On the Media: American Emergency

June 12, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

American Emergency

On December 1, 1974, a passenger plane crashed into the side of Mount Weather in Virginia, killing all 92 people on board. When TV crews arrived, they found the site already sealed off by federal security agents. The plane had inadvertently exposed a tightly guarded Cold War secret: inside the mountain was a massive underground complex—a self-contained city with a hospital, crematorium, power plant, and broadcasting studio, built so the White House and thousands of federal workers could run the country from underground after a nuclear war. That facility, still operated by FEMA today, was the agency's original reason for existing. And as journalist Garrett Graff explains, the conspiracy theories that plague FEMA today were baked in from the very beginning.

The Birth of an Agency with Two Souls

Before FEMA existed, America's disaster response was a mess. A hundred different agencies might play a role in any given crisis, and local leaders navigating this patchwork during emergencies found federal aid too slow and too disorganized. In 1978, the National Governors Association drew up plans for a streamlined one-stop shop for federal emergency response. President Jimmy Carter signed an executive order in 1979 creating the Federal Emergency Management Agency—a "federal Frankenstein" with a dual mission: Cold War civil defense and natural disaster relief.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:56) **Introduction: Why FEMA?** - Latif Nasser introduces a Radiolab collaboration with On the Media, exploring a series about FEMA's fight for survival under the current administration.
2 (03:43) **Origin Story: The Mount Weather Bunker** - Episode one details FEMA's secretive Cold War origins, beginning with a 1974 plane crash that exposed a hidden government facility.
3 (08:20) **The Need for a Disaster Agency** - By the 1970s, the focus shifted from nuclear war to natural disasters, which were overwhelming the fragmented federal response system.
4 (11:36) **FEMA's Dual Mission and Early Dysfunction** - FEMA was created with a split identity: Cold War civil defense and natural disaster relief.
5 (13:20) **The Reagan Era and Secret Doomsday Planning** - Reagan appointee Louis Giuffrida funneled FEMA's budget toward Cold War civil defense, including a secret continuity-of-government program.
6 (19:15) **Conspiracy Theories Take Root** - The Miami Herald exposed Giuffrida's past and the martial law plans, linking them to Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair.
7 (22:53) **The Conspiracy Theory Legacy** - Fringe figures like Linda Thompson and later Alex Jones and Glenn Beck amplified the FEMA camp conspiracy theories, which persist online today.

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Guests on this episode

Garrett Graff

Show Notes

A little while back, our friends over at On the Media released a gripping and immersive reporting series about FEMA, the agency that is supposed to be there for all of us in the wake of disaster. In American Emergency (https://zpr.io/MtrUmJU3yEMW), OTM investigates how the agency tasked with saving America became distrusted, despised… and defunded.

Today we talk to On the Media co-host Micah Loewinger about how this project came out, what reporting went into making it happen, and play a couple of fun and truly surprising bits of the story that the OTM team uncovered. And it’s a story that highlights the ideal and promise of good government, right alongside the frustration with bureaucracy and mismanagement, and of course the undercurrent of profound mistrust in governmental power.

As natural disasters are getting more extreme and less predictable, this series makes sense of that tangle, and provides a prescient peek into FEMA’s future.

Special thanks to On the Media (https://zpr.io/MtrUmJU3yEMW). To hear Micah in person, talking more about the complex history of FEMA, join him on June 24th at WNYC's The Greene Space (https://wnyc.org/events/otm-fema).

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