What do you do? You don’t have to tell me your job title, but what’s your job?
I’m a social scientist at FEMA. I’m one of many people the agency employs to study how we do what we do — how do we measure our success, how do we ensure we’re getting the outcomes Congress intended for the dollars we spend on everything to help people before, during, and after disasters. If DOGE were serious about efficiency and effectiveness, offices like mine are what we’d be talking about expanding rather than cutting.
However, like everyone else at FEMA, I also have a disaster role. When disasters reach a certain level of severity, my steady state work is paused and I deploy to assist survivors, most recently, during Hurricane Helene.
As a social scientist, we analyze the data the federal government collects during normal administration of programs to better understand how well programs are achieving their intended outcomes, and where needed, go out and collect additional data to supplement that. While some agencies, like USAID, HHS, and DOL have really robust, mature functions for this, DHS and FEMA are still pretty nascent and we’re learning a lot as we go.
Most recently, in my disaster role, I worked to connect with survivors who weren’t able to return to their homes and find them temporary, transitional housing. It can be really emotionally tough work, because you’re working with people who often didn’t have much to begin with and have lost what little they did have, in a sudden and awful way.
How did you find your way into federal service? Did you always want to join up?
I always knew I wanted to do work that mattered, and work that would help people. I come from a family of scientists and engineers (educational courtesy of the GI Bill), so I got pushed into STEM, but it wasn’t quite the right fit. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do when I finished undergrad, and the economy was still in shambles from the 2008 financial crisis, so I joined AmeriCorps. I got to work in educational access and it was a formative experience. I saw that no matter how great the nonprofit I worked for was, there would never not be a need for nonprofits like them unless bigger things changed. Government seemed like the place where those bigger things could happen.
I went to grad school, on a public service scholarship, to do data driven decision-making and program evaluation, in the hopes of learning what works, for whom, and under what circumstances. With that knowledge, we can update how the government delivers those services so we can do more good for more people. Since then, I’ve worked in several different agencies trying to move forward policy that makes it easier to do this kind of rigorous study of government programs. I feel such an incredible responsibility to pay it forward for the opportunities I’ve had to go to school and build a good life, public service feels like the only thing that would rise to that duty.
What does this work mean to you? Why is it important to you, personally?
This is the work that undergirds democracy as we know it. Jefferson and other visionaries of American democracy were students of the enlightenment. They believed that government could also work like a science. We take a falsifiable hypothesis and test it, and from that we can learn how to do better. I think that is the promise of the idealistic words in our founding documents. What good is having a government at all, if you aren’t striving to do better? To be better? That’s what drives me everyday.
FEMA has always been my dream job because I think disaster response is such an expression of democracy and community. Disasters don’t discriminate in terms of who they can affect and it takes everyone coming together to recover. There’s something so incredibly beautiful in the way people come together after the worst days of their lives, I can’t imagine anything more human than saying, yes, and I want to help too.
What should be important about this work to Americans? Why does it matter?
I’ll speak to FEMA broadly first, then Evaluation across the government.
It’s hard to think of an area of life that FEMA doesn’t touch. I am terrified of a nation where individuals and communities are left on their own to recover without the coordination, expertise, and infrastructure that FEMA provides. I personally don’t think most states have the administrative capacity to absorb what FEMA does. Someone I deployed with told me about one state that decided to funnel all Individual Assistance through their state level emergency management agency for a disaster. It takes FEMA about 3 days to process payments to survivors bank accounts once they’re approved; this disaster was taking upwards of months for survivors to get their money.
We’d also be worse off without the extensive preparedness and resilience efforts the agency implements to limit the devastation of disasters when they do occur. Ready.gov is an incredible resource for families and communities to be ready for most disasters Americans are likely to face. FEMA provides nearly a billion dollars every year to security measures for public transportation. The agency also helps fill in gaps in local budgets, so they can keep Emergency Managers on staff. We would be worse off without all of these things.
Losing evaluation & social science research offices like mine has already started across the federal government and we’re losing institutional knowledge and access to research your tax dollars have already paid for. USAID was the gold standard for evaluation work and supported other agencies to stand up evaluation capacity. The Institute of Educational Sciences team ran the What Works Clearinghouse which aggregated the best research from around the world on evidence-based interventions to improve student outcomes. Those are just two examples, but who is going to do that when they’re gone?
Cutting these offices means getting rid of the best, most rigorous way we have to actually learn about making government programs more effective. Most program staff don’t have time to do literature reviews, much less digest what current developments in research are and how they apply to their programs. They don’t have the capacity to run the kind of studies on their programs that would give them the insights they wish they had into implementation and results. It’s cheating the American people out of getting the best services possible for their tax dollars and we should all be really mad that we’re losing decades of research in mere weeks.
What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it’s all going to impact your work and your mission?
The nature of my work illustrates that I do agree government has issues in delivering services and I think we should fix them! But everything I’ve seen so far, I don’t trust to be operating in good faith. It doesn’t seem like throwing the baby out with the bathwater; this feels like setting the whole house on fire. I don’t think I can understate the damage this is doing to both the Nation’s ability to adequately prepare for & respond to disasters or our knowledge of how best to do so. FEMA doesn’t even have a nominee for administrator, just a lower level political appointee who doesn’t meet statutory requirements to even serve in the role (the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 specifies experience requirements he doesn’t meet).
Most of my work has been paused or cancelled. An agency-wide embargo on external engagement means no new data collection and no new participatory research with the people who are trying to keep us safe at state and local levels. Canceling study contracts means wasting money Congress specifically set aside for learning and we’ll never get to findings that could help people. I’m not allowed to go to conferences to share my work or learn from other researchers this year. I haven’t been RIF’d yet, but I’ve heard through the grapevine that my office probably isn’t safe in the plans being submitted today. All of this loss in capacity and the chilling effect on federal research will take literal years to restore.
Personally, I’m furious. I’ve spent most of my career trying to build up evaluation capacity in the government and now all of that work is just gone. Trying to get good researchers into government in the future will be an extremely difficult sell. We are losing our ability to build a responsive, smart, and nimble government that can meet the challenges of today, much less those of tomorrow.
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