After Hours with Jamie Rubin: Reflections on Disaster Relief

The current administration has announced plans to cut funding for disaster relief. The cuts include budget and personnel at FEMA and HUD's Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program. Drawing from his experience building and leading the New York State Governor’s Office of Storm Recovery after Superstorm Sandy, Jamie Rubin explains how losing these agencies will be devastating for communities across the country hit by catastrophic natural disasters.

You can listen to this episode, "Reflections on Disaster Relief," on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. 

TRANSCRIPT:

Jamie: You're listening to After Hours with Jamie Rubin, a Vital City podcast. I'm Jamie Rubin.

Molly: Jamie, last week you reached out and you wanted to record an “emergency podcast” because this [federal] administration was defunding the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The New York Times broke the story. You had a very personal and kind of specific reaction to it.

Jamie: To be a little more specific, it came at the end of the week when they had announced already that they were planning some significant cuts to FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration. What I was specifically talking about were the cuts that they were at least rumored to be making to an equivalent piece of HUD, which is the office that runs the Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery Program.

Molly: Known by those in the know as?

Jamie: D.R.

Molly: D.R. Rolls off the tongue a little easier.

Jamie: Yep.

Molly: Okay. So. We're making cuts to FEMA and DR. Why does this have you so fired up?

Jamie: Back in 2013, my first job in state government was two years I spent as the head of the Governor's Office of Storm Recovery, which was set up to deal with the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, and specifically to allocate the money around the state that came to us through that very HUD program.

Molly: And what do the cuts mean? Like, you know, we are getting news every other day that this and that is being cut. Staff are being laid off. Why does this one matter so much?

Jamie: It matters to me because I had the experience and I had, and I can tell you what it means to people on the ground when a natural disaster hits.

To give you some background, the roles of FEMA and HUD are related, but different when you have a natural disaster. FEMA comes along right after the devastation. They basically flood the area. No pun intended. They flood the area with people to save lives. They distribute medication, they get people out of their homes.

They're basically there to secure the area and stick around for as long as needed to make sure that people are basically safe. More or less when they leave, if there's D.R. money appropriated by Congress for the recovery—and there often is because these are large natural disasters—HUD basically gives the money to the region (the state, or the city, typically the state), and then the state is in charge of putting that money to work to fund the recovery from the disaster.

It's the next step of getting people back to their lives.

Molly: And that's what you did for Sandy in New York.

Jamie: Correct. That's what I did. I set up the Governor's Office of Storm Recovery, which didn't exist in New York before that, because New York, frankly, had never really had a natural disaster of that magnitude, and so it never needed it. I was in charge of managing a $5 billion grant from HUD to the state, this D.R. program, and then also figuring out what to do with a lot of the $10 billion that we got from FEMA and then some other pockets. But mostly the D.R. money.

Molly: Okay, so you just threw out $5 billion, $10 billion. I hear those numbers and it feels like monopoly money.

Jamie: Mm hmm.

Molly: Like, how are you spending this money? What does this job actually entail?

Jamie: As you say, it's a lot of money. On the other hand, it's really not. The City of New York had gotten an equivalent D.R. grant of about $5 billion.

Our job was to deal with all the other areas outside of New York City that had been impacted on the coast—principally Long Island and then some up by the Hudson River and then a little bit upstate. On Long Island [alone, the damage] was 20,000 homes. In the rest of the state, there were thousands more.

By the time you add up the number of people that were directly impacted out of their homes and had to get back in, the $5 billion starts to sound like a lot less.

Molly: You actually visited a number of these sites directly. What was it actually like on the ground?

Jamie: I started in May of 2013. We had been given the money and for the first many, many months, we couldn't give out the money because the programs were just being put into place. I basically went out and visited all these communities. That's what I did day and night. I went out to Long Island and Staten Island and all these other places and met with, frankly, some pretty angry New Yorkers.

There's nothing quite like an angry New Yorker who thinks that they should have been helped out by the federal government way before this.

Molly: Absolutely. I had family whose house was flooded out in deep Brooklyn—Manhattan Beach near Coney Island. As you have said, seawater is a whole different beast than regular water.

They had to gut renovate their apartment and it took—I don't remember how long it took, but it definitely was not the quickest experience, that's for sure. So you held this job for two years. You come in nine months after [and] things aren't even really fixed at all.

What's this process actually like for you in this role?

Jamie: Pretty simply I show up in May of 2013, start hiring people, visit Long Island for the first time, let's say I'm in, like, Long Beach, meet with a bunch of people who are very angry, and ask them to please be patient while I figure out what the housing repair program's going to look like.

And then I basically go back there every week to tell them what kind of progress we're making on designing the program, and just when it's been taken long enough that they think we're lying to them, we come back and say, “Oh, great. Ready to roll. Here's the rules of the program.”

Molly: When you say rules of the program, what does that mean? What is happening behind the scenes when you say that?

Jamie: We're talking to all these folks back at HUD in Washington. We're saying, “We would like to do this. Is that okay?” And they say, “Well, you can't do that, but you can try this.”

It's this back and forth, like, ping ponging for weeks and months, frankly, between us and them until we have a program that works and is legal.

Molly: When you get to that point, then you get to go back to Long Beach and say what?

Jamie: “Here's the program.” In this case, we said, “start doing your work, go find yourself a contractor, and have them do the work, and we're gonna reimburse you for your bills along the way.”

Molly: They get their house back?

Jamie: They get their house back. Not exactly maybe the way they wanted it, and, we don't meet every single need, but yeah, they get their house back. And we did that 20,000 times.

Molly: So you're creating this agency from scratch? And I think this is what you were saying, but just to put a point in it: you're relying on the people that work at HUD, at FEMA, who have been through these sorts of natural disasters before to help you figure out how to create rules and spend the money in a way that is efficient.

Jamie: Efficient, yes, but not fraudulent. The staff back at HUD headquarters in D.C.—those are your friends. They've been there since Katrina and before, and they can tell you all the do's and don'ts—give you this really hard-earned wisdom, frankly.

We took it all very seriously. We made best friends with those people and they got us through really, really hard legal questions, bureaucratic questions, how to meld these different kinds of money together, which is boring, but incredibly important. By the time we were done, we gave out all the money and we ultimately did it without one single finding of fraud, waste, or abuse, which is something to be proud of.

Molly: Absolutely. What you're telling us is that it's these people who really helped you execute this in a fraud-free way whose jobs are at risk?

Jamie: Absolutely.

Molly: And without D.R., what happens?

Jamie: None of that happens.

Molly: Just doesn’t happen at all?

Jamie: We did, we did $5 billion worth of work and there's no way the state of New York was going to come up with $5 billion. And then the city would have had to come up with another $5 billion.

And then there's FEMA money. There's DOT money. By the time you're done, it was $60-some-odd billion from the federal government. The New York State budget at the time was probably—I don't know—twice that every year.

Molly: What I feel like you're saying is like without the D.R. and the federal support that basically a disaster like this could be the turning point from where a neighborhood—it could just not recover without some of this stuff.

Jamie: Gutted.

Molly: That is wild.

Jamie: Never to return.

Molly: The more we talk about it, the clearer it seems to me how critical this agency is and this staff is. Why do you think they’re on the chopping block?

Jamie: I don't know any actual answers, but I can make some informed guesses. First, I think probably there's some hangover from the experience in 2005 after Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi when there was a ton of fraud. These are very early days in those programs, and in fact there was a lot of wasted money, tens of billions of dollars.

Some people just sort of stopped thinking about it after that, assumed it's been the same thing since then.

Two, I think there's some notion that this is work that the states should just do themselves. I think that makes no sense. The money is much too large and the disasters happen too frequently.

It's sort of like telling Colorado that they're supposed to go conduct their own foreign policy—you know, have their own armies and just deal with France by themselves. It doesn't make any sense.

And then third—this is very speculative—but I would imagine there's something like this natural disasters of this size are happening more and more often over the last, you know, even in the last 10 years, even in states like New York and they're relatively insulated from this.

I think most people would acknowledge that climate change plays a role in that. This administration seems to be, let's say, skeptical about the impact of climate change. And I think they probably feel like paying a lot of money for disaster recovery or preparing to pay a lot of money for disaster recovery is sort of a tacit admission that climate change is real and creates problems for people.

Molly: If nothing changes and things proceed as we currently understand with the staffing and budget cuts, what does that look like? What does that mean?

Jamie: I can tell you what the immediate thing it's going to mean is that [in] the next natural disaster of size that hits somewhere—and by the way, it's almost inevitably going to be in Louisiana, Florida, or Texas—[the state] will be left to deal with its own problems, largely. Maybe there'll be money from Congress, but without the staff back at headquarters and without FEMA people coming to help, it's empty dollars. They can't put it to work in the right ways. I'd like to think that that won't happen more than once, because the devastating consequences will be so obvious, and eventually, hopefully, they'll rebuild the infrastructure of these programs, but that's not going to be so easy.

People disappear. They'll get around to it eventually because you can't ignore the consequences and you can't ignore the fact that these disasters are coming more and more frequently.

Thanks for listening to After Hours with Jamie Rubin of Vital City Podcast. I'm Jamie Rubin.