How America Can Prevent Another Katrina
In the second week of July 2026, the Guadalupe River came up again. For the families of Kerr County, Texas, this was the second flood to put their homes underwater in as many years, and six weeks later, many of them are still waiting on the federal government. As of August 31st, most of the disaster aid Texas requested for individuals and local governments after this year's flooding still had not been released. Uvalde County has roads and bridges it cannot yet repair. Kerr County, still absorbing the previous summer's tragedy, does not have the money to put displaced families into livable homes. But this isn't unique to Kerr County. FEMA's own records show that under the Trump administration, the average wait for a decision on major disaster funding has stretched to roughly nine and a half weeks, longer than under the administrations before it. In June of last year, the President put it plainly: the goal, he said, is to "bring it down to the state level."
This is the second flood. It should not have had to teach the same lesson as the first.
Rewind one year. On the morning of July 4, 2025, the Guadalupe River rose more than twenty feet in under an hour, in the dark, while families slept in cabins along its banks. By the time the water receded, at least 137 people were dead, 119 of them in Kerr County alone, many of them children swept from a riverside summer camp. It remains one of the deadliest flash floods in modern American history. In the week after the flood, America’s disaster relief system barely worked. FEMA's own internal call logs, later obtained by NPR, show the agency fielded roughly 55,000 calls from disaster survivors and managed to answer barely 15,000 of them, leaving something like 40,000 calls from flood victims to ring out. On the single worst day, FEMA failed to pick up more than three-quarters of the calls coming in. The cause had nothing to do with the scale of the disaster and everything to do with Washington DC:
Horrifically, the contract funding FEMA's call-center staff lapsed the day after the flood, and it took the Department of Homeland Security five full days to renew it, because the Secretary had recently imposed a rule requiring her personal sign-off on any FEMA expenditure over $100,000. Specialized federal search-and-rescue teams were reportedly not authorized to deploy until three days after the water rose, while survivors were still being pulled from trees along the riverbank. FEMA's search-and-rescue chief resigned not long after. A month after that, nearly two hundred current and former FEMA employees put their names, or in most cases their anonymity, behind a letter to Congress. They called it the Katrina Declaration. Its message was blunt in its appraisal that the agency was, year by year, losing the exact safeguards Congress had built after Katrina, and it was now less prepared for the next major disaster than it had been in years. Within a day of sending it, every employee who had signed it publicly was fired.
A year later (this summer), the Guadalupe rose again, and the aid moved even slower than it had the first time.
None of this should feel unfamiliar to any Americans who remember the horror of New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina killed roughly 1,800 people along the Gulf Coast in August 2005, but most people did not die due to the storm itself. They died in the week that followed, when New Orleans became a legal no-man's-land, its rescue split three ways between a mayor, a governor, and a federal government that could not act without the governor's word. Louisiana's National Guard belonged to its governor unless the President formally federalized it, and federalizing it meant persuading her to hand her state's own forces over to Washington in the middle of the worst week of her career. She said no more than once, even as the water kept rising and President Bush’s own staff warned that they were running out of time.
In that week, FEMA bought and then lost track of more than 180,000,000 pounds of ice, trucking it to warehouses as far away as Maine, and two years later quietly threw out $100,000,000 of it, unused. It spent $900 million on 25,000 mobile homes for displaced families, then discovered its own floodplain regulations barred parking most of them anywhere near where those families actually lived. The government had the resources the entire time. What it lacked was anyone with the authority to release them fast enough, because everyone technically held a piece of that authority and no one held the whole of it.
That is not a 2005 problem that Congress merely solved and filed away. It is the exact same failure that Kerr County families lived through in July 2025, replayed with a lapsed contract and a six-figure signature requirement instead of a flooded Superdome. And it is the reason that federal search-and-rescue crews were still waiting on authorization while the window for finding Americans alive was closing.
Across the Pacific
Across the Pacific, Japan had this same disease, and it cured it.
At 5:46 in the morning on January 17, 1995, an earthquake tore through Kobe and killed more than 6,400 people. Like New Orleans a decade later, many of Kobe's dead were victims not only of the hazard but of a government that could not decide, quickly enough, who was allowed to help. Japan's Self-Defense Forces, the one organization in the country capable of search-and-rescue at real scale, could not deploy into Hyogo Prefecture until the governor formally requested them. His office, its own communications knocked out by the quake, did not make that request until ten that morning, more than four hours after the ground stopped shaking. The Prime Minister at the time was also personally reluctant to lean on the military at all, a holdover from Japan's postwar politics, and a hesitation that costed time the country did not have.
Japan's response to that failure was to inaugurate a structural reform. The government stood up a Cabinet crisis-management team empowered to convene and start directing a national response the moment a major disaster hit, with no governor's request required to set it in motion. It standardized firefighting and rescue equipment across every prefecture, so help arriving from three hundred miles away could plug directly into the response instead of showing up with incompatible gear. And it rewrote the rules around military mobilization so the four-hour gap Hyogo Prefecture lived through could not happen again.
Sixteen years later, the test came. On March 11, 2011, a magnitude-9.0 earthquake off Tōhoku sent a tsunami with waves that topped 130 feet in places into Japan's northeastern coast, and it killed close to 19,000 people. But where it took Tokyo hours just to grasp the scale of the Kobe disaster in 1995, the national emergency team was meeting within thirty minutes of the Tōhoku quake. Within two days, the Prime Minister had ordered 100,000 Self-Defense Forces personnel mobilized; within a week, most of them were already in the field, pulling tens of thousands of people from the wreckage and distributing food, water, and shelter before hunger and untreated injury could turn one catastrophe into the kind of slow second one that defined New Orleans. In the years since, polling has consistently found somewhere around nine in ten Japanese citizens holding a favorable view of the Self-Defense Forces, trust built almost entirely on performances like that one.
"But Japan Is Different"
The easy objection is that Japan is a smaller, more homogeneous country, and that whatever it built cannot simply be transplanted onto the United States. Some of that is true, but much of it is a myth. Japan is not a small country by any serious measure: it carries one of the largest economies on earth, is home to roughly 123 million people, and is governed through 47 semi-autonomous prefectures with their own governors, police forces, and budgets, precisely the kind of large, federal-style democracy that skeptics here in America might insist cannot produce the same jurisdictional gridlock as fifty American states. What actually differs between Japan and the United States is not the size of the country. It's the choice that its government made in learning from its mistakes. Japan looked at the jurisdictional blockage that had cost thousands of lives and removed it. America looked at the same kind of crisis in Katrina in 2005, convened a bipartisan congressional inquiry that called it, memorably, "a failure of initiative," and left the problem standing. Twenty years and two Kerr County floods later, the problem is still standing, and the Trump administration has said plainly that it would like to hand even more of this problem back to the states, obviously to relieve the federal government from the responsibility of failure.
The Change We Need
The law that still governs federal disaster response, the Stafford Act, works almost exactly like the Japanese law that failed in Kobe: before most federal capability can move, a governor has to request it in writing, and a President has to grant it. There is no floor on how long that can take when the state asking for help is itself short-staffed, in shock, or waiting on a Cabinet secretary hundreds of miles away to personally approve a purchase order.
The New Nationalists of America have already proposed a National Labor Service organized around a standing Civil Corps: trained, funded, and kept under one chain of command for exactly the kind of large-scale rebuilding work a natural disaster leaves behind. That same standing force is the natural backbone of a National Disaster Command, a single federal authority, already staffed and pre-positioned, empowered to deploy the moment an objective threshold is crossed, whether that is a river gauge, a hurricane category, or a seismic reading, without waiting on a governor's signature or a Secretary's approval of a six-figure invoice. Local police, fire, and rescue would keep doing exactly what they do best, just as they do in Japan. Nobody in Washington knows the Guadalupe's floodplain better than the people who live on it. But when a river rises twenty feet in under an hour, the bureaucratic clog is felt by everybody who lives there, in calls that were never answered and search teams that arrived far too late.
Kerr County will almost certainly flood again.
The federal government can either learn from its mistakes, or it can keep finding new ways to prove that it hasn’t.
Our friends in Japan have shown the whole world that new disasters, although they are unavoidable, do not have to look like the old ones.
