Marking 40 Years of FEMA

2019 marks the fortieth anniversary of FEMA, which was established by an executive order signed by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 that merged many separate, disaster-related responsibilities into a single, independent agency. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO’s) has published an article on the occasion, exploring what it found as FEMA as evolved through the years and what it can do to improve operations for the future. GAO’s examination looks principally at how FEMA responded to some of the most significant disasters that impacted the U.S., and how these experiences forced changes at the agency to make it better prepared to respond to future incidents. Looking to the future, GAO notes that one of its open recommendations for FEMA is for it to develop a better way to assess whether states and local governments can respond to and recover from disasters without federal assistance. This is a multimedia article; it includes an embedded podcast and video and links to numerous other articles and resources. Read the article at GAO.