Eloise Blondiau

Hi.

Yes.

So my name is Eloise Blondio.

I am senior producer at On The Media, and I helped make American Emergency the movement to kill FEMA.

That's such a fun surprise.

So I made this series with our host, Michael Loewinger, and we were really interested in how we got to this very interesting political moment where storms and floods and fires are getting more extreme, more intense, less predictable.

And the agency that is supposed to help us help Americans during those kind of really scary events is

There was even this talk when Trump took office of getting rid of the agency altogether, which when you look at the crises that are looming over us, is a very scary thought.

Yes.

And I guess the important thing that I've realized about FEMA is that it's always struggled to earn the trust of the public it's been hoping to serve.

That is not a contemporary challenge for the agency.

It's really been there since its creation.

Yes, I think that we're in a political moment where any kind of existing fault lines or instabilities in how our systems were set up are being exposed.

And I think that for a long time, FEMA was able to do great work

while contending with these challenges of earning trust from the public.

And I think that they have struggled to meet the current political moment.

Many there are.

It's hard to imagine really what a good response to them would be in this current era.

We spoke to Willa Remus at the Washington Post, and he did a study of misinformation during Hurricane Helene.

He said that FEMA's most popular tweets since Hurricane Helene reached 50 times fewer people than the false rumors.