate change forces people to leave their homes and then high levels of violence force them to leave their country,” instead of migrating internally, Bermeo said. The influx of migrants at the U.S. southern border has been one of the most polarizing issues in American politics in the early 2020s, with few political compromises on the horizon. Republicans have already made clear that the issue will be prominent in the 2024 presidential campaign.
Less well-known is the fact that within the United States, land loss exacerbated by climate change and a repeated cycle of disasters are also causing people to relocate internally. The most pronounced land loss is taking place in Louisiana, where, as journalist Elizabeth Kolbert writes, “every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field of land,” resulting in the disappearance of 2,000 square miles of land in the last fifty years. In 2016, the federal government initiated the first program to resettle climate refugees through a HUD program to “enable a tribal community on the Isle de Jean Charles, which has experienced a 98 percent loss of land [since] 1955, to relocate to a resilient and historically-contextual community.”
According to the Data Center for Southeast Louisiana, New Orleans lost a third of its population after Hurricane Katrina, resulting in many different kinds of cultural, economic, and social loss. The city’s population decline also contributed to a significant increase in vacant homes. Similarly, after Hurricane Maria, more than 123,000 Puerto Ricans permanently relocated to different U.S. states, especially New York and Florida, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.
The immigration debate has thus far not extended to internal climate migrants, even as movement is increasingly driven by disasters. From a national security perspective, this kind of land loss and internal migration requires interstate cooperation and policymaking that is beyond the normal governing experience of most elected mayors and county executives.
Washington should focus both on facilitating a coordinated response across states and municipalities to what is likely to be a growing phenomenon and on learning from other countries’ experiences with internally displaced people.
Corruption in a Disaster-Capitalist Ecosystem
With massive disaster payouts coming to states and localities—many with limited internal capacity—for-profit firms often win massive contracts with little accountability. This reduces the funds available to help survivors, while also eroding confidence in the government’s ability to lead recovery efforts.
Then U.S. ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten described this system in a 2010 cable obtained by Wikileaks, in a section entitled, “THE GOLD RUSH IS ON!”: “As Haiti digs out from the earthquake, different companies are moving in to sell their concepts, products and services . . . Each is vying for the ear of President in a veritable free-for-all.” The United States would go on to send more than $2 billion in relief assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to Haiti, only a tiny percentage of which went to Haitian firms.
Within the United States, this dynamic is also playing out across jurisdictions experiencing disasters. As with many aspects of the modern disaster state, Hurricane Katrina laid the foundation for future disasters. Writing in 2009 as the post-Katrina program for homeowner assistance was winding down, the Times-Picayune wrote that despite the program management firm being “generally reviled by Louisianians and essentially banned from new business with the state,” it still walked away “$900 million richer and holding lucrative contracts with governments across the country.”
This post-disaster dynamic of extreme reliance on the private sector bears similarities to postwar environments where large, private firms scoop up enormous government contracts for rebuilding. National security policymakers have long wrestled with the consequences of this kind of outsourcing in an international context, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq. Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, summarized disaster capitalism in a March 2020 interview about the COVID-19 pandemic: “It describes the way private industries spring up to directly profit from large-scale crises.” She went on to say, “The ‘shock doctrine’ is the political strategy of using large-scale crises to push through policies that systematically deepen inequality, enrich elites, and undercut everyone else.”
Domestic disasters present a new challenge in a complex web of federally funded, locally administered contracts. In 2021, the U.S. Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency articulated the challenge in its review of twenty-eight reports related to the federal government’s natural disaster preparedness and response. Summarizing twelve separate audit reports on Hurricane Sandy recovery, the council concluded that “the Government paid extreme markups on rented equipment, used problematic contractors, and failed to prevent or detect numerous financial and internal control deficiencies.” The report said that inspectors general questioned almost 20 percent of the total recovery costs for Hurricane Sandy.
As the costs of disaster recovery rise, containing systemic financial abuse within an ecosystem of private contracting while building local capacity to manage recovery is a pressing national security challenge. The Biden administration has prioritized combating corruption worldwide as a national security priority and a pillar of its democracy strategy. The strategy mentions disasters only once in an illustrative example about Peru. Moreover, it focuses on coordination and reporting at the NSC as a primary means of implementing the strategy. Without a strong disaster focus within the NSC, there is reason to be skeptical that disasters will be included in the rollout of the administration’s anticorruption efforts.
A Reason for Hope
The national security risks of larger and more frequent climate disasters are serious. Climate disasters contribute to the erosion of trust in basic governance, the widening of racial and other forms of inequality, the displacement of people inside and outside of U.S. borders, and heightened corruption. These risks are especially acute in the period of democratic fragility that characterizes the first half of the 2020s.
But anyone who has lived through even a small-scale disaster firsthand has likely experienced the unexpected joy of a community coming together in extraordinary ways. Think of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people sewed masks, bought groceries for neighbors, and supported medical workers. At the height of despair and struggle, people often extend a helping hand. In her book A Paradise Built in Hell, historian Rebecca Solnit wrote about the altruism that arises in post-disaster organizing: “In the wake of an earthquake, a bombing or a major storm, most people are altruistic, urgently engaged in caring for themselves and those around them, strangers and neighbours as well as friends and loved ones.”
Historically in the United States, this kind of community care has not translated into large-scale political movements that can sustain momentum and reach across existing divides. In a 2017 interview, historian Jacob Remes reflected on this unrealized potential for disaster citizenship, concluding that “what’s missing is organizing. That’s always what there has to be: workers organizing and building ways of helping each other and demanding things from others based on working together.”
But there are glimmers of a new kind of sustained disaster citizenship taking shape. In October 2022, organizers from some of the most disaster-prone areas of the United States—Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, Puerto Rico, and Texas—commemorated the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Sandy with the announcement that they would come together under the banner of Organizing Resilience to build political power out of their experience as storm survivors.2 This effort reflects the kind of sustained, collaborative, multiracial, and demand-driven organizing that has been missing from the American political ecosystem in response to disaster.
In her 2022 working paper, “Five Strategies to Support U.S. Democracy,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Rachel Kleinfeld made the case for broad-based movements that seek concrete, locally rooted action as a key component for building democracy at home and abroad. Similarly, author Michelle Barsa made the connection between the coming-together moments of disaster and the possibility of democratic renewal in a fractured country, in her paper, “Renewing American Democracy.” Both authors emphasized the importance of multiracial coalition-building as an intervention pathway to overcome societal fracturing. This is the kind of coalition-building that can happen post-disaster and that Organizing Resilience is seeking to sustain.
As Biden argued when making the case for his presidency in 2020, strengthening American democracy will be a bedrock national security priority for the foreseeable future. Viewed through that lens, a more equitable, responsive, national-level disaster-recovery policy should be prioritized as a central tenet of American national security.
Notes
1 The author worked on this City of Houston study while at the Housing and Community Development Department.
2 The author has done a small amount of consulting work for Organizing Resilience.
