How one word built FEMA’s billion-dollar gravy train

President Donald Trump ushered in a new era that ended the postwar years. Language defining it will emerge over the next decade, but, eventually, few will deny that Trump, nearly single-handedly and through pure Nietzschean will, kicked off this era. For those on the Left and in the ranks of the federal government, there will be much howling and gnashing of teeth as they seethe at the mere mention of Trump’s name. But the spirit of this new era can be understood through an idea Ronald Reagan captured perfectly: the need to keep government in check and out of your business.Since WWII, there were touchstones on the journey to Trump. JFK and Reagan are two. My family was in the early wave of the working class’s shift of the Republican brand. In his time, Reagan was vilified as an extremist; he was mild compared to Trump. Ronnie’s quips and offhand remarks sound folksy and canned next to those Trump uses to crush his cellophane detractors.Yet there is one Reagan quote I believe should be carved on the backdrop of his statue that graces the entrance to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. To me, it was his most profound statement because it captures perfectly the essence and spirit of an American attitude many simply don’t understand: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” Reagan said that in Chicago after a morning at the Illinois State Fair. The quote captures the idea that precise language is necessary to keep government in check and out of your business, even in our Orwellian world of constant surveillance and forever wars. Ronnie likely used the word help purposely; he knew how insidious the word can be and how, under the banner of help, the proverbial camel gradually nudges its nose under the tent.In our day, bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., send hordes of underlings to roam the heartland and fringes of America, engaging in busywork that gives them job security and a license to meddle in the name of help. Under the banner of help, thousands of bureaucrats are living in hotels across the country, collecting per diem for months and years on end. They hail from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.Mostly due to disaster threshold levels that have not kept pace with inflation, major disaster declarations have climbed from about 25 a year in FEMA’s first decade to more than 60 today, and the agency has been handed missions that have nothing to do with hurricanes: migrant surges, Afghan refugees, even the pandemic. Give a word like help no boundary, and it will always find more work to do.In my book Texas Flood: 4 July 2025, I mention help or helping a lot. It appears when I’m about to be sent to FEMA to nurse the agency through hurricane season and then shut it down or radically transform it. Prior to going, my team analyzed the laws outlining FEMA’s purpose. The volumes we sifted through didn’t mention help, yet it’s featured prominently in FEMA’s mission statement: “Helping people before, during and after disasters.” Somehow, FEMA had managed to reverse-engineer Reagan’s statement.When I first read the mission statement, I was silent, wondering if it was a parody of Reagan’s statement, the Deep State of Incompetency, prone to the Left, making fun of Ronnie. My team stood by as I read it. Finally, I asked, “What the f*** does that mean?” Nobody at FEMA, the news networks, think tanks, or anywhere else has been able to answer that question.In short, it could mean anything. All words are open to interpretation, some more than others. Help falls on the far end of open-ended.Helping people before, during, and after disasters. This is the tone of a mission statement one expects to see at the Department of Motor Vehicles, Dairy Queen, or the Unemployment Office. Help encourages the encroachment of the federal government on state and local responsibilities and allows FEMA to intervene as it sees fit. Disaster recovery and response become a pile-on sport, a morass of aimless and uncoordinated actions.Go to any FEMA location nationwide, peek through the window, and that’s what you see inside: aimless action and paper churn. That’s one reason you can’t get in without a badge. They don’t want you to know.The word help also encourages state and local authorities to rely on the agency as the first defense during disasters. By helping, FEMA gets to be Sugar Daddy.There is a real mission statement in the law, and it does not mention help. In law, 6 U.S.C. § 313, FEMA’s primary mission is “to reduce the loss of life and property and protect the Nation from all hazards … by leading and supporting the Nation in a risk-based, comprehensive emergency management system of preparedness, protection, response, recovery, and mitigation.”By now, you may be discouraged and warily looking out the window, trying to spot FEMA employees strolling over the grass and toward your front door, dressed in not-so-uniform uniforms that are not really uniforms but commercially branded apparel purchased from FEMA gift shops. FEMA likes to look official to the naive public.But let me suggest what a real mission statement should look like. I was trained to write them by other Marines who were masters at it, despite the fact the United States hasn’t won a protracted shooting war in 80 years. Come to think of it, that’s likely part of the reason Marines and Army Rangers become masters of concrete statements that mean something. They keep us alive in wars nobody else takes seriously.For agencies such as FEMA, vagaries work, though. But I digress. Consider the following: FEMA provides assistance to state and local authorities when state and local authorities are overwhelmed by disasters.There is a legal basis for this mission statement. Note the guardrails: provide assistance. I concede assistance and help are similar, but assistance implies something defined and quantifiable. Help is much broader. Yet the second half of the statement is the qualifier: when state and locals are overwhelmed.Currently, states justify reaching out to the federal government for relief before they have adequately applied state funding. As a helper, FEMA has little recourse. In fact, FEMA, to get in on the action and justify its existence, often rushes to disaster sites, reveling in the effort to make it a pile-on sport. Everybody wants to be a hero.While running FEMA, I proposed the aforementioned mission statement to replace the help banner. The few I showed it to at FEMA or in the political appointee ranks couldn’t distinguish the difference between what I proposed and the one emblazoned on the basement of FEMA featuring the word help.I RAN FEMA. HERE’S WHY YOU’RE PAYING FOR RICH PEOPLE TO LIVE ON THE BEACHThey likely still can’t. The nation remains strapped with a mission statement encouraging gangs of FEMA types to roam the country, collect per diem, reside for months and years in hotels, and seek out the American equivalent of the peasant to offer help, all while stirring the pot of the disaster industry gravy-train confusion.Resolved to this reality, I appeal to them: first do no harm, the corollary to Reagan’s statement.David Richardson served as the senior official performing the duties of administrator of FEMA. He is the author of Texas Flood: Power, Money, Politics, History, Bureaucracy and Tragedy.