After Donald Trump visited the Los Angeles area late last month to observe the damage from recent fires, he made a nakedly political demand: As a condition of releasing federal aid to stricken areas, he wants California to make voters show ID at the polls. Trump is reportedly convinced that he would have won the state if it had such a law, but that has nothing to do with fire safety.

If Trump wants California to mend its ways before receiving federal disaster relief, he could make some reasonable requests: The state should stop encouraging suburban sprawl in fire-prone areas, for example, and start pushing property owners to take more precautions. To the exasperation of emergency-management experts and budget hawks alike, California fires are like many other disasters all around the country. They lead to massive insurance settlements and outflows of government aid, which in many cases pay for rebuilding the same physical environment that left people and their homes vulnerable in the first place.

[M. Nolan Gray: How well-intentioned policies fueled L.A.’s fires]

State governments typically manage the aftermath of natural disasters; when they are overwhelmed, they appeal to Washington for additional money. For years, people in my field have been urging Congress to put strings on that relief. Unfortunately, Trump’s voter-ID demand—along with his insistence that the state should also change its water policies, which he did not appear to fully understand—triggered a righteous response among prominent California Democrats. “Conditioning aid for American citizens is wrong,” Governor Gavin Newsom declared in a statement. No, it isn’t, but Trump is setting back the cause of reform.

The present federal disaster-relief system, built over decades, involves multiple pots of money from a variety of agencies: the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The 1988 Stafford Act, which governs the distribution of many of these funds, is built on the presumptions that major disasters are random, rare acts of God, and that communities hit by them need to be made whole again. But as climate change repeatedly exposes certain regions to the same disasters—fires in California, hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, tornadoes in the Great Plains—rebuilding the status quo looks less and less defensible. “Okay, that was a 40-year-old building; let’s rebuild a 40-year-old building,” one recovery official in Louisiana memorably said in a 2009 PBS report, capturing widespread frustration with federal rules governing New Orleans’s long recovery after Hurricane Katrina.

Some local jurisdictions have responded to disasters by taking steps to avoid a repeat. In 2018, the Camp Fire destroyed most of the buildings in Paradise, California, and killed 85 people. To build there now, homeowners must abide by local regulations, known as defensible-space requirements, that require them to remove vegetation that would otherwise help a fire move more quickly. In 2013, a tornado in Moore, Oklahoma, killed 24 people, including seven children in an elementary school. The community responded in part by imposing stringent new residential building codes.

When I visited Moore last year, after a devastating tornado season in Oklahoma, a builder named Marvin Haworth walked me through a home that requires sheathing, nail shanks, and hurricane straps under the new regulations. He was originally concerned about the changes, but the added cost to home purchasers is minimal, and the matter is settled now. “It is not a part of the discussion anymore,” he told me. “It’s the code. This is the way we are building and are going to build.”

[Nancy Walecki: The place where I grew up is gone]

Moore and Paradise both had the foresight to acknowledge the risks they face and take it upon themselves to change. States generally do not require such steps. Sweeping policy changes are difficult to enact immediately after a disaster. People are hurt and in need; political considerations demand that immediate distribution of money. That’s why FEMA administrators under presidents of both parties have proposed some version of conditional relief funding. Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s policies, calls on states to pay a “disaster deductible” before securing federal aid—a requirement that might motivate governors and legislators to demand better preparation for disasters. As The New York Times reported, that idea originally came from Craig Fugate, President Barack Obama’s FEMA chief, who insisted that Washington needed a mechanism to force states to do better advance planning. But states want money unconditionally, and substantive reform proposals such as Fugate’s have not survived political pushback.

Nevertheless, a lot of little changes—stronger nails, cleared yards—can add up to a more resilient society. Trump’s focus on political payback is unfortunate, because the current system needs an overhaul. Disasters are no longer random or rare. When disaster strikes, we should rebuild accordingly.

The U.S. federal government manages a larger portfolio of risks than any other institution in the history of the world. In just the past few weeks, wildfires raged across Southern California, a commercial flight crashed over the Potomac, a powerful Chinese-developed AI model launched to great fanfare, the nuclear-weapons Doomsday Clock reached its closest point ever to midnight, a new strain of avian flu continued its spread across the globe, and interest rates on long-term government bonds surged—a sign that investors are worried about America’s fiscal future. The responsibility of managing such risks is suffused throughout the federal bureaucracy; agencies are dedicated to preparing for financial crises, natural disasters, cyberattacks, and all manner of other potential calamities.

When one of those far-off risks became a real-life pandemic in the final year of Donald Trump’s first term, this sprawling bureaucracy, staffed mostly by career civil servants with area-specific expertise, helped limit the damage, often despite Trump’s own negligence and attempts to interfere. This time, things may turn out differently. Trump is committed to dismantling the federal bureaucracy as we know it—and, with it, the government’s capacity to handle the next crisis. Like an individual who chooses to forgo health or fire insurance, most Americans won’t feel the negative impact of this effort as long as everything in the world runs smoothly. What happens when the next crisis strikes is another story altogether.  

No country was fully prepared for what became one of the deadliest pandemics in history, but it is hard to think of a leader who handled COVID more poorly than Trump. He spent the crucial weeks leading up to the outbreak downplaying the severity of the virus, at one point referring to it as the Democrats’ “new hoax.” His administration never developed a national plan for getting the virus under control and reopening the economy, leaving the states to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, the president undermined his own public-health agencies at every turn, telling states to “LIBERATE” their economies, refusing to wear a mask, and, at one point, suggesting bleach injections as a potential therapeutic. A February 2021 analysis by The Lancet, a British medical journal, found that the U.S. could have avoided 40 percent of the deaths that occurred under Trump’s watch if its death rate had matched the average among America’s peer countries.

[Theodore Roosevelt: An object lesson in civil-service reform]

The administration’s pandemic response did include one shining success: Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership that produced and distributed high-quality vaccines in record time, saving countless lives. But that triumph is the exception that proves the rule. The idea for the program came from Robert Kadlec, an assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Peter Marks, an FDA official—two seasoned public-health experts who had served in top government roles for years beforeTrump took office. The project was then championed by HHS Secretary Alex Azar, who had been appointed by Trump after working off and on for the department since 2001; managed by Gustave Perna, a four-star general who had served in the military for more than 40 years; and staffed by bureaucrats with decades of public-health experience. (This success story has, of course, become distasteful to mention on the right, because it involves vaccines.)

These are exactly the sorts of experienced public servants whom Trump is trying to push out of government. On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order known as Schedule F; if upheld in court, it will give him expansive new power to unilaterally fire federal employees. In the meantime, his administration is finding creative ways to begin its purge of the federal government. Last week, the administration “reassigned” at least 20 career lawyers at the Department of Justice, allowing them to be sidelined without being officially fired; sent home 160 members of the National Security Council; and offered the remaining 2 million federal employees an ultimatum: Resign voluntarily and receive a severance package, or stay and risk being fired at some point in the future. As Axios reports, the White House expects 5 to 10 percent of the federal work force to take the buyout. Those bureaucrats who remain will, by and large, be reporting to Trump loyalists.

If Trump’s plan succeeds, the inevitable result will be a government that finds itself hamstrung in the face of the kinds of risks that it is designed to manage. (Almost unbelievably, Trump has also floated the idea of abolishing FEMA.) Imagine how much worse the pandemic would have been if Kadlec and Marks, the architects of Operation Warp Speed, had been pushed out of government before March 2020. Imagine if Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist, had been in charge of the nation’s public-health apparatus, and surrounded not by scientific experts but by hard-core Trumpists. How many more Americans would have died?

For now, that question is a thought experiment. Soon, it might not be. In recent weeks, public-health officials have begun warning about the rapid spread of a new variant of the H5N1 virus, also known as bird flu, which infected 67 Americans last year and appears to be becoming more transmissible. Rather, officials were warning about it; last week, the Trump administration instructed federal health officials to temporarily halt all public communications, including reports about the escalating H5N1 crisis, “as the new Administration considers its plan for managing federal policy and public communications.” Kennedy has already cast doubt on the safety of H5N1 vaccines and implied that the virus itself was partly a creation of the U.S. government.

[Kristen V. Brown: Trump has created health-care chaos]

Pandemics are only one example of a broad swath of risks facing America today. Tensions between the U.S. and China are high, the AI arms race is well under way, wars have broken out across the globe, and climate-change-fueled natural disasters have become ever more common. None of this means that a major crisis will inevitably strike next week, or even over the next four years. But Trump’s actions make that possibility far more likely, including by exposing the country to risks that might have previously seemed arcane. On Thursday, the U.S. experienced its first fatal crash of an American airliner in 16 years. This was barely a week after the Trump administration dissolved the federal Aviation Security Advisory Committee, a body that advises the Transportation Security Administration on airline safety, and fired the head of the TSA, whom Trump himself had appointed during his first term. As the aviator and Atlantic contributor James Fallows points out, dismantling the board was likely not directly responsible for the crash, but it represents “the thoughtless destruction of the taken-for-granted institutions that have made modern aviation as safe as it is.” Trump, meanwhile, in a moment that revealed how he might respond to future crises, immediately began blaming the incident on a push for DEI initiatives within the Federal Aviation Administration.

In a crowded field, this might be the most alarming aspect of Trump’s second term. At first, most people won’t notice an agency gutted here or a program slashed there. But those cuts will make disaster more likely, and when that disaster strikes—whether during Trump’s presidency or his successor’s—the government will be far less capable of handling it. What we don’t know is how bad that crisis will be, and whether Trump will still be in office to face the consequences.