Brian Lehrer on WNYC, it's our special Brian Laira show today. The weekend shows visit us on a weekday.

We're kind of starting the weekend one day early for so much fun and interesting content that these shows always

bring and to help with our two-for-one matching day. Our colleagues that on the media are out with the

first two episodes of a brand new four-part series that maybe you've started listening to about the

federal emergency management agency FEMA. President Trump and the MAGA movement have made FEMA a major target.

The series is called American Emergency, the Movement to Kill FEMA.

First episode, which dropped on May 1st, traces FEMA's secretive Cold War origins.

This includes classified bunkers, martial law planning, and covert refugee camp scouting. The series argues that those

origins, freaky as they sound, really ceded the conspiracy theories that haunt the agency

today and that are often parroted by right-wing skeptics of the agencies on the internet and

within the Trump administration itself. Just last week,

the Trump-appointed FEMA Review Council released its final report calling for sweeping overhauls

that would shift disaster response leadership to the states. The states can afford that themselves,

like after a Hurricane Katrina or something, right? Joining us now are on the media hosts, Michael Lohinger and Brooke Gladstone.

Again, the four-part series is called American Emergency, the Movement to Kill FEMA,

reported by Micah and senior producer Eloise Blondio.

Hey, Micah and Brooke, welcome back to this show.

Hi.

Micah, for listeners who may think of FEMA is just, you know, the agency that shows up after a hurricane,

what made you want to go back to the very beginning of this agency's history to understand what's happening to it right now?

Great question.

I mean, honestly, FEMA is an incredibly important agency, but it's also an agency

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