worked myself to sickness to try to ensure that i kept that job. this is absolutely crazy and on the patriot act, it is interesting that we want to monitor 320 million americans but we don't secure our borders. host: thank you very much for the call. a reminder that we will continue the conversation and the latest tomorrow on c-span's "washington journal" with the senate debate on the patriot act. neil lysacek he will be joining us and james thurber on pensions of ex-president's and we will talk about federal disaster relief but michael greenberger tomorrow morning at 7:00 a.m. eastern time and 4:00 those on the west coast. "newsmakers" is next and i hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend. have a great week ahead and ui for being with us on this sunday morning. ♪

[captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> today on c-span, "newsmakers" is next with fema administrator, craig fugate on preparations for this year's hurricane and tornado seasons. then, interviews with freshmen members of congress. now, "newsmakers." host: on "newsmakers" this week, we are joined by craig fugate. he is the administrator of the federal emergency management agency. in studio, to help with the questions, we are joined with seth bornstein of "associated press" and donna leinwand-leger of "usa today." i want to start with the deadly flooding in texas and oklahoma. what is fema doing now, and what are you expecting in terms of assistance that will be asked by the federal government in recovering?

guest: we have been working with both states. in fact, several states have been impacted. right now, they are still in a response phase. under the governor's leadership local officials, the national guard, they are managing the response. as the president said the other day, our prayers and thoughts are with the families who lost loved ones, but we are prepared to support the recovery if needed. right now, there is very much response. they are still trying to verify and find people who are missing. the role of the federal government in this case, and fema, will be a support role. reporter: have you been in with -- in touch with the governor of texas, and you expect he will request fema assistance? guest: the president called the governor yesterday and pledged assistance. i talked to my counterpart at the state level, we talked

yesterday, and let me put it this way. they are still very much in response phase. they began doing assessments. we have our regional administrator with the state, as they start counting. again, we are prepared to support them is they find that they need assistance and recovery. they are still very much focused on the response. they did not have any request for the federal government, but appreciate that we are there with them as this is happening. reporter: if we could jump ahead a little, hays county is known as flash flood valley. it has grown 60% in the last 10 years. these are areas that are very prone to flooding. are you looking at doing something to prevent this from being something that repeats over and over again? what are you doing to save taxpayers from having to shell out over and over again? guest: a lot of this are decisions that are at the state and local level. if we become involved and the president ends up in a situation

where disaster declaration is issued, we are making sure that we put in federal dollars to do rebuilding. we are not rebuilding past data, but also future data. part of this is an executive order that the president signed saying when we use federal investment, we cannot just build back to old standards. we are looking to build two feet or three feet above the prior level to mitigate future losses. when we go back in after a disaster to help communities rebuild, we want to build for future risk and not just build back to what was. reporter: you talk about a future risk. does that include climate change? guest: absolutely. if you look at a lot of the data -- debate about what causes climate change, my direction from the president is that that debate, as far as we get our

concern, is not something that we are focused on. we are focused on how do we adapt. we are seeing events, as you point out, even if there is not climate change, we are having flooding over and over again why are we not building better? a lot of times it is because we have limited data. often times you will hear, we , are dealing with an event that is a 100 year of event. there are a lot of hundred year events that happened several times per year. we often have limited data. if we only build back to past historical data, we are often times not incorporating what we need to to protect against future impacts when you talk about population growth, population density, and climate change. there are a lot of factors you have to look at to make sure you are building and rebuilding infrastructure in a way that reduces future disaster risks. reporter: can you tell us about a city that may be doing some of this, try to mitigate its flood risk, and some cities that may not be looking at this as much

as you would like? host: there are a lot of places -- guest: there are a lot of places that you need to look at, but i was in miami beach yesterday. what they have done there is they have seen these astronomically high tides. miami beach is literally a porous rock that they built on. they were getting flooding that was getting worse and worse outside of a storm. so, they have gone in and have been engineering and building improvements so that the high tides are not going to flood the same areas anymore. saythey are also looking at how how they can engineer their sidewalks and roads to give them greater protection against sea level rise. that, in turn, will help or when there is a tropical storm or hurricane, by minimizing damage, but also by speeding up the recovery.

host: can you explain what a federal disaster mitigation grant is, and how much money we are talking about here in terms of grants? these are grants that you will now be requiring the states that seek these grants to plan for climate change, correct? guest: partially correct. when the president declares a disaster, depending on the state 's hazard mitigation plan, a told percentage of the disaster dollars, they get a certain fund to build or improve facilities for that risk. what we are requiring is that we have two levels. the base level that they get if the disaster alert is issued. this gives the governor of a lot of flexibility because it does not have to be tied to disaster. it can be anywhere in the state and any project that would mitigate future risk. when we talk of a higher level funding, we could increase the

-- which would increase the percentage of dollars, and want them to incorporate things that could impact the future. we look at sea level rising, and climate change as impacts in those plans. the standard level that you will get when a disaster occurs, but for the enhanced plan, we want to see that communities are taking steps to identify the risks and looking at strategies that are adopting to the changing environment that we are in, and looking at the future risks, and again, climate is one of those factors. host: that effort that you are doing has gotten pushed back from members of congress recently. senators wrote you a letter saying that the decision according to the letter, "injects unnecessary ideological-based red tape into the disaster prep process, planning and preparing for disaster should be focused on strengthening local communities from inevitable weather events and not about falling in line with the president's political agenda." what is your response to that? guest: we are working on that.

let's be up front about this. the only time that the federal government reimburses state and local governments for losses is when it is uninsured. let me ask you a question. if the insurance industry is not ensuring the risk, why is the taxpayer assuming all of the risk? if we are actually building in a way that improves the protection, hopefully we can get some of these buildings from being protected only when there is a federal disaster declaration to using private insurance to better leverage risk. my question is if the private sector does not think it is a good risk, why are we still investing the same way we always have done? reporter: to follow-up on that i believe it was north carolina, or one of the carolinas was mandating a lower sea level rise in planning. how does that factor in in your work with them host is after or -- post disaster or during a

disaster, and along also the same lines, the two states that get the most disaster money in history are texas and oklahoma, where you have officials do not want other states getting disaster assistance. at some point, do you just want to tell these elected officials -- what do you want to tell them when they do this? guest: i learned a long time ago that the job of appropriated funds is congress and they have vigorous debates on how to do that. one thing i know is that we have never not funded a disaster. there is often times vigorous debate, but as the president says, we come together as a nation when i citizens need us. when it warnsrents a presidential disaster declaration, our focus is on the survivors and communities to help them rebuild. again, we like to try to rebuild on the best data that we have going forward.

i get less about the -- where you want to stand on this as much as does it make sense with your tax dollars and we are building in a way that says we build it back stronger, better and safer, and hopefully it is more insurable, so that going forward, we are able to see more private insurance covering risk versus the taxpayer pick it up after the fact. reporter: we are going into hurricane system, there has been severe winter weather, all this flooding in texas, can you give us a sense of fema and its ability to response should we -- ability to respond should we , have a catastrophic event this season? guest: we always plan against catastrophic events. a lot of the activity you are saying including the most recent activity you are seeing in texas, oklahoma, arkansas and some other states that have been impacted, the response has

been handled really at the local and state level. all of those dollars that we have invested in homeland security and building up capacity. states are really more capable. locals are more capable. our role is really supporting on the recovery side. it really comes down to two things. the help of the disaster relief fund, which is the primary source of funding disasters, congress anticipates that and expects the certain amount of activity, and sets aside money forecast catastrophic disasters. we are in good shape. it does not mean that we would not need more money in some events but most recently, we have flooding in colorado. it did not require supplemental, we were able to manage it with the funds. you talk about debates over funding. one thing that congress has done, at the request of this administration is to fully fund , the disaster relief fund. it is healthy and ready to go. we can manage these disasters. they are actually budgeted on an annual basis.

as far as the team goes, we have a lot of folks that we work a lot of different events, but that is the business we are in. we have to be able to support the disasters happening today, as well as the next big large event. reporter: with hurricane season starting, it has been more than nine years since a major hurricane, sandy does not count. nasa scientists have looked at it and said that is pure luck. first of all, do you think that luck will hold out this year? are you happy that you are lucky? or, is there a problem with the complacency? guest: you know, you get ready every year. it is like binary decisions. you don't hedge your bets. you don't think, it will not be a bad year, so i can slack off. you get ready. that is what we do. i think, we put so much emphasis on experience. the problem with experience with

hurricanes is that it will get you killed. i want to be straightforward with this. a lot of people say, we have not had a hurricane in a long time and people forgot. the other problem we have is that people don't understand the threats. let's take superstorm sandy. a lot of people, when they realize that it would not be a hurricane like i read -- irene, they said, i was here when it hit and it did not flood, so i , am not worried about sandy. what they do not understand is that sandy was bigger and different. many areas had flooding and we , lost lives. i caution people thinking that experience is a great tool with hurricanes. it actually may not be as good as you think. you have to treat each storm as a individual event. part of this is doing a better job communicating the threat and giving people better information on the impacts on their community. this year, the national hurricane center will use a new

product and start issuing an experimental forecast to show people where the storm surge and storm surge impacts will be. instead of just relying on wind speed to communicate a storms danger. it has been a long time, that is great, but every season, you start off at zero. you have to get ready for hurricane season. if nothing happens, you celebrate. you can never take the risk that, well, it will be a quite season, i don't worry about it. or, i have been through this, i don't want to worry about it. you have to worry about every storm as that event. the important thing is know what your evacuation zone is, and if you live in an evacuation zone be ready to evacuate. that is the most important thing that we know about hurricanes. if we can get people to move away from the hazard, unlike other disasters, we have time. if people live in that zone, no -- know what the plan is, and be

prepared to evacuate. hopefully we can enjoy summer and there are no concerns. host: we have about 10 minutes left in "newsmakers" this week. you bring up superstorm sandy. 2.5 years after superstorm sandy, said concern continues in congress about both overpayments and underpayments for those who filed claims after superstorm sandy. why is it so hard to get that payment of claims precise? guest: you are talking about two things. overpayments, you are probably referring to the individual assistance program. those are funds dispersed based on need for rental costs and other things. as we do with all of her federal grant programs, you have to go back and review those and make sure that payments were appropriate. in some cases you may find that there were overpayments, or payments that went out to more than one person in a household. we do have a fiduciary responsibility. we do look of the attacks and -- impacts and hardship, but we

have to do those reviews. that has been less than 2% of our total payouts. the other part of the problem is the national flood insurance program. we have had a lot of challenges with that. one of the things we have got back to address this program is put more emphasis on looking at servicing the policies and ensuring that the policies and the way that we apply the whole process of getting payments is not biased against a claim holder. i think we dealt with this. we built a lot of things into the program to protect the fun. -- fund. we want to make sure we are making the best effort to make the full payment whenever possible in the claims process versus always looking at it from a standpoint of -- are we doing this in favor of the fund and minimizing exposure to the fund? or are we doing this to maximize the potential benefit that the policyholder has when he flooding occurs? reporter: with regard to sandy

i think this week fema sent out letters to some of the folks who had flood damage to review their claims. what do you think is going on there? do you think insurers did not step up to the plate? guest: again, the national flood insurance program is an interesting way of doing business in that the federal flood insurance program underwrites the program, but we have individual companies that manage our product and service the claims. we have over 83 of them. some do a great job. others, we had concerns that there were inconsistencies in the process. we were in litigation, we met with the judges, and said, we want to settle this, get to the right answer. we also realize that if we were finding problems in the claims that were litigated, our concern was how many other claims that were not litigated had issues? we are sending letters out to

anybody who filed a claim during sandy and offering them an opportunity to come in and let us review, and make sure that any types of areas that we are finding and some of the cases that are being litigated -- if we find those, they may be eligible for more payment on their policies, and we want to make sure that the policies fully service the people. we are sending out letters and giving people the opportunity to come in. we don't know how many people actually take advantage of it, but we thought that since we did see errors in the cases that were litigated, we did not want to take risks, and give people a chance to come in for further review and see if we did have more money to pay them. reporter: new york used to be one of the worst case scenario disaster experts when we talked about hurricanes. going into this hurricane season , june 1, can you give us your three worse case in areas for hurricanes. what is the top of the list that keeps you up at night? guest: you take any area that has a lot of people, a lot of

traffic congestion, along the coast, and that will be a problem area. the density of population obviously in the new jersey-new york area is some of the highest density. again, one of the most challenging areas. areas that have not been hit with hurricanes and a long time also have big challenges. one of them is north of virginia. the hampton rosary. i was down there with the director of the hurricane center on the east coast hurricane tour. there are areas where they have not had a lot of hurricanes, and people tend to think that they did not have a hurricane problem, but it is a region that would be very difficult to evacuate. again, as their governor and local officials work together, we need to highlight to the public why it is so critical to take the time now as we go into the hurricane season, to find out if you live in an evacuation zone, and if you do, know where you will go. not everybody realizes that this

is not just along the coast. a lot of times, we will have flooding inland on rivers, canals, and bays that will flood farther inland than they realize. storm surge is not about just being on the beach. as we saw in new york and other areas, water coming into an urban area can cause tremendous devastation. in areas that people have lived all their life, they say, i have never seen this much water. reporter: one of the things you are working on in fema is public-private partnerships. can you give us a sense of what you're doing what kind of response you have gotten from big corporations? do you think they are now more prepared to face disasters particularly hurricanes? guest: the whole idea of this was we used to start off with a question, what could the private sector do to help government do our job? i found that the better question is what can we do to help businesses get back on their feet and open. the reality is that we have to supply food, water, and other supplies because stores are not

open. if we can get stores open, they have a much better system of logistics, and meet those needs. we can put our efforts and other efforts in other places. it is really providing a seat at the table to both what the state and local are doing, but another area is private businesses. that relationship has paid off. it exactly saving taxpayers money. if we are talking to the major big-box stores and they can tell us that they have stores open, it means that we will not have to send in supplies, generators, or other things, because they are up and running. we can actually use those resources further down. that real-time communication is actually saving us money because we know that within the first couple of hours, they are able

to get their stores open, and we can move our resources elsewhere. host: we always hear about fema post hurricane. what is the next frontier of disaster preparation, in your might, in this country? i have read stories about fema doing more prep work for oil train disasters with the rise of oil being shipped by rail in this country. is that the new frontier for you? guest: no. we have been doing this for a while. as things become topical, they become new again. we have always been about all hazard. not just about what people call natural hazards, or hurricanes. it is everything from earthquakes to the natural hazards we deal with. we deal with things like what happens when we have space weather events? we look at the consequences of cyberattacks, terrorist attacks. we prepare based upon the

consequences of the event. we oftentimes might not be the lead agency or initial control or management of something, but on behalf of the president and secretary of homeland security, fema's job is to support the response as our leaders manage the response. what many people think is new is really topical, but things that we have done before, and we continue to do. whether it is preparing for a nd doing planning around powerplants to looking at chemical and biological agents that terrorists may use, to think that we see more frequently, like flooding from hurricanes tornadoes, or , earthquakes. it is always about consequences. if the power goes out because of a hurricane or a terrorist attack, you are still dealing with the same consequences.

this constant -- that is how the concept from courthouse to white house works. we deal with a variety of hazards. host: you have been on this job since may 2009. how long would you like to be on this job? could you see yourself in another administration passed 2016? guest: i have one boss and i'm working for him. whatever happens in the future is another discussion. reporter: here is an opportunity to say something nice about someone. some company or state. if others ask you who is doing something right, in terms of private, especially retailer that you are trying to get open quicker after disaster, is there a retailer that you like to use as an example -- go watch them and try to do the same thing to -- and even more important, is there a state or county that you think does disaster preparation and response right? guest: there are a lot of states, but often times until

you have an event, you can't really show what they can do. you want to see a good effective team. look at texas and the leadership there. as they work with local officials and respond, that is how you say it should be done. you have good operators and a lot of states, but in a real-time disaster look at what , texas is doing. that is, again, why we are in a support role, but it is important to plug into a good team. there are a lot of examples i can use, but people get nervous when i start mentioning brands by name. there are a lot of indicators that we find -- what i have found is if you wait to do assessments in bad disasters, it is too slow and too late. what my motto is -- go big and go fast. be smart about it. you have to think big go big, , and go fast.

you also have to know what is going on. if you know there are certain stores or certain big boxes that will be getting open quickly and you get to the area, and they are open, it is probably not the worst area, see you can -- so you can keep going. we do use those indicators. an example is if a restaurant is able to get open and they can serve meals, that's probably not the hardest hit area. and we need to go to the hardest hit area before we start -- stop and get to work. reporter: i've heard you call that the waffle house scale. guest: i have heard that, yes. reporter: one of the low points of fema was hurricane katrina. that was before your time. what has changed since then? what is fema doing better? what still needs to be improved? host: we will give you one minute to answer that question. guest: you cannot solve complex

disasters by only the federal government. and you cannot respond effectively to complex and large-scale catastrophic disasters with just government. it is what is called the whole of community. if we are not engaging the private sector, the faith-based organizations, but more important, if we do not get the public that they are part of the solution. we talk about first responders but every big disaster that i have been in, including tornadoes, the first responders were neighbors. i think we get away from that and think that the government will always have the answer and take care of us, but the reality is that with a big disaster, the person taking care of you may be your neighbor. that is why it is so important to understand that this is a shared responsibility.

the government, private sector faith-based, but most important, it is the responsibility of the public to be prepared. we have to learn the lessons of katrina and apply them going forward. the challenges going forward is you cannot prepare, and only be ready for disasters that you are capable of responding to. you have to build for the disasters that can happen, even if they may not be frequent, or in some cases, unimaginable. historically, or physically possible, you have to plan for what can happen, and not hope that you can scale up. that was probably the biggest lesson of katrina. you cannot build systems that can build up for catastrophic responses. you have to build for catastrophic, and if it is not as bad, you scale down. host: we will have to end it there. craig fugate is the fema administrator. thank you for being our guest this week. we will go right to our roundtable. we are continue to be joined by donna leinwand-leger of "usa today" and seth bornstein of

"associated press." seth borenstein, i want to pick up on a point that you brought up -- the debate over rebuild versus move. where are you hearing where he comes down? and what is congress saying when it comes to these disasters that come in places where you said, over and over again? reporter: congress does not like to talk about it at all. no one likes to tell someone to move. and no one likes to pick up the bill over and over again. it is a situation where you can only look like a bad guy. but, it often needs adult supervision. reporter: this is also case where people have to deal with insurers. if insurers do not want to ensure people, that is a motivating factor to get people to not build in these areas that are disaster prone. we are seeing some of that, some of the private sector stepping

in, but there has not been a lot of movement from congress on it. host: the administrator talked about certain areas that he is concerned about. some inland, urban areas. are these areas heating the call -- heading the call from fema? are they listening to the concerns that he expressed? reporter: i'm sure that they are, i'm sure they are preparing in the sense that they could prepare. these are very highly populated areas, very well developed. there are only so many places for people to go in a disaster. if something does hit in those areas, we are looking at something like sandy. reporter: this week i was -- the state of maryland had all of their disaster officials in ocean city, and i was there talking to the state administrator. they know what is facing them, and they think they can handle it. part of it is that they have not had a chance -- you don't know until you actually get the major