On the Media: American Emergency

Radiolab

WNYC Studios

Society & Culture, History, Documentary, Natural Sciences, Science

4.6 • 44.5K Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2026

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A little while back, our friends over at On the Media released a gripping and immersive reporting series about FEMA, the agency that is supposed to be there for all of us in the wake of disaster. In American Emergency (https://zpr.io/MtrUmJU3yEMW), OTM investigates how the agency tasked with saving America became distrusted, despised… and defunded.Today we talk to On the Media co-host Micah Loewinger about how this project came out, what reporting went into making it happen, and play a couple of fun and truly surprising bits of the story that the OTM team uncovered. And it’s a story that highlights the ideal and promise of good government, right alongside the frustration with bureaucracy and mismanagement, and of course the undercurrent of profound mistrust in governmental power. As natural disasters are getting more extreme and less predictable, this series makes sense of that tangle, and provides a prescient peek into FEMA’s future. Special thanks to On the Media. To hear Micah in person, talking more about the complex history of FEMA, join him on June 24th at WNYC's The Greene Space (https://wnyc.org/events/otm-fema). Signup for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing radiolab@wnyc.org. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Wait, you're listening.
0:03.1	Okay.
0:04.4	All right.
0:05.6	Okay.
0:07.0	All right.
0:08.5	You're listening to Radio Lab.
0:11.4	Radio Lab.
0:11.9	From W. N. Y.
0:13.9	C.
0:14.8	See?
0:15.1	Yeah.
0:19.0	This is Radio Lab. I'm Latif Nassar. And to stay the obvious, we here at the show are normal human people, mostly, even occasionally civically minded people. So there are stories and topics, especially newsy sorts of things that we think are important and that we care about, but they're just not
0:39.6	the kind of thing we usually cover.
0:41.7	And when something is going on that we feel that way about, often our friends over it on
0:45.5	the media are covering it, and then we realize, oh, this is even more interesting and strange
0:49.6	and tricky than we thought.
0:51.6	And that was the case recently with a series of episodes they did about the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which under the current administration
0:59.8	has been fighting for its very existence. I'll also be signed an executive order to begin the
1:05.4	process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA.
1:10.7	The series they put together is a deeply research and reported dive into the agency's origins,
1:17.4	its troubled history over the last few decades, and it's also a prescient peak into its
1:21.4	uncertain future.
	...

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