The Evolving Federal Landscape for Emergency Management: A Conversation
By Pete Gaynor and Rich Serino
June 2023
This paper is part of a continuing publication series for the Global Crisis & Resilience Forum led by Juliette Kayyem, Faculty Chair of Harvard Kennedy School: Belfer Center’s Homeland Security Program. The forum is supported by McKinsey and Company. The ideas in these papers are the independent product of the discussants.
Background
In November 2022, the Belfer Center, with support from McKinsey, brought together a diverse group of leaders from the emergency management community to discuss the evolving nature of emergency management, the challenges the enterprise faces, and solutions and strategies to better prepare for the new, poly-crisis climate. Among those leaders were former FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor (1) and former Deputy Administrator Rich Serino (2). They graciously agreed to participate in a facilitated dialogue with Belfer Center Fellow Nate Bruggeman (3) to further explore the themes and issues discussed in November 2022. (4)
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1) Pete Gaynor is a former Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. He currently serves as Senior Vice President and Director of National Resilience, Response and Recovery Programs at GEI Consultants Inc.
2) Rich Serino was the 8th FEMA Deputy Administrator and served as Chief at Boston EMS where he served for over 36 years. He was also the Assistant Director of Health for the City of Boston. He is currently a Distinguished Senior Fellow in Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
3) Nate Bruggeman is a Fellow at the Belfer Center’s Homeland Security Project and the Executive Editor of its Homeland Security Policy Paper Series.
4) The participants engaged in an initial interview. The facilitator and participants edited the transcript of the interview for clarity and completeness.
Nate Bruggeman (NB): Can you describe how emergency management has evolved since you entered the profession?
Pete Gaynor (PG): When I talk about the profession of emergency management to other people, I try to remind them that we are a young, immature, not fully developed field. Think about other public safety professionals like police and fire. They’ve been around hundreds of years, while emergency management has been around for maybe 50 or 60 years. Police and fire professionals have lots of history, lots of trial and error, lots of evolution. We have a long way to go to catch up to our fellow brother and sister public safety partners.
But that said, since 9/11, and definitely since COVID began, the emergency management field has grown leaps and bounds to become more professional, more action oriented. The pandemic allowed the public to see what emergency managers really do. Their understanding may not be perfect, but they have a better feeling about what we do and our importance to their lives.
Although people are more familiar with what we do, there is still a challenge in getting people to take to heart some of the things we’ve been asking for years like preparedness. This isn’t a one-sided equation where it’s all on government or it’s all on emergency managers to prepare the community. It is incumbent on all of us to have a role in having a more prepared community. When a disaster is knocking on their door, I believe many citizens are inclined to take actions that protect their family and property. But if you ask them to take some action that will improve their preparedness six months ahead of time, they have other priorities that get in the way. We have made some headway over the past decade or so, but we still have a long way to go before we create a universal culture of individual preparedness in this country. It’s a process, but I believe we will get there.
Lastly, as a profession, emergency managers have to talk more about what we do for our community, whether that community’s a tribe or a territory, state, local county, or the federal government. We need to take ownership and take some pride in what we do. I’m not sure as a profession we do that well enough.
NB: What does the new operational environment look like for emergency management, and why is its evolution presenting challenges for emergency managers?
Rich Serino (RS): As we look at the current environment for emergency management, we must understand the concept of “poly-crisis,” and the idea of a billion-dollar disaster happening every 15 or 20 days. These large disasters are now happening frequently. That pace of disaster is challenging for national, state, local, tribal, and territorial emergency managers.
In addition to the frequency of disasters is the change in the types of issues to which we’re being asked to respond. It’s not just floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires anymore. Emergency managers are dealing with fentanyl, homelessness, immigration, cyber, biosecurity, and terrorism. Those types of issues are not things that emergency management has typically been involved in. So, on top of the poly-crisis, we’re starting to see certainly domestically that the issues emergency managers are dealing with are changing, in particular at the state, local, tribal and territorial levels.
Emergency managers are being asked to coordinate or lead, which is justifiable because they can bring people together. Emergency managers do that better than anybody else. But it is changing the face of what emergency management is and what emergency management does. And a significant problem is that emergency management doesn’t have the resources to handle the poly-crisis, let alone all of these new issues.
When we talk about building stronger emergency management systems, we can’t do that in our silo or cylinder excellence. We have to look at strengthening related systems, for example, stronger public health systems and stronger public safety systems. Emergency management cannot replace all of those related systems and their unique capabilities.
PG: We are evolving from being a traditional emergency manager to something more in line with a crisis manager. The word emergency now sounds generic, and we’ve evolved from the generic emergency manager dealing with one event at one time that is familiar to us, like a flood or tornado. Now, we’re increasingly a crisis manager in the poly-crisis environment that Rich described. These events are intertwined and happening at once, or sometimes stagnant and never ending. With that transition we need to expand our traditional skills sets, skills like the expertise in how we understand and manage the supply chain. Resolving emergencies, disasters, and crises is all about our ability to pour critical resources into the problem at the right time. If we don’t understand our supply chain, even our best efforts will fall short.
We need to reframe who we are and our value to the community. We don’t do just emergencies, we do crises. There isn’t a clear lane for us anymore, as we are managing every kind of crisis. Look at FEMA managing aspects of a public health emergency like COVID. It isn’t in the statutory FEMA mission. It’s a health and human service mission by law. But FEMA comes to own part of it and many other issues like Afghan resettlement. Why would national leadership pick FEMA to do that, but they did because of the fact that we are the nation’s problem solvers. So, you need to reframe the emergency manager role, what it was, what it is, what it is going to be in the future. We have a lot of growth ahead of us.
The nation is not going to stop asking FEMA and other emergency managers to respond. Whether FEMA is on fumes after COVID or is busy handling routine matters, when the president calls on the agency to lead, the answer is yes. Our culture says that we’re going to go do it and we’ll get it done. We are the nation’s premier problem solvers. It may not be pretty, but it will get done. That’s what is so admirable about the culture of emergency managers. After us, who are you calling? There’s no one else to call
NB: Do the traditional ways in which we've organized federal, state, and local responsibilities still make sense in the current environment and for the future?
PG: It sometimes seems like the answer to, “who do we call,” is simply the people with “emergency” in their title. Why wouldn’t we call them when they’re responsive and effective. At the same time, we must learn that’s the old model of being reactive. So, if emergency managers are going to be called more and more to do more complicated things, let’s have a national crisis strategy and put on paper, into law, what everyone’s role is. This isn’t just about FEMA; this is about the integrated role of all of government (and our partners) in a national crisis.
This should move us beyond being reactive, as happened with COVID. We must be proactive, so when the next national crisis happens, we know who is going to do what and who is in charge. What we had during COVID was ad hoc; it worked, but we were constantly reimagining our approach. What we had developed didn’t survive the first 48 hours. We need to get smarter as a nation before the next crisis strikes. Congress needs to proactively recognize the need to adapt and formalize our national approach to a crisis in law.
RS: Emergency management is complex to begin with, and when you are operating at the federal level, it becomes even more complex. What we need to do is begin to simplify—make it easier for the survivors, which doesn’t just mean people, but communities. We have to find ways to make it easier for folks to get the help they need.
Within that, we have to have clear roles and responsibilities. We both have called for a National Emergency Management Strategy and agree that a national strategy would be very helpful. FEMA has a great strategic plan. It’s great for FEMA, but we have to look broader to more of a national emergency management strategy. How we’re able to bring people together so people can understand and align roles, responsibility, and resources.
I’m not talking about a 300-page document. Consider, for example, the national strategy for cybersecurity, which is 34 or 35 pages. Canada’s national strategy for emergency management is about the same length. The key is that we set a tone for where we need to go and what the roles and responsibilities are to do it. We’re at a point of transformation for emergency management, a crossroads. We can’t keep doing things the way we have been doing them.
PG: No one likes change, as most people prefer the path of least resistance and the way it used to be. Our biggest threat as emergency managers right now is returning to the status quo where we haven’t embraced any of the lessons we observed and endured during our response to COVID-19. I think, as a profession, it’s the worst trap that we could allow ourselves to fall into.
When it comes to finding additional capacity, under persistent funding and budgetary constraints, we have to look internally into our organizations. Are there things that we’re doing that have no apparent value to the mission? Activities that we’ve been doing for the last 25 years because we have always done it that way. If you stopped doing it today, would people notice that you don’t do it anymore? I’m sure all of us could find extra capacity in our organization by repurposing resources that no longer have value to the organization.
There may be things organizations need to shed that aren’t really about the core mission. I’ll pick a controversial item: Could FEMA shed its insurance mission to some other agency, to a standalone agency, or to the private sector? I’m not saying to do it or not do it. It’s not that it’s not important to the general mission of FEMA, but does it help the agency be more effective in managing the next national crisis. We shouldn’t be afraid to ask the question and then, depending on the answer, act on it or at least seriously consider it. We must look from the bottom to the top and evaluate whether what we are doing moves the needle when it comes to managing a national crisis or some multiregional crisis.
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