we will be checking in with radio talkshow host. on thisu for joining us sunday. enjoy the rest of your holiday weekend. have a great week ahead and a happy new year. we will see you next week. ♪ [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2017] >> next, craig fugate. then, former president george w. bush discusses north korea. then the future of online

gaming. >> we are taking your emails and facebook questions during the program. our panel includes a white house correspondent and author of "the presidency in black and white, my view of presidents and race in america. author of democracy and black, how race still and slays the american soul, and a pulitzer prize-winning journalist david marinus, author of "barack obama, the story. today is been to. >> this week on "newsmakers," craig fugate. thank you for being here to talk about the last eight years heading the agency and the state of emergency management. also in studio with us is reid wilson of the national

correspondent for the hill newspaper along with then, energy and environmental reporter with the national journal. ben: let's say hurricane sandy happened today. how would the federal response be different than clutter years ago in terms of the immediate response and how flood insurance is dealt with. -- dealt with? historically, energy has been one of the things at the local and state level that has coordination. localou are talking about states from the mid atlantic the densely populated areas, you tod to be able to give national utilities and their association that focal point. that is one thing we did definitely that the department of energy has codified into their function. program.evamp of the

two things that stood out was the lack of trained people to go into the program and administer that, and a lack of focus on customer service. we have taken a lot of work in the last four years, lessons we have learned to apply to the most recent floods in louisiana and math you, to focus on the customer, the service of the products, and giving the adjusters the -- to do the policies. >> has the agency changed over the last two years? there was low morale after hurricane katrina. office,hen we came into they had started to begin the implementation of that. areas we could improve upon.

that was the tendency to a for assistance before you start responding. events,ge-scale congress made it clear if we think it will be declared, we can begin moving. that was a shift to put more emphasis on completely think something bad is happened, respond and do not wait for a not about it is coming in and taking over. it is just we're usually not -- not quick enough to be the first response. that if the state and local government. the next part of that response needs to be in motion. we do not get time back. that was the emphasis on time. do not wait until you have all the information and facts. respond to the event and -- adjusted downward. ward.just down -- adjust downward.

teams in every state, a potential impact before landfall. we have moved supplies for rescue teams. in thely initial rescues state of north carolina and flash flooding. events and other earthquakes. build a relationship with state and local partners and no with the initial appointments look like versus waiting for an assessment of how bad it could be. >> something that has been in the news lately is cyber security and cyber attacks. how has fema repaired for and what have been the changes for the potential of a large-scale power outage? standpoint,a fema the consequences of the event and not necessarily the cyberring of an event,

has a lot of history and yet we have yet to see a large impact of the grids. it is unknown. does not mean it will not happen or cannot. if you look back to the types of things we have dealt with large scale power outages from sandy and other storms as well as non-cyber events that have caused large-scale power outages, you plan for those events. the real question is how long will the power out and -- our be out and how large of an area? that is how we approach cyber. it is not that we have the event of cyber. it is what is the consequence of local governments in dealing with the consequences? fraught political issue, there are a bunch of mayors who have lost their jobs after not responding to snowstorms. what kind of mandated president obama give you, and what did he tell you about prioritizing?

forg: the first meeting was the 2009 hurricane season. i set my approach is to take the team and exercise without notice. do not wait for assessments. a lot of things i had learned from florida, his busy direction to me was that is what he wanted for me. been a lotnship has of making for the team has been working as one team i powering me by saying look, if it is a 50-50 decision, lean forward. there is an area of great. see clarity and move. do not wait for the right answer, have the best answer and act. empowering us to take the steps

and not wait is a way we speed up the response. drawback, femal has a reputation earned or not and there are some people skeptical of the federal government taking over. is there a danger showing up before something has been formally requested? better fast than late. if you are late, you're too late. i have communicated this with association.in the we do not do this in isolation or in a vacuum. by the time we have the information to formulate what you need, it is too late. more willing to take a risk on our end. the risk is if you are slow to

need those will not time frames. further behind, our cost will decrease to matter -- dramatically in covering for that. we may not always be needed but we do not want to be late to the need, so we go early and it is always about a one to one transaction. we are in support of the governors and not the other way around. >> one thing president obama hasn't sized and it is something fema has it that, the issue of climate change. resilience to climate change. to what extent have the initiatives you put in place, they are poised to continue we will have fat the new administration. can you talk about this? craig: the pregnant -- president tells me the discussion about

climate change, the debate is over. we have to look at how we are adapting it. pastve always looked at data. we do not have enough weather data to make intelligent decisions. we are hearing 5000 year events. they may have lifespans of 30 or 40 or 50 years. look at future risk. what does it mean for investments. most everything we pay for his insurance. we end of reimbursing local and

state governments because they have very high deductibles. we want to say, can we build it in a way that the private sector is incentivized to ensure the risk? risk on a taxpayer to the private sector, then have them set the goal post of what we should be building two, wherein how we build, based upon insurability versus the taxpayer, which does not always change the behavior long-term. we will have to deal in figure out how to maintain those -- the responsibility. risk, we should be looking at how we put this into the private ,ector so they manage the risk versus you, the taxpayer, who absorbs the risk when we do not do these things, looking at the future. >> one of the issues around those ideas is the so called

to pay less of a cost increase in terms of disaster response in the .therwise would that initiative is not complete as i understand. craig: it is driven by the general county office and the better general who says the threshold for disaster at public assistance is too low and we should raise that. for large states, it is dramatic. $1.41 per capita. they would recommend doubling or trick -- or tripling that in time. this would become crippling for large states. of $100 disasters million and will not get the clear and yet other states would double the risk and see $2 million disasters being cleared.

we've close something different. instead of raising the threshold, do not go back to the first dollar. the way it works now is if they hit a threshold for disaster that racial, we always go back to the first dollar. any insurance dollar -- policy that goes back to the first dollar always? just cannot afford them. you have deductibles in your health insurance and auto insurance and homeowners insurance. in many cases, you get incentives if you do things like put in alarm systems or fire extinguishers. instead of raising it up higher, which we think is detrimental to adjust to come keep the thresholds, but do not go back to the first dollar. then provide incentives for states that do have land-use planning, things we know that fight out long-term risk, and give them credit for that versus treating them all the same, which is what the current system tends to do. it does not rest -- recognize a

buydown risk. this would be a way for states to get credit. the deductible will not be great but the savings long-term would be dramatic if you incentivize local governments to take more of disaster risk, which they are building to minimize. wildfires -- have become in this challenge for state and federal budgets. response isovery funded differently, as -- rather than an emergency allocation. how to set challenge emergency managers and fema and the race themselves? craig: five system -- five situations. you have fires that are reimbursed through the major department responding to that,

then you have the fires on nonfederal lands. there is a grant program for nonfederal land wildfires. when we talk about the last, that is not the greatest it is. envoyappened was not an -- an anomaly. wildfires are actually great on east coast than on the west coast. when you see changing drought patterns, fire on the east coast actually has more homes at risk than anywhere else in the country. firefighting on federal lands and everything else. fema has always supported state local governments for everything else for federal firefighting. those, youto merge

run into the issue of how we federalresponse or a responsibility versus a reimbursement local government. disasterhin this relief funds, all the other disasters for state and local governments. leslie are a few weeks away from an administration that is new. have you had meetings with the trump transition team to talk about the transfer of management to the agency? craig: not yet. the transition team is working on that. we want to focus on telling the story. i do not predetermine what the next party will be in i got a -- i want tong story.re we tell the

we found ourselves with budgets and the of budgets changes in authority we have received to sandy, here is what and here is what we have come in these gaps we still have. gaps, we findat ourselves capable -- preparing for what we are capable of doing. the state and local and federal government gets into. we were pushing catastrophic disaster planning. did off the west coast of the u.s., a multistate very intensive response to an earthquake that would literally exceed our capability.

it forces us to look at international response teams to support it. continue iswant to the him thinkable's or the improbable spirit when you fail those responsible -- you fail the government. >> what congress has faced in the last few years, government shutdowns, for a lot of that is a minor inconvenience. craig: we have seen everything from our grant cycles delayed in time, to i grew up in the state of florida where you knew what you had, the legislature told you this is what we want to do and this is how much money you have to do it. this is one thing where i support him 100%.

a budget to hc is one of the fundamental responsibilities of congress that allows agencies to take the will of congress and do a better job and more efficiently implement that, versus continuing resolutions. congress is not really able to come back and make the changes. it is hard to anticipate what may be coming if you have uncertainties. you need time to make sure you're able to carry out your mission. , it may seem thing like it is inside baseball. want done,f what you allowing you to successfully execute that, versus short-term gaps, not very efficient, and it

sometimes ends up costing more money because you are in a series of short-term processes that you cannot make a strategic investment in buyout future costs. >> wanting the senate will be doing -- your replacement. for thel be fundamental senators to ask of those hearings? craig: defined what the job of -- both sides will have their opinion about it. understand the responsibilities of the position and that they will be a principal adviser to the national security staff, homeland security, and congress?

laidhose possibilities as out are much more extensive than many people outside of the programs no. sure theocus on making incoming income it as they go to confirmations fully understands what congress intended and that they understand and can explain how they would carry that out. i foundne of the things going through a transition that many of these authorities were not clearly expressed or it was an assumption that you would know about them. this would be a chance for congress to revisit those and make sure the nominee understands that and what they think it means that congress needs to make adjustments or suggestions. >> let's go back to climate change in the work the obama administration has done. there is discord over whether climate change is happening and whether man cost climate change. has that impacted your work at

all? are there minefields you have to navigate as you talk to members of congress? say climate change to some folks, they just shut down the conversation. i bring it back to capitalism. shouldn't we be looking to remove risk away from taxpayers? wrong, itnecessarily is just come are we doing it in such a way that the taxpayer receives a benefit greater or we we subsidizing risk and are growing risk that is not sustainable nor does it benefit the taxpayer? people always talk about fema in the first person. it is your tax dollars going out in these disasters. movingensuring risk and to the private sector, or are you, the taxpayer, subsidizing risk? why does the risk seem to be crowing and not changing? why can we not move this toward the private sector?

i think you can get past what is causing things and more in terms how do we adapt financially, how do we build, and how do we not grow risk that we as test payers -- taxpayers do not want to grow or benefit from? >> congress will consider very infrastructureof package. we have heard the numbers floating around, $1 trillion of infrastructure poses. bet do you think needs to written into that proposal to ensure that resilience is ?onsidered or is there a way craig: if we are to make these investments, let's build not only to capacity issues but to the risk profiles we see coming.

in some cases, this has nothing to do with it and more to do with the understanding of seismic risk and as better how dotion comes out, they perform, and yet we do not want an earth quake to occur and then find out we should have the better and then come back and say there was actually data. lookisk profile should be at your known personal risk, look to the future and what kind of objections that may look like and incorporate that into engineering. future and resiliency against oreats, whether it is cyber, just changes to the way we operate in use things, that will change risk profiles. is a rolethink there for congress to ensure some of these considerations are taken into account? craig: absolutely.

when you build your house, to you wanted to fall down in 20 years? we do not want infrastructure that will fail. if you go out and invest in wouldn't youe, like it to last the whole time it is there? eventually becoming damaged? this is not like shooting for the moon. it is good in sound practice of building stuff that will last a lifetime in the environment it would be in. and using the best data and science for what the future may look like. >> emission it possible earthquake. the subject of a new yorker story that caused everybody to panic in seattle and portland, what keeps you up at night? what is the disaster that worries you most? craig: i sleep pretty good.

my fear is the lack of disasters of areas that have not had disasters have a tendency to get cannot happen here it cannot be that that. will, and it will continue. we cannot just fall back on what you're good at doing. we must always look at what can happen. the best way to deal with it is to build for that environment such a way that we minimize risk. responding to the disaster may not otherwise sample there is a tendency to fall back into what we're capable of doing. >> we will have to leave it there. thank you very much were being this wii's newsmaker. -- this week's newsmaker. we're back with our reporters. start with you about

where fema is compared to where it was eight years ago after superstorm sandy? ben: during the obama administration, there has been a lot more information on climate change. as we heard the administrator say, the agency dealing with real world of accident. i thought it was correct when he said, look, how often do you hear about a disaster that is supposed to be every 500 years, every thousand years? what we heard was the extent to which they're putting on resilience and trying to be forward with, we heard , that they act with ine level of forethought making sure that is not go away.

viewpoint onur what it has done in the last three years? did was not only reviled by the state and administrators, but also had that morale problems within the agency itself. backgroundom a state and dealt with several major hurricanes. he has made the effort to reach out to groups around the country. where everything is viewed through a partisan lens, the lieutenant governor, as far to the right, elected in the united states of america, he prays on the obama administration and ima for being there on time. disaster recovery and disaster

response has yet to be a partisan issue in the last year. we will see how that changes going forward. there is an understanding that certainly when disasters -- it, it does not happened to red states and blue states. will see the proof in the pudding as congress received this infrastructure package as whether or not they were taken to the cake and all to see if we would have public expenditures on infrastructure. some democrats would like to run type of task that scenario. worth of the floor is whether or not the projects undertaken have some type of robust resilience and flood planning hardwired into the system.

>> what do we know that the direction of fema in the incoming trump administration? >> trump administration have not said any about who the next fema director would be. they have offered some takes on climate change. they do not fall in line with the obama administration on whether or not humans are involved in climate change. ae next epa administrator, clear sign of where the trump administration will come down on change. means ima not that will continue to serve resiliency project, it is not. . >> what is congress saying about each of fema? sure it has to make boots on the