Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast. After crossing over Florida, the storm affected all five gulf states. Coastal Mississippi was devastated by storm surge, and New Orleans was hit at a catastrophic level when its levee system failed.
Nearly 1,400 lives were lost. Countless people were separated from their communities, many forced to relocate across the Gulf Region. Some were never able to return home.
Today, on the disaster’s 20th anniversary, we must reflect on what was lost, how we responded and what remains at stake.
Hurricane Katrina was a turning point for disaster response. The storm revealed the devastating flood risks faced by coastal communities, worsened by underinvested and poorly managed infrastructure.
These risks are exacerbated by a changing climate, as we’ve seen in the countless disasters across the nation since 2005.
The storm also exposed deep flaws in the federal government’s disaster response capacity and the need for pre-disaster planning and risk mitigation.
Slow aid, poor coordination and inequitable recovery led to a national reckoning and grassroots efforts to bring reform at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The FEMA of today is a product of those difficult lessons learned. FEMA was overhauled after Hurricane Katrina to become more efficient and better coordinated with state and local governments.
The agency also implemented better risk mapping, faster mobilization of resources, and strengthened pre-disaster mitigation programs.
Today’s FEMA is not perfect. But it is far more capable than the FEMA of 2005. Proposals to weaken FEMA would undermine two decades of progress and put more Americans at risk during future storms.
FEMA does not just provide aid after hurricanes. Natural disasters like wildfires, inland flooding, and severe storms affect every state in the nation.
A well-resourced and effectively managed FEMA is more important than ever; but now the Trump administration’s actions are undermining FEMA’s ability to protect Americans from disasters.
The agency has already lost significant capacity over the past six months, and the president’s budget request proposed cutting FEMA’s funding by over 20 percent. Low-income, rural and minority communities are hit especially hard when FEMA is under-resourced.
Earlier this month, the FEMA Act of 2025 was introduced in the House of Representatives by a bipartisan group of legislators seeking to continue improving FEMA.
The bill would improve coordination with state and local governments, strengthen FEMA’s disaster mitigation framework, streamline programs and processes to allow for more efficient disaster assistance to communities, expand pre-disaster programs to reduce community risks and elevate FEMA to a Cabinet-level position to improve coordination.
All Americans deserve a FEMA that is equipped to deal with modern threats, like stronger and more rapidly intensifying storms driven by a changing climate. The introduction of the FEMA Act is an important first step for Congress to influence the future of FEMA.
We urge these policymakers to recognize the need for strong federal leadership to keep people informed of their growing risks, support pre-disaster programs that reduce climate-driven impacts and build communities back safer disasters.
Weakening FEMA risks repeating the same mistakes that left so many Gulf Coast communities endangered during and after Hurricane Katrina. The people of the Gulf Coast who were affected in so many ways by this storm and the many since have spent decades building back their communities.
While building back, they have advocated for more effective programs at the local, state and federal levels to ensure that their experience of catastrophic failure in disaster response is not replicated and endured by communities like theirs around the nation.
We cannot allow their efforts to be forgotten, or worse, reversed.
Will McDow is the associate vice president, Climate Resilient Coasts and Watersheds at Environmental Defense Fund (wmcdow@edf.org).
