Reputation and Federal Emergency Preparedness Agencies, 1948

domestic preparedness agencies was obscured during the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, and
again during the early 1980s when fears of nuclear war grew, the FEMA of the 21 st century has,
for a time, been able to preserve its focus on natural disasters.
The Rise and Fall of FEMA
During the 1970s, and many civil defense programs came to be seen as merely wishful
thinking and attention given to nuclear defense programs and their budgets withered. The
congressional armed services committees were more concerned with offensive nuclear capability
and deterrence than they were with passive defense. At the same time, Congress devoted an
increasing amount of attention to natural and technological hazards after several high profile
disasters and after pressure from state and local governments to rationalize the recovery process.
That attention resulted in the Federal Disaster Relief Act of 1974 and the decision by Congress to
allow the Department of Defense's Civil Defense Preparedness Agency to be “dual use” in
preparing for both natural disasters and civil defense emergencies. 23 A year later, Congress
conducted hearings on federal emergency assistance programs and suspended those efforts only
when President Carter began to review the issue. Carter eventually submitted Reorganization
Plan Number 3 to Congress, which established FEMA in 1979. 24 For the first time, emergency
management functions were centralized at the federal level.
The FEMA reorganization rivals the creation of the DHS in complexity, if not in size
(FEMA’s staff is about 60 times smaller than the DHS). It combined the Department of
Defense’s DCPA with over 100 federal disaster-response programs, all of which reported to 20
different congressional committees. To appease interest groups and congressional committees,
the reorganization plan transferred each program’s political appointees to FEMA, which created
isolated divisions or “stovepipes” with their own connections to Congress and interest groups but
little connection to each other. One participant in the reorganization recalled that “It was like
trying to make a cake by mixing the milk still in the bottle, with the flour still in the sack, with
the eggs still in their carton...” (NAPA 1993, 16).
It was not only organizations but also professional cultures that divided the agency. At
least three distinct cultures combined to create FEMA, including: 1) the Department of Defense
civil defense personnel, who tended to have seniority; 2) the disaster relief program, whose
employees had considered themselves so close to the president in the 1970s that they answered
the phones with the greeting, “White House”; 3) a firefighting culture from the scientific and
grant making programs established by the Fire Prevention Control Act of 1974. Divided by
culture and organizational responsibility, the fragmented agency was not able to establish a clear
mission. Even so, its first director under Carter, John Macy, attempted to put the agency on a
path toward an all hazards approach by emphasizing the similarities between natural hazards
preparedness and civil defense activities. 25 Under Macy, FEMA began development of an
Integrated Emergency Management System that included “direction, control and warning
23 That decision had little immediate impact, but it laid the foundation for policymakers to later expand the dual use and all
hazards approaches. In 1976, Congress amended the Civil Defense Act of 1950 to recognize “that the organizational structures
established jointly by the federal government and several states and their political subdivisions for civil defense purposes can be
effectively utilized, without adversely affecting the basic civil defense objectives of this Act, to provide relief and assistance to
people in areas of the United States struck by disasters other than disasters caused by enemy attack.” Also see Keith Bea,
“Proposed Transfer of FEMA to the Department of Homeland Security,” CRS Report, July 29, 2002.
24 June 1978 - President Carter submitted to Congress “Reorganization Plan Number 3” to establish FEMA. After congressional
approval the Reorganization Plan creating FEMA took effect April 1, 1979. (See also Executive Order 12127; 44 FR 19367,
April 3, 1979.)
25 Macy was Director from August 1979 - January 1981.
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