Doing My Part

You’re right, When Katrina hit in 2005, it was a major cock up. The agency was underfunded, and unprepared.
Famously, a certain scumbag traumatized Mike Meyers by saying George Bush doesn’t care about black people on national TV.

Obama spent much of this two terms improving FEMA to improve funding and readiness of the agency. Much to the chagrin of the press, who made much ado about FEMA’s ‘zombie outbreak’ plan.

When COVID hit, I recall all the hoopla around FEMA and how they were utterly unprepared, and that it became clear that the stockpiles and plans that had been created under Obama had been ignored, destroyed, or left to rot under Trump. I remember a common headline was that Trump “‘Ripped up’ Obama’s FEMA playbook.”

Since then, the agency has been a political vehicle, where democrats wants to fund it to get on top of COVID, and republicans don’t, so they can claim democrats are just as bad as they were at responding to COVID.

Which is all to say - it’s not the agency, it’s the politics, and moreso than that, it’s the people who are stupid enough to think it’s the agency and not the politics.

People out in the sticks of Appalachia who are informed by targeted disinfo campaigns don’t give two shits about the victims of Katrina or any of the actual past failures of FEMA. They care about perceived failures of FEMA and what they think FEMA is doing and what it stands for, based on the information bubble the algorithm has picked out for them.