Five years ago, the World Health Organization held a press briefing in Geneva to declare the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. In a prime-time address that same night, President Trump reassured the nation: “No nation is more prepared or more resilient than the United States. We will heal the sick, care for those in need, and emerge from this challenge stronger and more unified than ever before.”
In the days that followed, the president watched as his most powerful agencies — the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Homeland Security — failed to take ownership of the crisis. They pointed at each other, and dithered, as the virus spread rapidly — and invisibly — across the nation.
Contrary to conventional wisdom though, the causes of our failure were not political. While political divisions emerged, the root cause was deeper: a system that had no idea what to do or how to do it. As Philip Zelikow writes in “Lessons from the COVID War“: “COVID-19 was not a crisis of science. We had the science. We were willing to spend the money. This was a crisis of competence. The failure was in knowing what to do and how to do it and then getting ready to do it.”
This wasn’t a political failure — it was a systems failure. The U.S. had the resources, the knowledge, and the warning. What we didn’t have was an agency responsible to take charge and make things happen.
That is exactly where we stand today, with a national disaster system consisting of 50-plus state systems duct-taped together, each with its own structures, capabilities, and methods. They have no obligation to help each other, and when they do, the process is slow and ad hoc. Relationships between states shift with political winds and so, amid catastrophe, each state is left to fend for itself. If another pandemic hit today, would we be ready? The answer is no.
Nine out of 10 Americans believe the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, should take ownership of catastrophes. But ownership requires leadership, and FEMA doesn’t provide it, focusing instead on delivering the funds that flow to states after disasters. To meet the urgent demands of these massive programs, FEMA has abandoned its core mission, trading crisis leadership for grant administration.
From pandemics to hurricanes to cyberattacks — disasters will come. Our greatest vulnerability isn’t the threats we face, but how we prepare and respond. Effective crisis response requires coordination: knowing what is going to happen and who is on the hook to make it happen. In a resource-rich environment like ours, only crisis management can bridge the gaps and address the consequences of the disaster.
NYU Langone Health acted decisively in the weeks before New York City became the first U.S. epicenter of the pandemic. We launched crisis teams, ran 24/7 surveillance, and prepared for the tidal wave we knew was coming.
The real heroes were the nurses and doctors and clinical and support staff who worked around the clock, saving lives. My team didn’t provide world-class patient care, but we did enable a nimble organization that learned and evolved constantly, from updating safety protocols to changing the use of hospital spaces. This contrasts starkly with the clumsy federal bureaucracy, and the failure of its various components to take an ownership stake in the crisis.
We don’t need FEMA writing checks, we need it preparing for, and leading the national response to, catastrophes. The president has established a FEMA Review Council to propose ways to overhaul the agency. The changes it proposes must include restoring the agency’s core mission of crisis management.
A refocused and empowered FEMA would forge strong public-private partnerships, driving a response that is government-led but not government-centric. It would become the national disaster machine we so desperately lack — fast, coordinated, relentless — bringing governors together in a supercharged mutual aid system that operates beyond politics and goodwill.
We are running out of time. The next catastrophe will not wait for us to figure out who is in charge. If we don’t fix our broken system now, we will once again find ourselves scrambling in the dark, as lives are lost and chaos unfolds. We must act — before the next pandemic forces us to.
McKinney is the vice president of Emergency Management and Enterprise Resilience at NYU Langone Health in New York City and formerly served on FEMA’s National Advisory Council.