Michael Loewinger
speaker
1,796 appearances
17 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 3d ago
Michael Loewinger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 17 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 9.
Appearances
Like in 1972, when another big storm hit.
Trump says FEMA should return its responsibilities to the states, which is odd because states often bring in FEMA when they're unable to respond on their own.
And anyway, it was the states that asked for FEMA in the first place.
In nineteen seventy-eight, the National Governors Association drew up plans for a streamlined one-stop shop for federal emergency response and delivered it to a sympathetic White House.
In 1979, Jimmy Carter signed an executive order giving life to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
FEMA was a federal Frankenstein with a dual mission, Cold War civil defense and disaster relief.
I wish I could illustrate this moment by playing you like a triumphant speech from President Carter or some colorful news footage, but either that stuff never existed or no one thought it was important enough to archive.
Even the earliest employees at FEMA were confused about how to talk about it.
We had a new director there.
And there was a message when that went out to us that said
That if we're referring to the agency publicly, we should say either Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA, because the word FEMA he thought sounded too much like a laxative.
This is Leo Bosner, a retired FEMA official who's taught me a lot about the earliest days of the agency.
He was working as a flood insurance specialist with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in one of the offices that was folded into
FEMA.
We're all working along in the office and one day they tell us, okay, everybody go down to photo ID, you're getting new photo IDs.
So we walk down the stairs, get new photo IDs that say
Specialist.
And and I'm thinking
What on God's earth is an emergency management specialist?
Like this is the end of my career.
Showing 1021–1040 of 1,796 · page 52 of 90
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