Hurricane Katrina fueled major reforms at FEMA. Now, its future is uncertain

The Brief

It’s been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, a catastrophe that killed 1,400 people and led to countless changes in how the country responds to disasters.

Now, those reforms are in jeopardy as the Trump administration works to drastically reduce FEMA’s budget, and potentially dismantle the agency altogether.

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency became synonymous with chaos and dysfunction that crippled response efforts and left people stranded on rooftops for days.

Twenty years after the nation’s most destructive disaster killed roughly 1,400 people, experts have a much clearer picture of what went wrong, and whether FEMA was a scapegoat for massive failures at all levels of government.

Now, with