On the Media: American Emergency

**Lulu Miller** (0:02)
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**SPEAKER_2** (2:07)
Oh, wait, you're listening.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:09)
Okay.
All right. Okay. All right.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:14)
You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab.

**Latif Nasser** (2:17)
From WNYC.
This is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser, and to stay the obvious, we here at the show are normal human people, mostly. Even occasionally civically minded people. So there are stories and topics, especially newsy sorts of things that we think are important, and that we care about, but they're just not the kind of thing we usually cover. And when something is going on that we feel that way about, often our friends over at On the Media are covering it, and then we realize, oh, this is even more interesting and strange and tricky than we thought. And that was the case recently with a series of episodes they did about the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which under the current administration has been fighting for its very existence.

**Donald Trump** (3:09)
I'll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA, or maybe getting rid of FEMA.

**Latif Nasser** (3:16)
The series they put together is a deeply researched and reported dive into the agency's origins, its troubled history over the last few decades, and it's also a prescient peek into its uncertain future.

**Donald Trump** (3:28)
It just complicates it. I think we're going to recommend that FEMA go away.

**Latif Nasser** (3:33)
The series sprung from the mind of On the Media co-host, Micah Loewinger. Okay, here I am.

**Ira Glass** (3:39)
Congratulations.

**Latif Nasser** (3:41)
Thank you. God, you've been working on this for a really long time. So today, we're going to play some excerpts from that series. We're going to talk to Micah about his reporting because it feels like a very American, very now story about on one side, the idealism and promise of good government. On the other side, the frustration with bureaucracy and mismanagement, and under it all, a profound distrust in government power. It's also just an impressive, compelling, and immersive bit of journalism that we'd like to share with you. Thank you. With kind of at its heart, I think, is like an agency to help people. Yeah. But then it's like to kind of watch the swirl of this money, all this power, all these politics, all these moves around this very simple, very pure drive, Americans wanting to help Americans. Yeah. And that was the kind of the thing that caught me off guard about diving into FEMA. You take that mission and then you kind of compare it to like the stories that have been told about FEMA. And it's like, how did we get to a place where the agency that's supposed to like be the backstop between you and like financial and literal ruin, how did that become like one of like these villains of the Internet? The series basically takes on that question. How did FEMA become so hated by so many people? It's four episodes long, but I want to start by playing you some of Episode 1, which details the origin of FEMA as an agency. Turns out all the conspiracy theories that plague it today were there from the very beginning. Yeah, the conspiracy theories about FEMA that date back to this era of the agency that no one thinks about or talks about anymore when it was hiding things from the American public. And it all starts, as you'll hear in the piece, with a plane wreck.