2018-2022 FEMA Strategic Plan

FEMA Released its 2018-2022 strategic plan in March 2018. The plan takes into account many of the lessons learned from the landmark year of disasters in 2017.

FEMA released the 2018-2022 strategic plan last month. The new plan focuses on three goals: (1) Building a culture of preparedness; (2) making the nation ready for catastrophic disasters; and (3) reduce the complexity of FEMA. Throughout the document, FEMA acknowledges many of the issues it learned while responding to many disasters in 2018. Appendix 1 of the Strategic plan will showcase FEMA’s progress along it’s measures of performance (“MOP’s”) through 2022.

GOAL 1: The first goal of building a culture of preparedness acknowledges the issues that many Americans face with not having enough resources to react to a disaster. It’s not as much of being aware (something the profession has focused in the past), as it is having a “real” plan and the resources to back it up. For example, Goal 1, Objective 3 not only includes training and
planning measures of performance, but also to “increase the percentage of people with savings set aside for an emergency.” It would be interesting to see if this question is included on the census scheduled for 2020.

GOAL 2: The second goal focuses on building the readiness of the federal government to answer the call of state and local governments when needed. This comes not only from building a ready on-call incident workforce, but also by improving the logistics tail that supports that workforce and impacted communities. One of Goal 2, Objective 4’s three performance measures includes to increase the number of states with comprehensive continuity plans and
programs that comply with the Continuity of Guidance Circular. (Keep in mind, CGC 1 and 2 were combined this past February into a single document). There was talk in 2017 that FEMA would begin soliciting input from the field to better develop these grant conditions. Inclusion as a performance measure in the strategic plan could mean that FEMA could planning to follow through on its interest in making CGC planning a condition of future grant funding.

GOAL 3: Goal three focuses on reducing the complexity of FEMA, something many will probably celebrate. Much of this goal sounds like there is a good departure from Classical Public Administration with an embrace of New Public Administration (and some aspects of New Public Service). In short, this is a shift from focusing on the process to one that is responsive to customer/citizen needs, transparent, and focuses on the outcomes. Something to keep an eye out for is feedback solicitations in the Federal Register. FEMA will likely seek feedback from the field as it looks at the impacts of process and program changes to make sure they have their intended effect.

Read the full strategic plan by clicking here.