The Code Word Is Resilience

Special Interest Capture of a Big Tent Idea

By Jessica Weinkle

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has reportedly tagged Representative Garret Graves (R-LA), who serves on the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, to head FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Graves is a long-time critic of FEMA with an extensive track record in policymaking related to energy, infrastructure, and the environment including, climate change. As ranking member of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, Graves has spoken in support of resilience through infrastructure and land use, wetland restoration; he has spoken on lowering emissions through an “all-of-the-above energy strategy.”

Trump’s rationale for picking him as FEMA head may have to do with Hurricane Helene, which tore through the southern United States in September 2024, just before the presidential election, causing at least 230 deaths and around $40 billion in damage in Florida and North Carolina.

As the storm’s winds died down, speculation grew that the storm’s devastating floods in western North Carolina could impact the upcoming U.S. presidential vote. Then candidate Trump took to social media to claim that the government was not aiding Republicans. And shortly after his victory, Congressional members of the House and Senate have launched investigations into FEMA, regarding reports that an employee directed disaster response teams to avoid homes with pro-Trump signage. The employee was fired shortly after the incident made the news.

In the lead-up to the FEMA oversight hearings in the House, Graves sharply criticized the agency of bias against conservatives:

I have done a deep dive looking at grants and some of the policies some of these terms that they’ve invented adding justice at the end, talking about equity. What it’s done is that it’s allowed them to redefine sort of how they are going to prioritize grants, policies, and things like that. And it’s resulted in a bias, meaning, I think in many cases the areas that are more conservative are being neglected.

In interviews the now ex-FEMA employee gave additional context: workers had been told to avoid houses with pro-Trump signs because of “political hostile encounters” and homeowners meeting aid workers in their driveways with “guns blazing.”

Emergencies and related disasters have long had their own unique politics. But there is a sense that their politicization is deepening. A view of this politicization can be traced in the way a now standard term in emergency management—resilience—is invoked, defined, and deployed.

Resilience

As a concept, resilience is nothing new. It lingered in the background of the interdisciplinary academic literature on disasters since shortly after it became an important ecological concept in the 1970s. It hit the main stage around the turn of the century, loosely conceptualized among disaster studies scholars as the opposite of vulnerability.

The concept of “resilience,” however, never solidified into one clearer meaning. There are at least three thematic understandings:

First, it can describe a system’s capacity to resist disturbance through engineering, computer science, and improved construction practices.

Second, it can describe a system’s capacity to absorb disturbance and bounce back through limited government support.

And third, it can describe a system’s capacity to adapt or bounce forward after disturbance through what the late scholar in disaster studies, Siambabala Bernard Manyena, describes as “social engineering, if not community agency” to face changing ideas of risk and improve community capabilities.

In 2021, the Congressional Research Service (CRS) reported that resilience had also become a type of code word for social constructions of climate change risk:

Over the past decade, CRS has observed a general shift from a prevalence in federal use of the term climate change adaptation to a rise in the term resilience in the context of climate change. Resilience also has become more prevalent as an objective of risk reduction more generally. The shift in use of the terms in the context of climate change policy may connote change in the concept or approach, a reduction of priority for climate change adaptation, greater integration of climate change risk management into multi-hazard management efforts, or political sensitivity to explicit references to “climate change.

Because of its vague meaning, policymakers who adopt the term “resilience” do so at risk of setting policy goals that are misunderstood, vague, or incompatible with other overriding objectives.

A Tale of Two Bills

Spending on resilience-specific projects demonstrates how different conceptions of the term play out in contexts where policymakers with different politics work together vs. when they do not work together.

On invest.gov, the federal government provides details of the projects awarded funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and the CHIPS and Science Act. As noted on the website, its data is incomplete. However, with over 74,000 projects listed, it is still a good indication of how money is being spent.

Under the project category “Resilience” are two subcategories: “Resilience” and “Climate Resilience.”

ChatGPT provided a quick narrative summary that reveals that “Resilience”projects funded predominantly by the BIL went to actual built infrastructure. Many of the projects are labeled by their road intersection. This is the first interpretation of resilience in the list above.

Climate Resilience funded by the IRA went to projects primarily related to organizations and conservation, with top big ticket items for water resources problems in the desert southwest. This is the second and third interpretation of resilience in the list above.

Caption: ChatGPT analysis of invest.gov projects

One explanation for the different approaches to resilience in the BIL and the IRA is that the former required cooperation across the aisle and the latter did not.

The IRA’s passage along party lines through the budget reconciliation process meant that its language did not need to pass muster by anyone beyond niche special interest groups who rally around climate change.

Perhaps that is why “climate resilience” and its derivatives appear ten times throughout the IRA text, each time referring to a different conception. The word “resilience” appears 24 times in application to a wide range of entities from forests and rural electrical systems to offshore wind transmission and Native Hawaiians.

BIL, however, was a bipartisan endeavor. The phrase “climate resilience” appears once in the legislation and in reference to assessing fish stocks when prioritizing funding for infrastructure to improve fish passage.

The word “resilience” and its derivatives, including additional associations such as systems resilience, appear 200 times in BIL. Moreover, the term is given clear definitions in the contexts of transportation projects and drinking water systems. In the context of electric grid resilience, legislators defined a “disruptive event” for which resilience was sought.

In short, “resilience” in IRA means Democratic social value priorities; “resilience” in BIL is contextually specific and pertains to infrastructure on which the broader society relies.

Mission Creep

From an historical context, the introduction of the idea of resilience to emergency management was welcomed. It implied a recognition that some are more vulnerable than others and that communities have their own grassroots capabilities of self-support through groups like churches and the Cajun Navy.

However, understanding that the poor, elderly, undocumented, and others have unique vulnerabilities that require consideration in the lead up and aftermath of a disaster is quite different from advancing a social and energy agenda under the guise of emergency management.

FEMA’s strategic plan attaches resilience to specific views of climate change such that “We must recognize that we are facing a climate crisis and educate ourselves and the nation about the impacts our changing climate poses to the field of emergency management.”

The bipartisan-supported Community Disaster Resilience Zones Act of 2022 provides for the identification of census tracts across the country to be prioritized for grant funding to improve the “climate and natural hazard resilience of vulnerable communities.”

The legislation did not define resilience, focusing instead on the acceptable means of identifying census tracts with high natural hazard risk and high social vulnerability—giving considerable discretion to presidents to identify any other relevant characteristic to prioritize some over others (including a changing climate). The legislation did not mandate any specific tool, but aspects of its wording indicate that legislators had in mind the use of FEMA’s National Risk Index, which includes considerations of hazards and social vulnerability (shown below).

The 16 variables comprising social vulnerability in the FEMA National Risk Index

FEMA produced the Community Disaster Resilience Zones by combining the National Risk Index with the Climate and Economic Resilience Screening Tool. The latter of which comprises eight indicators: climate change, energy, health, housing, legacy pollution, transportation, water and wastewater, and workforce development. The Climate and Economic Resilience Screening Tool was developed under the direction of the White House Council on Environmental Quality at the behest of an early Biden Executive Order to advance environmental justice.

So, what started out as conventional metrics of social vulnerability within the National Risk Index has spiraled into an attempt to measure a cascade of perceived social ills and a plan to remediate them through the government’s emergency management agency as part of a call for “resilience.”

In 2023, for example, the White House released a Climate Resilience Framework with the vision of “reimagining” the government’s role in advancing climate resilience. The White House defined resilience as “the ability to prepare for threats and hazards, adapt to changing conditions, and withstand and recover rapidly from adverse conditions and disruptions.” The White House focused explicitly on the impacts of climate change and aimed at an overarching social agenda to “Help communities become not only more resilient, but also more safe, healthy, equitable, and economically strong.”

This past summer, moreover, FEMA released National Resilience Guidance that appeared to drop its own longstanding definition of resilience: the “ability to adapt to changing conditions and withstand and rapidly recover from disruption due to emergencies.”

It adopted instead the White House’s definition, which encompasses fighting back against general adversity. The difference between the two definitions demonstrates the extent to which political leaders have appropriated “resilience” as signaling a broader social initiative.

Indeed, the National Resilience Guidance, which features on its cover wind turbines and community gardens, makes note that the guidance is intended to “drive collective action.” As part of this turn to collective action FEMA concludes:

To successfully build resilience, everyone must understand the role they play, and the nation must come together to work towards a shared vision of the following:

● A resilient people

● A resilient society

● A resilient economy

● A resilient built environment

● A resilient natural environment

In this sense, resilience is no longer intended as an opposite of vulnerability. Instead, it is a White House directed political project of shaping societal value preferences towards achieving a suite of domestic policies in response to the climate crisis.

’Merica

The factory-issued dictionary on my Mac defines resilience as “the capacity to withstand or to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness.” What should be one of the biggest tents under which to garner broad public support—a Resilient America— has become factionalized.

At the Liberal Patriot, the political scientist Ruy Teixeira makes the point that big tent issues have come undone by a politics that requires accepting “a vast litany of other progressive positions to join the righteous cause in any particular area.” In line with his argument, for instance: Want to build resilient American communities? Well, what do you think about global energy markets and social inequities in rates of diabetes?

It is naive to think that only the Left sees FEMA as a tool with which to buy support from specific populations in the name of a pet crisis (see: immigration). However, for his part, Representative Graves appears keenly aware of the problems posed by a resilience that is taken-up as a social project rather than one of built and natural infrastructure. Distribution of funds for risk management projects are tied to political priorities rather than clearly defined measures of hazard exposure. If resilience is just code for climate change, as the CRS indicates, or a broader progressive agenda where it does not have a bipartisan definition, then funding for resilience projects favors those already politically aligned while coercing opposing communities to fall in line.

Even still, as FEMA Administrator, Graves would lack the type of emergency and disaster management experience earned through a career in the trenches of response. It is one thing to critically identify shortcomings in administrative processes, but it is quite another to triage a San Francisco earthquake or a South Florida hurricane landfall. Some of FEMA’s darkest days have been under leadership that lacked on the ground career expertise in emergency management.

More dangerously, emergency and disaster management is now a target of politicization that breeds public distrust and fear—in a word, weakness, the antithesis of resilience.