On Wednesday, as Hurricane Florence swirled ominously off the coast of the Carolinas and the state prepared for imminent disaster,

Democratic Senator Jeff Merkley thought it would be a good time to draw everybody's attention to the shifting priorities of this administration.

Specifically, he released a budget that showed that the Department of Homeland Security has transferred nearly $10 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to immigration and customs enforcement to pay for the detention and removal operations, which is to say the separation of children from their parents.

FEMA officials maintain that the smaller budget will not hinder their operations,

but as wildfires rage and hurricanes make landfall,

they do have a lot on their plate.

We don't think about FEMA much until that's all we think about.

Historian Garrett Graff says the agency's

quote, under the radar nature was originally a feature, not a bug. We spoke to him last September

when he wrote a piece in Wired titled The Secret History of FEMA. Nowadays, we think of FEMA as

associated with the recovery in the wake of disasters,

like hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and so on.

But Graff says that that was not its original portfolio.

No, FEMA and FEMA's predecessors, it's an agency that is regularly reshuffled and moved around,

dates back to 1950 when Harry Truman started the Federal Civil Defense Administration.

Its main mission for the majority of the first half of its life was to plan for urban evacuations,

to plan for the stockpiles, to run fallout shelters, preparing for

nuclear war.

There was a pretty famous video that was produced and then reproduced and reproduced in the

60s, I guess, in the 70s.

Can you tell me its history and what became of it?

FEMA and its predecessors, an incredible amount of time and energy over the years to educating the population.

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