Did FEMA Really Build a Secret Lair in a Mountain?

Summary

Podcast Summary: Question Everything

Episode: Did FEMA Really Build a Secret Lair in a Mountain?
Host: Brian Reed (with reporting by Micah Lowinger, collaboration with WNYC's On the Media)
Date: May 7, 2026

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Episode Overview

The episode kicks off a special four-part series exploring how FEMA, the agency tasked with helping Americans recover from disasters, became entangled in conspiracy theories, public distrust, and political attacks. Through historical investigation, interviews with insiders, and a deep look into FEMA’s secretive Cold War origins, the episode reveals both the real and imagined aspects of the agency’s power and secrecy, and how these have shaped its public image for decades.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. FEMA’s Modern Crisis and Political Attacks

• Context: Under the Trump administration, FEMA's funding is slashed and its future is threatened. President Trump floats the idea of eliminating FEMA, stirring anxiety in the agency and Congress. (02:24–03:11)
• Quote: “It seemed like with the snap of his fingers, the president would be happy to see FEMA vanish.” (02:02, Narrator)
• Effects: Leadership churn, delays in disaster response, and public outcry after deadly floods in Texas. FEMA's reputation suffers as aid is withheld and programs are gutted.

2. The Deep Roots of FEMA Conspiracy Theories

• Origins: Far-right militias and personalities (e.g., Alex Jones, Glenn Beck) propagate myths about FEMA camps and secret government powers. Pop culture (X-Files) picks up these ideas. (05:36–06:24)
• Quote: “Are you familiar with what the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s real power is? It was a major plot point in the X Files.” (06:10, Narrator)
• Analysis: These conspiracies are fueled by real secrecy and questionable programs in FEMA’s history, blurring fact and fiction.

3. Mount Weather: The Secret Lair

• Incident: In 1974, a plane crash near Mount Weather reveals to the public the existence of a secret underground emergency government facility, reinforcing suspicions about FEMA’s hidden power. (09:44–12:21)
• Quote: “A subterranean Strangeloveian lair... Everything that the White House and thousands of federal workers would need to run the country underground while millions melted on the surface.” (10:06, Narrator)

4. FEMA’s Cold War Mission & Birth

• Backstory: Initially, the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) focused on nuclear war, leading to programs like Operation Alert (duck-and-cover drills, mass evacuations) and massive investments in secret installations.
• Formation of FEMA: After a string of natural disasters in the ‘60s and ‘70s exposed fragmented disaster response, state governors lobbied for a centralized agency. Carter created FEMA in 1979. (13:26–16:18)
• Quote: “It didn’t make sense for every state to be developing its own totally independent ability to respond to a hurricane.” (13:44, Garrett Graff)

5. Secret Plans, Black Budgets, and Fuel for Paranoia

• Classified Operations: Under Reagan, much of FEMA’s budget and mission remained secret, focusing on nuclear preparedness, continuity of government, and even martial law scenarios. (20:01–24:39)
• Project 908: A covert plan to identify buildings for potential use as refugee camps, stoking the seeds of later ‘FEMA camp’ conspiracies. (22:44–23:36)
• Controversial Leadership: Louis Giuffrida, Reagan’s pick, was revealed to have written academic work on using the military to detain minorities during unrest; he later helped draft plans for nationwide martial law. (23:36–26:12)
• Quote: “I was having lunch with a news reporter... the guy’s looking really bored. He says, ‘Yeah, Leo, that’s all really bad, but tell me about FEMA’s secret plan to round up all the liberals in the country and put them in concentration camps.’” (27:08, Leo Bosner)

6. The Spiral of Conspiracy and Reality

• Fringe to Mainstream: Early internet forums and militia documentaries (Linda Thompson’s "America Under Siege") turn FEMA into a symbol of government tyranny. (27:51–28:26)
• Quote: “These may be facilities that have other uses, but which could be quickly used to detain large numbers of people.” (28:17, Linda Thompson)
• Modern Parallels: In recent years, funds for detention centers (e.g., Florida's "Alligator Alcatraz") are tied to FEMA grants, blurring lines between conspiracy and reality. (31:29–32:27)
• Quote: “That is the most real FEMA camp ever built.” (32:27, Garrett Graff)

7. FEMA’s Public Relations & Shift under Clinton

• Turnaround: After catastrophic failures in the 1980s and early '90s (Hurricane Hugo, Andrew), President Clinton appoints James Lee Witt, an emergency management professional, as FEMA director—the first with real disaster management experience. (38:38–39:40)
• Reforms: Witt opens agency to public scrutiny, restructures response teams, invests in disaster mitigation, and declassifies much of FEMA’s black budget. (40:03–41:23)
• Visible Success: Positive responses to events like the 1993 Mississippi floods and the Oklahoma City bombing boost FEMA’s reputation. (41:48–44:23)

8. The Threats from Extremists: Paranoia Breeds Paranoia

• Extremist Infiltration: Stories of militia infiltration into FEMA officials’ private lives and credible death threats against FEMA’s leadership are revealed. (45:05–48:57)
• Quote: “A handyman... the FBI said, 'Well, he’s not. He’s actually undercover. He’s a militia member who was sent here to get close to you and watch your movements, figure out your patterns, try to collect information...'” (46:01–46:42, Mike Walker)
• Insight: The episode closes noting that FEMA, an agency born out of 20th century paranoia, remains ensnared in it—facing real threats from those who believe in its conspiracies.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On FEMA’s capacity: “These people are so inept they couldn't organize a two car parade and they're never gonna round up everybody in the country." – Leo Bosner, on FEMA camp conspiracies (27:33)
• Comic Relief: “I got those Federal Emergency Management Administration Blues, blues, blues, blues. Cause when you’re hit, that’s it. You either sit or stand and melt down in your shoes.” – Mark Russell, "FEMA Blues" (35:15)
• On Black Budgets: “FEMA, on a daily basis, is in charge of tracking the whereabouts of everyone in the presidential line of succession so that... it knows how to get them to secure relocation sites like the Mount Weather bunker.” – Garrett Graff (20:01)
• On Accountability: “He sends a memo to all hands. First official action, open door policy. All of a sudden he’s getting all these employees coming in and giving him an earful of all the problems in the agency.” – Leo Bosner, on reforms under Clinton (40:46)
• On Secrecy and Conspiracies: “You just can’t talk about these classified bunkers and classified operations, even if you’re trying to debunk conspiracies. The secrecy in and of itself is naturally going to feed conspiracy theories.” – Garrett Graff (30:12–30:42)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• FEMA in Political Crosshairs (Trump & Noem): 02:24–03:11
• Origins of FEMA Conspiracies & Pop Culture Spread: 05:36–06:24
• Mount Weather Crash & Revelation: 09:44–12:21
• Creation of FEMA & Cold War Missions: 13:26–19:36
• Secret Government Plans, Project 908, Martial Law: 21:09–26:12
• Rise of Right-Wing Militia Conspiracies: 27:08–29:00
• Use of FEMA Funds for 'Detention Centers': 31:29–32:27
• Clinton Era Reforms & Media Openness: 38:38–41:23
• FEMA's Oklahoma City Bombing Response: 43:32–44:29
• Extremist Surveillance & Death Threats: 45:05–48:57

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Conclusion

The episode expertly weaves together FEMA’s secretive history, policy failures, memeification in conspiracy cultures, and eventual reform, while showing how its paradoxical mix of real secrecy and hard-won reforms continues to shape its reputation. It sets up future episodes that promise to focus on Katrina and FEMA’s identity crisis, violent threats against its workers, and internal struggles for the agency’s survival—all with an eye on the complex interplay between myth, media, and government.

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For Next Episode

The series continues with a deeper look at how Hurricane Katrina triggered FEMA’s most public identity crisis, including the story of the lone FEMA staffer in New Orleans who blew the whistle during the chaos.

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This summary captures all the major events, insights, quotes, and the investigative tone of "Question Everything" and partners at WNYC's On the Media, structured to be useful for listeners and non-listeners alike.

Transcript

[Michael Lowinger]

Today on Question Everything, how did the agency in charge of helping us recover from hurricanes become the subject of such wild conspiracy theories?

[Leo Bosner]

Tell me about FEMA's secret plan to round up all the liberals in the country and put them in concentration camps.

[Michael Lowinger]

What our colleagues over at the fellow public radio show on the Media from WNYC in New York have just spent months trying to figure out how female the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is supposed to prepare America for worst case scenarios and not only natural disasters, remember, but nuclear disasters as well, has become so distrusted, despised, and now is having its funding dramatically slashed. On the Media. Co host Michael Lowinger has been reporting deeply on this and looking at the ways that kernels of truth about FEMA and the actual secrets it has kept from the public have spawned fear, fictional conspiracy theories, and how all of this has led to the crisis that the agency is now in. Where Donald Trump is talking about closing FEMA altogether on the Media is a kindred show of Question Everything. It uses the media as a lens to look at everything that's happening in the world. And today I'm excited to share the first episode in a special four part series they put together about FEMA and the conspiracy theories surrounding it. Here's Micah.

[Narrator/Host]

At the beginning of his second term, amid all the chaos of the incoming administration, President Trump made his first TR to North Carolina.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

We've come to North Carolina with a

[Leo Bosner]

simple message for all the people of

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

this region who are hit so hard by Hurricane Helene. That message is very simple.

[Leo Bosner]

You are not forgotten any longer.

[Narrator/Host]

Before he got on Air Force One, Trump called a press conference on the tarmac and casually dropped this bomb.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

I'll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling fema, or maybe getting rid

[Narrator/Host]

of fema, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the agency that stands between America and climate destruction.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

I think frankly, FEMA's not good.

[Narrator/Host]

The agency that helps people rebuild after they've lost everything. The agency that, while he was rambling, was providing aid to Californians suffering through the historic LA wildfires as well as Helene survivors right there in North Carolina. It seemed like with a snap of his fingers, the president would be happy to see FEMA vanish.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

I think we're going to recommend that FEMA go away.

[Narrator/Host]

I learned that employees at FEMA boy broke down in tears when they heard the news. Some replayed the president's speech over and over.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

I think we're going to recommend that FEMA go away.

[Narrator/Host]

Anxious members of Congress spent the day calling into the agency's headquarters with a barrage of questions. Is the president serious? What happens when the next hurricane hits?

[News Reporter/Spokesperson]

If the president came to you and said, you're my DHS secretary, do you

[Leo Bosner]

think I should get rid of fema?

[News Reporter/Spokesperson]

What would you say? I would say yes, get rid of FEMA the way it exists today.

[Narrator/Host]

Kristi Noem, former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security it has been slow

[News Reporter/Spokesperson]

to respond at the federal level and that is why this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today.

[Narrator/Host]

Before she got the boot this spring, Noem effectively set fire to FEMA preparedness. Programs were slashed. Unqualified leaders cycled in and out. Billions meant for survivors of storms, wildfires and earthquakes were withheld or denied. Lives hung in the balance. The death toll in Texas, the flooding tragedy. It's up to 104 dead across six counties. That number includes nearly 30 children. After deadly floodwaters inundated Camp mystic and other parts of central Texas, the agency's support lines left thousands of calls unanswered. FEMA's top leader at the time couldn't be reached for 24 hours.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

We live about a mile down the road from Camp Mississippi and we've already got two little girls who have come down the river and we've gotten to them. But I'm not sure how many else are out there.

[Narrator/Host]

The federal response to this disaster has come under scrutiny.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

Allegations that FEMA cutbacks meant delays in

[Narrator/Host]

answering people's calls for disaster assistance and

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

aid after the flood.

[Narrator/Host]

In one telling the dysfunctional response was Doge's doing. It's true at the start of 2025, no agency was safe from Elon Musk's chainsaw. But that's only part of the story. For many years, fomenting under the surface was a deep seated distrust of fema, which broke through during Hurricane Helene just months before the 2024 presidential election.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars on housing for illegal migrants.

[News Reporter/Spokesperson]

Some on the right pushing conspiracy theories that they're blocking aid and seizing land from people here in North Carolina. And that is not true. An anti government militia group known as Veterans on Patrol is claiming Hurricane Helene was caused by government controlled weather weapons. The group called Hurricane Helene an act of war.

[Narrator/Host]

I knew from my years reporting on far right militias that these groups often showed up after natural disasters to recruit, fundraise and spit shine their public image. But I never understood why they hated FEMA so much. So I started digging into right wing media archives and found that the anti FEMA lore went back decades.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

People are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps, to the New world Order, to the troops on the streets. The liberals are starting.

[Narrator/Host]

Alex Jones has made multiple films claiming to have discovered secret prisons operated by female and right wing pundit. Glenn Beck entertained this stuff when he was still on Fox.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

If you have any kind of fear that we might be headed towards a totalitarian state, buckle up. There's something going on in our country that is ain't good.

[Narrator/Host]

Over time, these paranoias seeped into the waters of mainstream culture.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

Are you familiar with what the Federal

[Narrator/Host]

Emergency Management Agency's real power is? It was a major plot point in the X Files.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

FEMA allows the White House to suspend constitutional government upon declaration of a national emergency. Think about that.

[Narrator/Host]

Even with Kristi Noem replaced at DHS by Republican Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, the future of FEMA is still in jeopardy. This week the administration announced that it was patching up some of the NOME era cuts. But agency insiders say that it may take years to build FEMA back up to fighting strength. About a month ago, Trump repeated his antipathy for the agency.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

I've never been a big fan of fema. I like to keep it local. I like to see governors and neighboring states help each other as opposed to fema.

[Leo Bosner]

FEMA is very expensive.

[Narrator/Host]

As I've followed the current day crisis at fema, I've wondered whether it can survive the stories that have been told about it. The misinformation, mismanagement and genuine catastrophes that have made this agency one of the least popular among American. But for all its faults, and there are many, it's not clear we can afford to lose it.

[News Reporter/Spokesperson]

Extreme weather leaving so many across the United States wondering when they'll get a break. In July alone there were five 1000 year flood events.

[Michael Lowinger]

Extreme heat is becoming a dangerous new normal.

[Narrator/Host]

The record setting storm measured not in inches but in feet of snow. Hundreds of thousands are now without power in this freezing weather. The US is experiencing $1 billion disaster every 10 days on average, compared to

[Leo Bosner]

every 82 back in the 1980s.

[Narrator/Host]

Over the next few weeks, we'll explore how the organization tasked with saving America came to be so despised and mythologized for a series we're calling American Emergency, the movement to kill FEMA. We'll hear about FEMA's identity crisis during Hurricane Katrina, how conspiracy theories have fueled violent threats against federal workers and and how a group of anonymous employees are fighting to keep the agency alive under Trump. For this first episode, we're looking at FEMA'S secretive origins and the moment when Americans first learned that the agency was hiding things from us. On December 1, 1974, heavy rain and fog rerouted a passenger plane over northern Virginia, some 50 miles from Washington, DC. On its descent, the aircraft dropped into the forest below, shearing off the treetops and crashing into the side of Mount Weather. The two pilots were killed first. Lanced by trees that burst through the cockpit, the rest of the aircraft crumbled into pieces. A mangle of shrapnel and the body parts of the 92 passengers. There were no survivors. One woman whose parents were on the flight said it seemed like the mountain had jumped up and bit the plane. News coverage of the day quickly turned to the blame game and the miscommunication from air traffic control amidst a violent storm. But our focus is something that was buried in the reports. When TV crews arrived at the crash site, they discovered, rather ominously, that Mount Weather had already been sealed off on the orders of federal security agents.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

The quick action was taken because the big jet had landed almost a mile away from a super secret government installation. An underground complex of emergency offices set up for federal officials in the event of nuclear war.

[Narrator/Host]

The crash had inadvertently uncovered a tightly guarded Cold War secretary. Inside Mount Weather was a massive covert facility and somehow that undersells it. Through a tunnel that burrows into the mountain and behind a 34 ton blast door lies a subterranean strangeloveian lair. A freestanding city with a hospital, a crematorium, an emergency power plant and even a broadcasting studio. Everything that the White House and thousands of federal workers would need to run the country underground while millions melted on the surface. I expect your people to save our government. That's what President Dwight eisenhower told the first director of Mount Weather after it was built in 1955. It's still operated by FEMA today. It's actually being renovated as I speak. But Back in the 1950s, Mount Weather was run by FEMA's predecessor, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, the FCDA, which poured billions into making America nuclear proof, or at least lulling people into the belief that with enough preparation, they might survive atomic hellfire. The FCDA was behind this delightful, if slightly morbid PSA instructing school children to hide under their desks during bomb drills.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

There was a turtle by the name of Bert and Bert the turtle was very alert when danger threatened him. He never got hurt. He knew just what to do. He got.

[Narrator/Host]

For adults. The FCDA organized Operation Alert, a series of dramatic exercises where millions of people acted out the day of their likely demise emptying the streets of America's biggest cities.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

While the sirens wail their grim warning, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers scurry for shelter against the attack. Riders and drivers taking cover in a realistic drill for a day all Americans pray will never come.

[Narrator/Host]

Operation Alert was also the first time that Mount Weather saw action.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

As soon as the alert sounded in Washington, President Eisenhower reached for his hat and strode to a waiting limousine to be driven to an emergency base of operations in the mountains outside Washington. Exact location kept secret.

[Narrator/Host]

Kept secret until that terrible plane crash in 1974. Fortunately, nuclear obliteration never came and Mount Weather was never truly put to use. But there's something ironic and revealing that a single storm brought more death and destruction to the base than 30 years of the Cold War. By the 1970s, it had become clear that the nuclear preparations had done little to protect America from an arguably greater threat. To better understand the current day crisis at FEMA and why so many Americans believe wild conspiracy theories about it, I wanted to dive back into the era. It was created when state leaders began to realize that all the focus on Cold War civil defense had left them vulnerable to Mother Nature.

[Garrett Graff]

We just didn't have that many nuclear wars, which is great, but we do have a lot of natural disasters.

[Narrator/Host]

Garrett Graf is a journalist and author of a book about the origins of FEMA titled the Story of the US Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself While the Rest of Us Die. Before the agency was created, America's disaster response system was, well, barely a system.

[Garrett Graff]

It didn't make sense for every state to be developing its own totally independent ability to respond to a hurricane, because in any given year, most states don't get hit by a hurricane.

[Narrator/Host]

Which became a big problem in the 60s and 70s when the country was rocked by a series of record breaking disasters.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

No one knows the full size of the disaster, yet in Betsy's wake, there's only darkness, confusion and death. After suffering one of the most serious earthquakes in history, Alaska had to undergo the further ordeal of over 40 severe earth tremors. Imagine being there as the streets reared up around you like the scene of some terrible biblical retribution. They called her Camille. Born of the sea, she turned like a woman scorned, she screamed and ripped and flooded and killed.

[Narrator/Host]

These big disasters overwhelmed towns and counties and states. The big ones often do. But when they asked for help, the federal government was too disorganized to act quickly or efficiently. Supplying extra ambulances, delivering food and water to survivors, fixing roads and power plants. Each piece of the emergency management process could come from a different office or department. 100 agencies might play a role. Navigating this patchwork of services and jurisdictions was a major pain in the ass for local leaders, especially during a crisis when lives are on the line and every second counts. Like in 1972 when another big storm

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

hit, many of the people here and others in the path of Hurricane Agnes were completely wiped out. Many of them feel that federal aid is too slow in coming and too little.

[Narrator/Host]

Trump says FEMA should return its responsibilities to the states, which is odd because states often bring in FEMA when they're unable to respond on their own. And anyway, it was the states that asked for FEMA in the first place. In 1978, the National Governors association drew up plans for a streamlined one stop shop for federal emergency response and delivered it to a sympathetic White House.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

Washington President Carter proposed merging five big federal emergency preparation and disaster relief agencies into one agency as part of his reorganization plan. Civil defense experts say it will provide much needed communication between the state and federal levels.

[Narrator/Host]

In 1979, Jimmy Carter signed an executive order giving life to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA was a federal Frankenstein with a dual mission, Cold War civil defense and disaster relief. I wish I could illustrate this moment by playing you like a triumphant speech from President Carter or some colorful news footage, but either that stuff never existed or no one thought it was important enough to archive. Even the earliest employees at FEMA were confused about how to talk about it.

[Leo Bosner]

We had a new director there, and there was a message that went out to us that said that if we're referring to the agency publicly, we should say either Federal Emergency Management Agency or fema. Because the word fema, he thought, sounded too much like a laxative.

[Narrator/Host]

This is Leo Bosner, a retired FEMA official who's taught me a lot about the earliest days of the agency. He was working as a flood insurance specialist with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in one of the offices that was folded into fema.

[Leo Bosner]

We're all working along in the office, and one day they tell us, okay, everybody go down to photo ID. You're getting new photo IDs. We walk down the stairs, get new photo IDs that say female, turned in our photo IDs that say housing Urban Development. And then we're all told we're all getting new job titles and our new job title is Emergency Management Specialist. And I'm thinking, what on God's earth is an emergency management specialist? Like, this is the end of my career. What kind of a dead end job

[Narrator/Host]

is Leo would spend the next 30 years at FEMA. He eventually found really satisfying work helping hospitals and medical organizations prepare for floods, wildfires and hurricanes. But less than two years after he started getting the hang of his new job, FEMA fell into a decade long tailspin.

[Leo Bosner]

The big shift really didn't come until 1980.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

Ronald Reagan appears to be heading toward a landslide electoral victory tonight across the United States.

[Leo Bosner]

Ronald Reagan got elected president and there's a super U turn from Jimmy Carter who was mostly all about social welfare and Ronald Reagan was more about national defense.

[Narrator/Host]

To run fema, Reagan picked someone who would stir up a lot of trouble for the agency.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

This man, only a masochist with a death wish would accept the job of directing fema.

[Narrator/Host]

Army Colonel Louis Jeffrida speaking here with a caller on Larry King's radio show.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

I really don't believe that we can be saved if there is a nuclear war. I mean, how are you gonna save me if you're blown up too? But you're not suggesting that because we both might be blown up by a nuclear war that we shouldn't have in place a system that would take care of us if there was an earthquake or a tidal wave or a hurricane or anything of that sort.

[Narrator/Host]

While Louis Jeffreyda paid lip service to FEMA's disaster relief mission, he was quietly funneling most of FEMA's budget towards cold War civil defense. Leo Bosner, all of a sudden we

[Leo Bosner]

start seeing all these military officers signing in at the login desk. We go, why these military people here? Military people go to floods or something. And then we learned little by little that FEMA's mission was really, really going to be to get ready for the big nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.

[Narrator/Host]

In the early 80s, Leo started to hear whispers about classified programs at the agency. Every day on his trip up the elevator at FEMA hq, he'd ride by a secret fifth floor manned by a security guard. Mostly he rolled his eyes at all the Cold War theater, wishing FEMA would focus more on preparing Americans for natural disasters. But he still wondered, what were they doing in there?

[Garrett Graff]

The majority of its funding, Garrett Graf and about a third of its workforce, was actually hidden in the nation's classified black budget, the special budget that Congress oversees that protects our most secret programs and capabilities. And FEMA on a daily basis is in charge of tracking the whereabouts of everyone in the presidential line of succession so that in the event of a nuclear war, it knows where all of those people are, how to get them to secure relocation sites like the Mountain weather bunker. And who would be best positioned to be the person who takes over as President of the United States in the event of a nuclear war.

[Narrator/Host]

I wonder if this classified continuity of government planning helps explain why there was so little media about FEMA when it was first created. I think the feds just didn't want to draw attention to their secret plans. That said, the coverage did pick up when the agency launched a controversial new initiative.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

The head of emergency management, Louis Jeffrida, says the heart of the proposal is crisis relocation. What we want to accomplish is taking the maximum number of people from high risk areas to areas of lesser risk.

[Narrator/Host]

A mass evacuation program.

[Garrett Graff]

There was sort of this sense of, well, if you could just get 20, 30, 50 miles away from a major city, you would at least have a chance to survive the initial blast from the nuclear weapons and then live into nuclear winter.

[Narrator/Host]

Government officials estimated that in the worst case, 60 million Americans could survive an attack. Can you imagine all those urbanites swamping small towns in rural areas? News reports at the time featured a mixture of fascination and incredulity.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

My God, you're going to have modified anarchy after that sort of thing. How in the world are you going to coordinate the recovery and putting leadership back into place? How are you going to do that?

[Garrett Graff]

60 million is still a lot of people. That is the modern population of France. Those people would need a functioning government and functioning infrastructure afterward.

[Narrator/Host]

This is where we start getting into the bizarre conspiracy theories that haunt Fema today. In 1982, in an effort to game out some of these post apocalyptic scenarios, President Ronald Reagan signed a secret executive order to create a covert program called Project 908.

[Garrett Graff]

That's 908, but they called it 9, not 8.

[Narrator/Host]

It pooled billions of dollars in top officials from the National Security Council, FEMA and the FBI.

[Garrett Graff]

The FBI was in charge of pre identifying buildings that could serve as refugee camps.

[Narrator/Host]

If I have this right. Basically you had FBI agents working undercover for FEMA traveling around the country, visiting warehouses, car shops, casinos, Walmarts, helping identify businesses that could be used to house citizens after a nuke was dropped on an American city.

[Garrett Graff]

Yes, and often without telling the businesses that they were being scouted for these purposes.

[Narrator/Host]

There was thankfully never a need to construct these refugee camps. But the secrecy went way deeper and darker. Just five years after the launch of Project 998, a bombshell report from the Miami Herald revealed that before Jeffrida was asked to help run fema, he'd written his master's thesis on how the military could Quell race riots by detaining millions of black people and putting them in concentration camps. Members of Congress were given a copy of his thesis during Jeffrida's confirmation hearings. A horrifying detail that makes me think they considered this to be part of his qualifications for the job. The most damning part of that Miami Herald piece though was news that Jeffrida had worked with Reagan's National Security Council to write plans for declaring martial law and putting the country temporarily under a sort of shadow government. And not just in the case of a nuke, but also in a so called national crisis like a war.

[Garrett Graff]

A bunch of this comes out in the late 1980s amid the Iran Contra hearings and investigations. It turns out that Lt. Col. Oliver north, who is the central figure at the White House of Iran Contra, was also one of the planners for Project 908.

[Narrator/Host]

Oliver north was asked about these martial law plans during the Iran Contra hearings.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

Colonel north, in your work at the nsc, were you not assigned at one time to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?

[Narrator/Host]

North was questioned by Texas Representative Jack Brooks. We see north pause and whisper to his attorney. Then the chairman of the hearings, Daniel K. Enouay, jumps in to respond on the government's behalf.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir? I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, that because I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan, a contingency plan that would suspend the American Constitution, and I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was. May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage?

[Narrator/Host]

The government never acknowledged any of this stuff until much of it was declassified. Years later, Louis Jeffrida ended up resigning from FEMA for totally unrelated reasons following a congressional fraud investigation.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

According to Senator Albert Gore, Giafrida had spent $170,000 of federal money to build a house on federal property for his own use.

[Narrator/Host]

By the start of the 90s, FEMA employee Leo Bosner was beyond tired of the dysfunction and the kooky national security schemes.

[Leo Bosner]

Frankly, for me, once that stuff was in the rearview mirror, it's like, fine, that's the trash. I hope they come on Friday and pick it up and dump it to the landfill. There were some pretty nutty people working back there then. Fortunately, nothing much ever came of that except they ate up most of our budget.

[Narrator/Host]

He was eager for the agency to shift resources to preparing for floods and hurricanes. But all this doomsday planning had done a number on FEMA's reputation.

[Leo Bosner]

I would talk on my off duty time to people on Capitol Hill or news reporters and say, look, this is a dangerous thing. We're ignoring these natural disasters. And I was having lunch with a news reporter one day and I'm telling him this and the guy's looking really bored. He says, yeah, Leo, that's all really bad, but tell me about FEMA's secret plan to round up all the liberals in the country and put them in concentration camps.

[Narrator/Host]

What?

[Leo Bosner]

Yeah, I said, buddy, these people are so inept they couldn't organize a two car parade and they're never gonna round up everybody in the country. Come on, get out of here, will you?

[Narrator/Host]

Leo didn't know it at the time, but those FEMA camps, conspiracy theories had started popping up in fringe message boards on the early Internet.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

The FEMA plans to imprison American citizens have generated a lot of interest in locating the potential prison camps throughout the country.

[Narrator/Host]

This woman, Linda Thompson, a sort of godmother of the right wing militia movement, made a 1994 documentary, America Unchart Under Siege, which warned that FEMA was part of the New World Order, a global authoritarian takeover that would require rounding up anti government dissidents.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

These may be facilities that have other uses, but which could be quickly used to detain large numbers of people, such as this Amtrak facility in Beech Grove, Indiana.

[Narrator/Host]

Following in her footsteps a couple decades later were militia leaders like Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, one of the January 6th guys. A lot of this stuff is dual use. They put together a detention center or an emergency center supposedly for refugees from other countries. And as I mentioned, Infowars host Alex

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

Jones, people are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps, to the New World Order, to the troops on the

[Narrator/Host]

streets, these FEMA camps and Glenn Beck when he was still on Fox News.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

I'm tired of hearing, you know about them. Sure. We've now for several days done research on them. I can't debunk them.

[Narrator/Host]

After whipping up this paranoia, Beck did eventually debunk the theory with help from the editor in chief of Popular Mechanics. This is an AMT repair facility in Beech Grove, Indiana. We set a crew there the other

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

day and we got.

[Michael Lowinger]

Is this your video?

[Narrator/Host]

Yes.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

And sure enough, what did we find?

[Narrator/Host]

They're repairing trains in there. Remember how earlier Garrett Graf told us about stores like Walmarts being scoped out by the government to be used as refugee camps, they don't exist. But people on TikTok and YouTube still like to make videos about them.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

It's like military style entrance, kind of

[Michael Lowinger]

like a FEMA camp.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

Why in the hell does Walmart Supercenter need that? See the Walmart trucks?

[Narrator/Host]

These videos are low effort and easy to laugh off, but I mean, if FEMA could operate amount weather, why not amount Walmart?

[Garrett Graff]

The challenge of a lot of these conspiracies is that they have a germ of truth to them. Garrett Graff in the early stages of the Cold War, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI had preselected lists of suspected communists and political dissidents that he wanted to round up in the event of a nuclear war.

[Narrator/Host]

Not to mention the fact that the US imprisoned over 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

[Garrett Graff]

I think FEMA has always been in a difficult place, and this is true, by the way, across all of the continuity planning and doomsday planning. You just can't talk about these classified bunkers and classified operations, even if you're trying to debunk conspiracies.

[Narrator/Host]

The secrecy in and of itself is naturally going to feed conspiracy theories.

[Garrett Graff]

Absolutely.

[Narrator/Host]

The kicker to all this is that some of what the conspiracy theorists warned about is happening, just not to them. This past July, fema, under Kristi Noem's Department of Homeland Security, revealed a new program, FEMA allocating $608 million in state grants for construction of detention centers, migrant detention centers, part of Trump's mass deportation program. The announcement came right around when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis opened Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious facility in the Everglades. And while he built the jail using state emergency funds intended for natural disasters, he claimed that federal reimbursement was on the way.

[News Reporter/Spokesperson]

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirms Florida did submit an application to FEMA and were awarded two days ago the full amount. Florida applied for $608 million.

[Narrator/Host]

The coverage made it sound like the money was in Florida's bank account, but at time of recording, those FEMA funds have actually been held up by Trump's Justice Department. Florida officials say the money is still likely, but but who knows? Despite that uncertainty and many legal attempts aimed at closing it, Alligator Alcatraz remains open.

[News Reporter/Spokesperson]

Amnesty International says immigrants held at the ICE Jail in Florida were shackled inside a two foot high metal cage and left outside without water for up to a day at a time. In a new report, they also detail unsanitary conditions, lights on 24 hours a day, poor quality food and water and lack of Privacy.

[Narrator/Host]

And while Governor DeSantis says the conditions are up to standard, the families of migrants being held inside are calling it a concentration camp.

[Garrett Graff]

That is the most real FEMA camp ever built.

[Narrator/Host]

What do you think it says that FEMA would actually use public funds for the very thing that has been a far right boogeyman.

[Garrett Graff]

I mean, there is something uniquely dystopian about a right wing government elected on the backs of the anti government conspiracies that it is now implementing.

[Narrator/Host]

Coming up, for the first time, FEMA finds its groove.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

They ought to change the name because the old FEMA has a pretty bad name and the new one they're running now as a crackerjack agency.

[Narrator/Host]

Artificial intelligence is moving very, very fast and it's raising new questions just about every day about what it is, what it isn't. When all is said and done, what is the end game? I'm Chris Hayes, and as part of my podcast, why Is this Happening? I'm speaking with leading experts each week to help ground that conversation. We're right now in a situation where it's very difficult to understand what is real and what's not real. Why is this Happening? The AI Endgame, a special miniseries from Ms. Now. Start listening today, wherever you get your podcasts. In my reporting, I learned that FEMA's Cold War mission to save America from nuclear war was met with a lot of suspicion, and understandably so. Case in point, when I was digging around in the National Archives, something that caught my eye was a tape curiously labeled FEMA Blues Seattle, Washington.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

Now, Seattle did a spunky thing the other day.

[Narrator/Host]

It turned out to be a comedy special from a guy named Mark Russell, which aired in 1982. He starts with this hokey bit about Luis Jeffreyda's nuclear evacuation plans in the

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

event of a nuclear attack.

[Narrator/Host]

In an apparent effort to coax Seattle officials into participating, FEMA had offered to subsidize the city's mass relocation, which the city refused.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

They turned down their allotment from the Federal Emergency Management Administration. I think it really stands for feeble exercise in mindless administration. You know what Seattle's allotment was? $17,000. Can you imagine that? I guess the money went to provide each resident with a free roadmap and a granola bar.

[Narrator/Host]

And so, yeah, after a bit of vamping, Russell calls up his band, the Buzzards.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

It's our spunky, feisty little band. We only do this once a year

[Narrator/Host]

to perform a song that I think captures the zeitgeist in the 80s

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

I got those Federal Emergency Management Administration Blues, blues, blues, blues. Cause when you're hit, that's it. You either sit or stand and melt down in your shoes.

[Narrator/Host]

Ooze, ooze.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

Don't need no federal bureaucrat to tell me where to go so I can have my choice of roasting fast or slow. The Federal Emergency Management Administration Blue.

[Narrator/Host]

According to its critics, FEMA's leaders were either mounting a comically pitiful defense against the nation's most pressing threat, or they were burning resources that would be better spent on responding to Mother Nature. Leo Bosner, that OG FEMA employee, was in the latter camp. As the 80s went on, he was busy trying to warn the press.

[Leo Bosner]

I was kind of in my whistleblower mode letting them know that FEMA was spending all of its time doing nuclear stuff and not doing anything for these natural disasters.

[Narrator/Host]

If Ronald Reagan's FEMA was too active, too conniving, George Bush Sr. S FEMA had the opposite problem. It was out to lunch. Daddy Bush left the agency leaderless for over a year. And he was punished for it in 1989 when a Category 5 storm came barreling off the Atlantic.

[News Reporter/Spokesperson]

Two weeks after Hurricane Hugo hits South Carolina.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

It's FEMA that is in the eye of the storm. Only about 20% of FEMA's budget goes for disaster relief. FEMA is trying to live down a reputation for being slow, stingy and distracted. South Carolina Senator Ernest Hollings today accused FEMA of raw incompetence. They're the south bunch of bureaucratic jackasses I've ever worked with in my life.

[Leo Bosner]

FEMA did a terrible job, Leo Bosner. But I think the feeling was, well, that's a once in a hundred years thing. Except three years later, Hurricane Andrew hit

[Narrator/Host]

in 92, another Category 5, one of the strongest in Florida's history.

[Leo Bosner]

And FEMA was on the front pages

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

a barrage of criticism for its handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew.

[News Reporter/Spokesperson]

If we do not get more food and water in a very short period of time, we are going to have more casualties because we're going to have people who are dehydrated who are without food.

[Narrator/Host]

After the storm, as journalists started digging into FEMA's dysfunction, they discovered a political backwater filled with unqualified Bush appointees.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

Congressional records show that while at most federal agencies there is only one political appointee for every 3,000 government agencies, at FEMA, there's one for every 300.

[Leo Bosner]

So the election for the president was only like three months later.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

This election is a clarion call for

[Leo Bosner]

our country to face the challenges of

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the next century.

[Narrator/Host]

Bill Clinton, the first Democrat to take the White House in 12 years, had seen how FEMA's reputation had dragged his predecessors. Unlike them, he understood that natural disasters are media spectacles. Predictable high stakes dramas that generate a steady stream of coverage. So when Clinton came into office, he did something radical. He appointed somebody actually qualified to run fema. Somebody who would fundamentally transform the agency from a liability to a government success story. A man named James Lee Witt, who had served as the Arkansas Director of Emergency Management when Clinton was governor.

[James Lee Witt]

As governor of Arkansas, when I went to work for him there, he said, if it affects people's lives and it's going to be in the media, then I want to know about it.

[Narrator/Host]

This is Witt speaking with C span in 1996.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

Can you tell us the story of your very first meeting with Bill Clinton?

[James Lee Witt]

Absolutely. I never will forget it. It was in 1974 and I was coaching a little league baseball team in

[Narrator/Host]

Dardanelle, Arkansas when they first met. Clinton was a law professor and congressional candidate and Witt ran a local construction company.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

You didn't go to college?

[James Lee Witt]

No.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

Do you ever have any second thoughts about that?

[Leo Bosner]

Sure.

[James Lee Witt]

I guess anyone that has never been to college wish they had gone. But when I grew up, I was working.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

What'd your father do?

[James Lee Witt]

He was a farmer.

[Narrator/Host]

Suffice to say, Witt's humble beginnings did not hold him back. And when he came to FEMA in 1993, he became the first leader in the agency's 14 year history with any professional experience managing domestic disasters.

[Leo Bosner]

Witt comes in and that's when he totally started turning everything around.

[Narrator/Host]

How did he do that?

[Leo Bosner]

Well, a lot of it was really common sense. He knew there were all kinds of problems internal to fema. So he sends a memo to all hands. First official action, open door policy. So all of a sudden he's getting all these employees coming in and giving him an earful of all the problems in the agency.

[Narrator/Host]

He collected all these ideas and got to work reorganizing the agency for what he called an all hazards approach to emergency respons.

[Leo Bosner]

Okay, if the FEMA employees might be needed in a disaster, what kind of jobs are they going to have to do? Let's train people for those jobs. He also made rosters of who would be on duty when during the disaster. And he said, okay, we're going to divide the employee Sherlock into three teams. The red team, the white team and the blue team. Yay, the flag. Right? If you're on the red team, you're on call for disasters during January, February. If you're on the white team, you're on call. Then he even breaks it down into night shifts and day shifts. Now, this does not take, like a PhD in higher mathematics to come up with this. And people could say, God, this is common sense. And my answer is, yeah, but nobody did it before.

[Narrator/Host]

And when did you get a sense that, like, people out there in the public were taking notice?

[Leo Bosner]

Well, there was one of the other really smart things that Mr. Witt did back in the Cold War days. Female. Kept the news media at bay. Like, go away. Keep out, keep out, keep out. And so that just added to the suspicion. Well, Witt opened the doors to it. The news media could come into our emergency operations center right there in Washington, D.C. and they could observe things and they could even interview us.

[Narrator/Host]

Witt relished speaking with the press. He seemed to genuinely want to explain how the agency worked. Within a year of joining fema, he began chipping away at its secret black budget, declassifying much of that doomsday planning and diverting a whole bunch of its resources to natural disasters. The agency began to see the fruits of all these new reforms during Witt's first major test as administrator.

[James Lee Witt]

It started in 1993 with the flood on the Mississippi river affected nine states, and the devastation was just unreal.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

The water kept on coming. Small river towns were swallowed up. Over 54,000 people were forced to evacuate and leave behind homes and belongings.

[Narrator/Host]

Though it was far from perfect, a New York Times headline about FEMA's actions following the floods reads, in this Emergency Agency Wins Praise for its Response. The tide was turning for FEMA's reputation.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

They ought to change the name, because the old FEMA has a pretty bad name, and the new one they're running now as a crackerjack agency.

[James Lee Witt]

President Clinton and I was talking about it in Governor Carnahan, Missouri, James Lee Witt and I said, you know, Mr. President, we can't let people build back in those areas that flooded. And we were able to buy out on a volunteer basis and relocate people out of the floodplain so they'd never flood again. In Missouri alone, we bought out over 4,000 pieces of property.

[Narrator/Host]

Thirty years later, this type of policy is considered a core tenet of good emergency management. Recent studies vindicate Witt's approach. Research shows that for every dollar spent on mitigation, $6 are saved down the line.

[Leo Bosner]

During the 90s, FEMA had gotten to be so well known. In 1996, President Clinton publicly elevated James Lewitt to cabinet level, saying he's done such a great job here. That's how it was.

[Narrator/Host]

You could probably tell from the way he talks about it. Leo Bosner was so proud of his agency during the 90s. Some of its greatest work, he says, was visible on one of the darkest days for the country.

[Leo Bosner]

That april morning in 1995. We're all at work like normal. All of a sudden a plume of

[News Reporter/Spokesperson]

smoke rising in the air. If you are anywhere downtown, you probably heard it and felt it, an explosion of some kind.

[Leo Bosner]

People are yelling because on the TV screen, oh my God, there's been a bomb in Oklahoma City.

[News Reporter/Spokesperson]

We have been able to confirm right now an explosion at the federal court building downtown.

[Leo Bosner]

Within like a few minutes, my pagers going off, we're seeing all this action suddenly, very organized action going on. Our regional office in Texas within one hour was on the phone with Oklahoma and they decided that what was needed, needed most from FEMA was our specialized search and rescue teams who had special tools and training to go into collapsed concrete buildings, which is not a simple thing to do. And our search and rescue teams were then deployed there within a couple of hours.

[Narrator/Host]

So they were quick.

[Leo Bosner]

Oh yeah. That's when you could really see that FEMA is real and we could do things.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

The reinforcements showed up tonight. At the center of it all, of course, is the bombed out shell of the Federal Office building and in its shadow, the exhausted, who for a day and a half now have sifted through its debris and counted its dead and seen up close. Why they call it terror.

[Narrator/Host]

The bombing was part of an alarming trend. Anti government extremists were becoming more active and more violent. After the attack, the White House brought in a new number two official at fema, A man with experience monitoring and investigating terrorism, including far right militias.

[Various Interviewees/Archival Clips]

I'm Mike Walker, the deputy director of fema and I'm one of the newest employees of fema.

[Mike Walker]

Mike's a legend in the business.

[Narrator/Host]

Tim Manning held the same deputy director role during the Obama administration. Now he's a professor at Georgetown University. But earlier in his career, Mike Walker was his mentor.

[Mike Walker]

Mike's been confirmed by the Senate. He's held a number of senior roles. He's been around, seen and been part of just about everything in the past 40 years plus years of emergency management, homeland security.

[Narrator/Host]

When Tim was preparing for his own Senate confirmation hearings, Mike warned Tim about the job he was about to take at fema. Mike told him a Story that's never been reported before now. It happened in 1999.

[Mike Walker]

He's in the new role at FEMA. He was gone a lot. These are very demanding jobs, traveling around the country, dealing with disaster response.

[Narrator/Host]

He was commuting, often between FEMA headquarters in D.C. and his home in West Virginia where he lived with his wife.

[Mike Walker]

He needed help around the house and there was a person in the neighborhood who came by and offered his services

[Narrator/Host]

as a handyman for a few weeks. The handyman comes by to repair windows, fix doors, whatever it might be. And Mike and his wife were pretty happy with his work until he got

[Mike Walker]

a call from the FBI one day asking if he knew who this person was. Mike said, well, yeah, he's our handyman doing work for us. And the FBI said, well, he's not. He's actually undercover. He's a militia member who was sent here to get close to you and watch your movements, figure out your patterns, try to collect information. He's there surveilling you as a spy.

[Narrator/Host]

Oh my God.

[Mike Walker]

Fortunately, nothing dangerous ever happened for Mike or his family. I suppose having an undercover militia operative in your home for a time is dangerous in itself. I don't know whatever kind of dangerous plots might have been in the works before the FBI figured out who he was and what was happening and interdicted.

[Narrator/Host]

I mean, when I hear this story, it doesn't sound real. It sounds like a movie, like noir.

[Mike Walker]

Yeah, I wish it was a noir fiction. It's the kind of thing that you're always worried about and you know, you think about in the middle of the night, is my family safe and am I doing all the right things and, and you think about that as like, oh, that's so far fetched, that would never happen. But you know, here it did happen.

[Narrator/Host]

When I first heard this story, I thought it could be explained simply by the rise of extremist militia groups in America. But the more I learned about fema, its secretive origins, its unhinged leadership under Reagan, the more I realized that the agency that was born of the paranoias of the 20th century had been met with paranoia in return. While reporting this series, I spoke to FEMA workers from just about every era of the agency. And I've heard too many stories of threats from conspiracy theorists to chase them all down. But for now, here's one more. A FEMA official from the 90s told me that he'd seen FEMA head James Lee Witt walking around with a U.S. marshal security detail, but never learned why. After some digging, I discovered that in 1998, Witt was asked to meet with the FBI. An agent told him that a militia group had been selling VHS tapes with his home address and information on his kids and wife. The death threats were credible enough that Witt was told to stop taking public transportation to work early in the morning. As you'll learn in the coming weeks, These plots against FEMA's leadership foreshadow its current day unraveling.

[Michael Lowinger]

That was Michael Lowinger, co host of on the Media from wnyc. This was the first episode in a special four part series on the Media is running over the next few weeks called American Emergency, where they're trying to figure out if FEMA can survive all the crazy stories that are being told about it. Go check out the rest of the series by catching on the media on the radio or wherever you get your podcasts. Episode two tackles the effects Hurricane Katrina had on fema, really put the agency into an identity crisis, and includes the story of the one and only FEMA staffer who was on the ground in New Orleans when the storm hit, a PR guy who became an unlikely hero when he testified in Congress against FEMA's leader. This episode was reported by Micah Lowinger, with additional writing and reporting from senior producer Eloise Blandio. Jared Bartman designed the artwork for the series, fact checking by Tom Colligan, original music and mixing from Jared Paul. American Emergency was edited by on the Media's Executive producer Katya Rogers. Thanks to Samantha Montano and Michael Cohen and to the whole team at WNYC for letting us share this episode with you. We'll be back with more Question Everything next Thursday.

[News Reporter/Spokesperson]

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