Senate Panel Urge FEMA Dismantling

NYT reported The Federal Emergency Management Agency was so fundamentally dysfunctional during Hurricane Katrina that Congress should abolish it and create a new disaster response agency from scratch,

I favor abolishing FEMA. I do not favor recreating it. I see no reason why the other 49 states should pay for natural disasters in one state. All parts of the country face some sort of natural disaster: huricanes, tornados, wildfires, earthquakes, mud slides, flooding, etc. and it should be up to the individual state to make the decision of whether it wants to prevent development in areas most prone to damage, or whether it wants to spend its own money to help rebuild. If a state can draw on the money from all 50 states, there is no incentive to prevent, for example, building houses below sea level, or continually rebuilding houses destroyed every year by the same natural disasters.

according to a draft of bipartisan recommendations proposed by a Senate committee. The new agency, which would still be part of the Department of Homeland Security, should be more powerful, with additional components that would give it a budget twice as big as FEMA's, the report's draft recommendations say.

Dont make it more powerful with twice as big a budget. Make it much less powerful, and with 1/10th the budget. Let it just make recommendations for how states should prepare for their own disasters.

It would assume functions spread throughout the department, like preparing for disasters or terrorist attacks, protecting the nation's infrastructure and distributing grants to state and local governments.