Goodbye FEMA, Hello Disaster Consultants

Derrick Hiebert had planned to stick it out at FEMA. He was an assistant administrator working on hazard mitigation—he specialized in getting communities prepared for disasters—and like many emergency-management experts I’ve spoken with, he thinks that the American approach to administering disasters needed an overhaul, even a radical one. The systems had gotten “clunky over time,” he said. Something needed to change. So Hiebert was open to seeing how President Donald Trump might change it. Then the Trump administration canceled a major grant-making program that helped states and towns build...