Amanpour and Company

(screen whooshing) - Hello, everyone and welcome to "Amanpour & Company."

Here's what's coming up.

As authoritarianism sweeps the globe, we look back at Poland's solidarity movement 45 years on.

The country's first democratic president, Lech Walesa, joins me to discuss the lessons we can learn from history.

Then a memoir of family and the open road, author E.A.

Hanks takes a road trip back through her complicated past, from a loving relationship with her famous actor father to her troubled childhood with her mother.

Plus, 20 years since Hurricane Katrina, Trump guts the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Hari Sreenivasan speaks to the former FEMA administrator, Deanne Criswell, and employee Katherine Landers who's being punished for sounding the alarm.

(lively music) (lively music continues) - [Narrator 1] "Amanpour & Company" is made possible by the Anderson Family Endowment, Jim Attwood and Leslie Williams, Candace King Weir, the Sylvia A. and Simon B. Poyta Programming Endowment to Fight Antisemitism, the Family Foundation of Leila and Mickey Straus, Mark J. Blechner, the Filomen M. D'Agostino Foundation, Seton J. Melvin, the Peter G. Peterson, and Joan Ganz Cooney Fund, Charles Rosenblum, Koo and Patricia Yuen, committed to bridging cultural differences in our communities, Barbara Hope Zuckerberg, Jeffrey Katz and Beth Rogers, and by contributions to your PBS station from viewers like you.

Thank you.

- Welcome to the program, everyone.

I'm Christiane Amanpour in London.

As if this week's grand display of rising authoritarian anti-American axis wasn't enough of a jolt, Russia's President Putin returned from Beijing declaring that of course he would meet with Ukraine's President Zelenskyy if he came to Moscow, seeking again not peace, but apparently Kyiv's capitulation.

Along with Chinese leaders Xi Jinping and North Korea's dictator Kim Jong Un, this coalition threatens to undo the democratic values instilled around the globe after World War II and the fall of the Berlin War.

So with the Kremlin's war in Ukraine still raging and US President Donald Trump cozying up to Putin, it serves as a reminder of the fragility of democracy.

Few are more aware of this than Poland, supporting its neighbor Ukraine's struggle for sovereignty and independence.

My first guest is a historic figure who knows better than almost anyone how to stand up against authoritarians and defeat them.

45 years ago, Lech Walesa started Poland's solidarity movement in the 1980s.

He stared down the Soviet Union and became his country's first democratically elected president.

Currently touring the United States and Canada with his lessons from history, he joined me from Phoenix, Arizona to discuss today's dangers, and his own extraordinary personal and political story.

President Walesa, welcome to the program.

I just want to ask you to reflect on 45 years ago when that historic agreement accord was made in Gdansk that led to the creation of solidarity and eventually changed the world.

How do you reflect on that 45 years later?

(Lech Walesa speaking in Polish) - [Interpreter] I think we read those times very well.

We noticed then that communism exhausted its possibilities and we also noticed that the way the world was organized after the Second World War also was exhausted.

There was a time for change, and we started those changes.

- But it was a long grueling period of activism by yourself.

You were a humble shipyard union leader.

Did you ever think, when you started Solidarity, that you would be able to make this happen?

(Lech Walesa speaking in Polish) - [Interpreter] Well, I thought that we would try several times in order to achieve what we have achieved.

I felt that we were to be defeated and the next move would be to organize Solidarity in Central and Eastern Europe.

But we won in Polish Solidarity and so we forgot about the rest.

- And did you know then that Polish Solidarity would have such consequential, you know, reactions outside of the Polish borders, that it led to the eventual fall of the Berlin Wall and then to the collapse of the Soviet Union?"

(Lech Walesa speaking in Polish) - [Interpreter] As I said, we saw that the era of communism, you know, communism was coming to the end as a sort of solution.

And at the same time, the post-war order was exhausted.

So we were convinced about the only question was how to depart from that.

When we were talking to the great and the good of this world, they said it was only the nuclear war that could achieve that.

And we said, "No, you think so because you don't have any arguments.

We will try to find those arguments which would achieve that."

And we were right, I think.

But you have to realize that from those era, the solutions don't fit to the current situation.

Even democracy, in its form of that time, is not good enough.

People don't believe in those democracy.

They don't defend it.

People elect populists and demagogues because they're dissatisfied.

- I wanna go back to your struggle.

You said that you realized that the Soviet communism or communism wasn't the answer and that it was getting tired and fatigued and this was your moment, but you still had a Soviet union that potentially was going to invade Poland to stop you.

You had the backing of the greatest superpower, well, the other superpower, the United States at that time.

And in fact, this is what President Reagan at the time said about your movement.

Take a listen.

- How can they possibly justify using naked force to crush a people who ask for nothing more than the right to lead their own lives in freedom and dignity?

Brute force may intimidate, but it cannot form the basis of an enduring society.

And the ailing Polish economy cannot be rebuilt with terror tactics.

- How important was the support of the United States and the support of Ronald Reagan at that time?

(Lech Walesa speaking in Polish) - Dear lady, Solidarity won, won in order to achieve changes.

President Reagan, all presidents were helping us in different ways, various ways.

They were in solidarity with us, but none of the American presidents didn't took the hard decision to draw consequences from our victory.

But there was one, Bill Clinton, who should get the Nobel Peace Prize because he was the only president who took this hard decision, which caused our joining of NATO and the European Union.

And that was the epochal change.

So I will publicly say that the real victor is Bill Clinton.

He changed the face of the whole world because he drew the consequences from the Solidarity victory and took the hard decision to introduce further changes in Europe and the world.

- Do you think Vladimir Putin is afraid of NATO?

Is that why he invaded Ukraine?

(Lech Walesa speaking in Polish) - Again, the whole art was to understand the times we are living in.

To the end of the 20th century, all nations on the map of the world were creating by including the weaker parties.

It was, for instance, this way in the South and North of the United States, and the whole world was behaving like that.

At the end of the 20th century, there was another conception, that because of development, we need to increase, but not in such a brutal way, but democratically, voluntarily through NATO, through European Union.

But the problem is that the big countries, like Russia and China, stayed within the old concept.

They're still trying to increase their spheres of influence, their territory, as we did in the 20th century.

And now the question is which concept will win it?

Now, Solidarity gave an example, how to fight, how to win.

Problem with Russia is such that we have to help the Russians themselves to change their political system.

Now they're shooting.

But apart from that, the more important issue is to show them it's very simple, show them that you have to achieve change.

- You are in the United States on a lecture tour.

What is your mission on this tour?

(Lech Walesa speaking in Polish) - [Interpreter] I have already said that the best way is to think in common what's going on and to diagnose situation like physicians.

And then the treatment is easier.

I'm trying to convince people to discuss, to understand people, to understand the challenges we are facing now and how to correct the situation.

For that we need involvement.

It's not difficult.

It's like in the case of Solidarity.

After the war, we stayed within the Soviet sphere of influence.

And at the very beginning, we are fighting with arms.

We lost and we were trying different solutions.

Then there were strikes, we lost again.

But in the end, we came to the Solidarity idea.

And I'd like us, through this discussion, to find solutions, to understand the solutions and then we will cope with all problems which exist in the world.

Now, in the whole world there are discussions, centuries of the best variance for the third millennium.

- How important was the support of the first-ever Polish Pope, Karol Wojtyla, who became John Paul II?

How much support did he give you?

How important was it back then in 1980?

(Lech Walesa speaking in Polish) - [Interpreter] Again, you have to understand what happened.

Communism had a very simple philosophy: to prevent independent organization of a society, as at the same time they were whispering to us, "Don't you see that we have 100,000 Soviet soldiers in Poland and there's more than million around Poland?

Don't you know that we have nuclear weapons?

You don't have a chance.

What violence and tyranny can do."

So we were the means.

They tried to prove that we have no chance.

So people lost faith.

And at the same time, the second millennium of Christianity was approaching, and the Poles prayed for the Polish Pope.

And the Pope came to Poland, and the whole nation was participating in the meetings, and the political police were taking part.

The Pope led us to understand that there's lots of us.

And he showed us that the political police started to make the cross signs, and we knew them.

What are they doing?

We stopped being afraid, and we knew that they are red only on the surface.

So the Pope organized us for the prayer, not for the fight.

But opposition, which existed already in Poland, took over those organized forces and led them to struggle.

If not for the Pope, the communism would have falled but it would happened later and maybe in a more bloody way.

But because of the Pope, the way was peaceful.

The society was waken up and started to fight for their freedom.

Before the Pope, I was looking the volunteers to fight for 20 years and I gathered maybe 10 people.

People didn't believe, didn't want.

When the Pope was elected, during a year, 10 million people came to me and let me to lead them.

So we have to understand, the Pope didn't do the revolution, but he helped us to organize ourselves.

And he was leading through prayer, and the opposition was organizing the fight and victorious fight.

- And finally, you yourself were imprisoned.

How dangerous was it?

And did you ever feel that you should stop this work, this work of Solidarity and trying to essentially bring freedom to your country?

(Lech Walesa speaking in Polish) - [Interpreter] Well, it was dangerous.

I was afraid, but I was only afraid of the God Almighty and my wife.

- Did you ever consider stopping?

(Lech Walesa speaking in Polish) - Never in my life.

I'm 82 this year.

Why I'm in the United States?

Because I can see big problems in the world, and also problems in the United States.

Those problems are connected to the epochal changes.

This is so difficult that we really need to discuss in order to select the best diagnosis and to start treatment.

The United States is the major country that needs to cope with its own problems and also needs to lead the world again.

They should regain the leadership position and also provide the ideas.

I don't select those ideas, I discuss them.

I want us to select them together.

In all those discussions, we try to achieve that.

In short, the old era has ended, the era of states.

Now we have the era of information, globalization, intellect.

We are in between.

One era has ended, another one hasn't yet properly started to function.

And this is the era of discussion, how this new world is going to look, what the new role of the United States should be.

These are the question which appear in the new times.

We've got to discuss them and find a solution.

And after the old era, nobody believes to anybody.

Now you have to convince me and I have to convince you, and we can start building together.

It's the time of convincing each other.

- Well, good luck to you.

You have a lot to teach people.

Lech Walesa, thank you for joining us.

(Lech Walesa speaking in Polish) - [Interpreter] Thank you.

- Now, as the daughter of one of the most famous men in the world, our next guest grew up in the glamour and privilege of Hollywood.

But that's only one side of the story.

Elizabeth A. Hanks may have spent time on movie sets with her award-winning father, Tom but the other side of her childhood was often dark and troubled, living with her abusive and neglectful mother, Tom Hanks' first wife, the actress Susan Dillingham, who struggled with addiction and mental illness.

Elizabeth goes as E.A.

Hanks and she's revisiting that complicated past, as she herself says, "Growing up with a famous dad and a crazy mom."

Her new autobiography, "The 10," retraces a road trip that she took when she was 14 with her mother who died in 2002.

And she's joining me now here in the studio.

First of all, thank you for being here.

- It's my immense pleasure.

- Secondly, I said a lot of things in that intro that's uncomfortable frankly.

You know, your own quote about a loving father and a crazy mother.

I know that's a shorthand for what you went through, but was it difficult to write about your mother, warts and all, in this incredibly revealing way?

- It wasn't uncomfortable 'cause it's the truth, and I think it, even if the truth is uncomfortable, that's where I'm most interested in going.

If my father's world is a fantasy and my mother's world was a nightmare, I think the book is really about trying to ground myself, not only in my reality, but in the larger reality that is America, which is very good on a road trip.

- Indeed.

So why did you use the road trip?

Obviously you'd done one with her, so how was that?

Was that something so great that you wanted to retrace?

- I think the road trip is, it's inherent in myth and legend that when you have something to discover about yourself and about who you are, and where you come from, you go on a journey.

It's in the basics of Joseph Campbell, it's in "Star Wars."

And I thought, "Well, the boys always get to go on the trip.

What about me?"

So I emptied out a van and moved in, and eight months later I had some answers that seemed worth writing down.

- And was it a totally different experience, obviously with the passage of time and you went on your own, not with your mother, who caused you a lot of fear and sturm and drang, was it a totally different experience than the same exact trip that you took with her?

- Oh, completely.

I mean, with my mom and I, it was like how do we get to Florida as quickly as possible?

Which is, you know, 2,500 miles.

And myself, I took months and months.

I was in the Southwest for three and a half months alone because it seemed important to me to try to understand these places beyond just the pop culture that I knew about them or the stereotypes that I had about them.

So it was really incumbent on me to talk to locals and try to figure out the relationship between the stories we tell about the places we're from and the story we tell about who we are.

- So you also learned about her, because she I think came from Florida and there was a whole, or at least she had a lot of family in Florida who you were able to reconnect with and learn more about the mother who you experienced mostly as a pretty frightening character to live with, despite loving her.

- Immense, deep love.

I mean, I think women, I think mothers and daughter... You know, men are... Fathers and sons are canyons.

It's a visible divide with quantifiable space.

And I think of mothers and daughters as ice fishers.

You could be standing extremely close to each other but that you'll never find the bottom of that crevice.

And for as much as I feared my mother and was physically intimidated by her, she was also the only person in the world who I could walk into a room and she would know exactly my mood and exactly how to help and how to hurt.

- So just so that we understand, what was it that made you afraid, and what was the abuse that you suffered at her hands?

- I think if you-- - What was her condition?

- Well, she never had a formal diagnosis 'cause obviously she refused to see mental health professionals.

But me and my therapist, you can imagine have discussed it once or twice, and the kind of working definition that I have that helps me kind of put her in a context is a paranoid bipolar disorder with sort of delusional tendencies because my mother heard the voice of God, which she answered out loud in public all the time.

So she was a sort of bizarre figure who had a very hard time keeping reality in line, which is why I had so many questions.

I didn't know where she was born.

I didn't know how she grew up, I didn't know where she went to high school or what her first job was.

I barely knew how she met my father, which by the way was in the Theater Department of Sacramento State.

And the fear that I had from her is the fear that anyone has of someone whose temper has no limit and who can be set off by anything.

I've realized in the course of talking about this book that my mom was my first beat because when you have a beat, you know it inside and out.

- [Christiane] What is a beat?

- A beat, like, you know, what you cover as a journalist, as a writer.

- A beat, I'm so sorry, yes.

- No, of course.

That, you know, I could tell what would set her off before it set her off.

I could tell if it was a good day or a bad day.

And that microscopic detail to someone's temper means that it's a life on very thin ice.

- Yes, as you've described it in the book, and something very burdensome for a young child to have to grapple with.

She was also, you say a cocaine addict for a while.

Look, you have many interesting passages, but we're going to ask you to read one passage from the book that describes this mood shifty.

- Sure.

"For a long while, my mother and I were never alone together.

She'd gathered a cast of characters around herself as a shield.

For years, she had believed that my father was paying people to spy on her, following her and tapping her phone lines.

One weekend I've arrived for my visit and in our living room discovered a random man with multiple guns and a German shepherd in tow, and was told he would be sleeping in our living room from then on.

That was also when I started finding guns everywhere, in the old sewing box where we kept the remote controls for the television, for instance.

- I mean, you know, it does sound terrifying.

And this was because you say, "Arrived from my visit."

At one point, you were separated from her.

- Yes.

- Your father intervened.

- Yes.

- What happened?

- So there was one night where sort of my mother's threats finally followed through.

And in a night where there was no anticipating what would set her off, my breathing seemed to set her off, something internal just reached a breaking point.

And she decided that the solution for the bad night she was having was to start hitting.

And, you know, an abusive situation that does not actually usually involve a physical altercation is hard to intervene in.

But once we had the receipts of physical abuse, that's when I was able to essentially switch custody.

- And go to your father.

So, you know, the obvious question is, because Tom Hanks is the most famous man in the world, everybody's most beloved, you know, Mister Rogers and all the other characters, one of the articles has wondered where was Tom Hanks in all of this?

How did he allow his daughter to live through this?

He did intervene but did you ever ask yourself that?

- Of course, and I've asked him that, and there's a lot of history in my book, but one of the things I did not quite have space for was the intricacies of family law in California in the late '80s.

And it's that thing of the courts require receipt of consistent physical abuse.

You can't say, "Well, sometimes she talks to God and it makes my friends uncomfortable."

Or "There's a lot of guns" because there's a lot of guns in a lot of houses in America.

So the nuance became, well, what is that fit that, you know, that river that should never be crossed?

And once it was, my dad was empowered by the state, by police, by lawyers to step in.

- The other interesting way you put it is about your father and you call the phenomenon around him Hanks Cola.

You talk about how your mother viewed his success as kind of catastrophic, not stratospheric, catastrophic for her.

- Catastrophic fame.

- Talk to me about the Hanks Cola first.

- Hanks cola is how I describe the situation of my father being who he is to my closest friends.

And to me, you know, Hanks Cola, it's a brand, it's bought and sold, and everybody in the world recognizes it, and buys it, and it makes them feel good.

But if you have too much of it, it will rot your insides.

It will.

- You're not saying that about your dad, are you?

- No, no, no because this is what I mean by catastrophic fame.

What is catastrophe?

A catastrophe is an eradication.

And I think there is a level of fame where parts of your humanity become eradicated.

People forget that my dad is a person, people forget that my dad is an artist and he just becomes Hanks Cola.

And that is a trickle-down effect where we're all kind of dealing with the fact that there is a divide between what the public is aware of, and the brand that is used to sell myriad things from movies to instant coffee that supports American troops, and, you know, forgets the fact that this is a working artist of once-in-a-generation talent who's a human being who has bad days.

- Who also though was viewed by your mother, according to yourself, as somebody who completely eclipsed her possibility of a career, if she had one.

- I think my mom had this concept of herself as this great Shakespearean actress who never got a shake.

And I spoke to a lot of people who said, (Elizabeth stuttering) "Wishful thinking."

But I think what's important is that while she never became a famous theater actress, something that I've been able to do as a writer is to bring her poetry into the book.

And so I got to edit her as a real writer.

And her work in the book is really good and interesting.

And I think that there's a part of me that sort of hopes that she shines down on the fact that she's now a published writer.

- And do you feel that, it's not an atonement, but do you feel that there's some kind of forgiveness and benediction that you're passing on somebody who caused you such pain as a young child?

- I think one of my favorite things about this book is that the very last word that I wrote, and this book took 10 years, all in all, is that the last word that I wrote was grace.

And as someone who has a lot of religious trauma, because my mom was a fundamentalist, born again Christian who could not answer a simple question like why is the date 1066 important?

Without her answer beginning, "Well, when you have the light of Jesus Christ in your heart."

So she was devout and she always talked about the grace that we can live in.

And I didn't really understand what that meant.

And I think it's not forgiveness and it's not forgetfulness, but it is a state of grace where I can understand that she was playing the best hand she could with the cards that she were dealt, and she was not dealt a great hand.

- You talk about being dealt great hands in the criticism or the commentary about, you know, you're a privileged daughter of a-- - As privileged as it gets.

- Exactly.

But you have an answer to that.

- Yeah, I think that criticisms of privilege come from people who don't experience it, as it should, but that means that they don't understand the nuances 'cause they've never experienced it.

And privilege kicks in way before most people does.

It starts before the good college.

It starts before the great first job.

It starts when you have consistent meals on the table and family and support, and you go to the right schools that get you the right first job, that get you the opportunities.

So the magnifying glass I think should be kind of moved earlier in the timeline.

And the ways that we create a pipeline that offers access to people who wouldn't get it otherwise needs to happen earlier there.

I don't have all the answers, I suspect they involve public libraries, but that is sort of my feelings about it.

- And your father is not only an actor, an artist, as you describe, and a man, but he's also a writer.

- [Elizabeth] That's true.

He published his own book.

What is his reaction to not only your writing but your storytelling of such an intimate detail?

- My dad and my brother are the people who understood my mother the most and they're the only people who could kind of offer notes.

And so they read the manuscript first, they read multiple drafts, and my dad gave me the best response I could have hoped for, which is, "That's her.

You got it right.

That is exactly what it was like to both love and fear and leave that woman."

And I think that for... He never volunteered information about my mother, but always directly and honestly answered questions.

And so to be given the benediction by him because he understands the process by which we take personal pain, and through sort of a transcendence make art of it.

For him to say, "You did good" means the world.

- And finally, E.A.

Hanks.

- Yes.

- Why?

- That comes from my days working at the Huffington Post where I had to navigate a comment section that did not always, maybe you've heard of this, people don't always love women telling them about the political situations that we're navigating.

So I took a hat tip from George Eliot and others and... - To change your gender, so to speak.

- Yes, and there was a slightly more cynical thing where when I was starting out earlier, when SEO was still part of, you know, second generation, third generation internet, if you googled Elizabeth and Hanks, it would just be results for "Big" because it would clock Elizabeth of Elizabeth Perkins and Hanks of my dad's name.

So if you wanted to find an article I'd written about something that happened in D.C.

that week, you'd have to go to like nine, you know, result pages in.

E.A.

Hanks was a lot easier for misogynists and Google alike.

- And now with "The 10."

- Exactly.

- Thank you so much for being with us.

- Thank you for having me, Christiane.

- Now, it's been 20 years since Hurricane Katrina, widely recognized as one of America's greatest disaster relief failures.

But now the Trump administration's cuts to FEMA threatened the vital reforms it made back then.

Over 180 current and former employees of the disaster relief agency are sounding the alarm in a letter to Congress warning the president's actions could lead to a repeat of the Katrina catastrophe.

And now several of the signatories have been put on administrative leave, including Katherine Landers who tells Hari Sreenivasan about this, alongside Deanne Criswell, a former FEMA administrator.

- Christiane, thanks, Deanne Criswell, Katherine Landers, thank you both for joining us.

Katherine, I wanna start with you.

You are currently an employee of FEMA, and you have put your name onto a document called the Katrina Declaration.

And this is a huge list of current FEMA workers.

What are you saying in this declaration?

- In this declaration, we are expressing both our frustration and fear due to all of the decisions that have been made for this agency over the last few months.

We are nervous that we are being dismantled and that we will be unable to help people, especially now as we have actually passed the 20th anniversary of Katrina.

We are hoping that we can be given back the autonomy in order to be an effective agency and to help people before, during, and after disasters.

- You know that this is a climate where an employee signing their name to a document can have repercussions.

Have you faced any yet for signing this?

- I guess the most apparent one is I was immediately put on administrative leave approximately 36 hours after the letter went public.

This was a risk I knew was there.

I did not anticipate it to happen so quickly, but that is the primary thing.

- Katherine, you know, one of the things that you point out, and you and your fellow signatories point out in the Katrina Declaration, is that there is now a new rule, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, must personally approve any expense over $100,000 to try to crack down on what she deems to be wasteful spending.

Now, the administration says, "Since President Trump took office on January 20th, 2025, FEMA is 126% faster on average in getting federal grant funding to states and communities that request it.

It is also more than 40% faster on average in getting vital assistance directly into the hands of survivors and 100% faster in getting responders on the ground to help affected communities."

You work for the agency.

You know, has this measure, as the administration says, made FEMA more efficient or as the critics of this policy say, has that created a backlog or a bottleneck that has prohibited or delayed assistance from getting to people?

- 100% the latter.

This policy has added more red tape to a system that we had in place, that we knew how to work before.

This system, we saw it with the Kerrville floods, it delayed key, key help that we needed on the ground immediately.

It delayed call center contracts, which meant that people were pulled off of their normal jobs so that they could assist with callers, leading to backups of up to seven hours.

We have seen it even impact some of the most mundane but necessary aspects of our day, including delaying contract renewals for basic computer software that we need to do our everyday job.

It is something that the absurdity of this policy has made itself clear over and over again.

And unfortunately we saw how devastating this policy could be with the Kerrville floods on July 4th.

- Deanne, the administration has also, not just the $100,000 approval, but has also tried to make structural changes.

One of the programs in question is called the BRIC program and the Trump administration attempted to reallocate about $4 billion.

A federal judge temporarily blocked that.

You know, the administration says it's another example of wasteful and ineffective FEMA program.

More concerned with political agendas.

The people that don't know the BRIC program, what is that?

- The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, affectionately known as the BRIC program, is actually a program that was started by President Trump in his first term.

And this is funding that goes to communities before disaster to help reduce the impact of disasters.

There are many studies that are out there that show for every dollar we invest in mitigation, it saves $6 in response and recovery costs.

And so I don't know how that kind of cost benefit can be determined fraudulent or wasteful use of funding.

I did hear the acting administrator during his hearing say that it was funding that was being used for pet programs, like bike paths and bus shelters.

Well, I haven't seen exactly what he's looking at, but my immediate impression was that a bike path means that we're probably creating an area that had homes in it that can no longer be built with homes, right?

Buyouts to absorb the flooding in an area and you add a bike path into that area, right?

And that's creating green space so future structures can't be damaged.

The goal should be to never respond or recover again because we've made smart investments to reduce impact.

And so that should be the driving goal that they've taken away the one program that can do that.

- Katherine, there was a report from the Government Accountability Office that said that the number of active FEMA employees has dropped by about 10% in the first six months of the year.

And I wonder if these reductions, perhaps some motivated by DOGE, et cetera, have had an impact on the work that you do.

Just kind of give us an example, you know, maybe your team, how it has changed over the past year.

- Yeah, absolutely.

The brain drain that we have witnessed over the past eight months has been really frightening and really sad.

For my team specifically, we lost two members, one of whom has been with the agency for 15 plus years.

The other has been with the agency for six years.

Both of them came with an incredible wealth of knowledge that it will take years for us to regain.

Specifically for our team, we lost the ability to conduct hazard and hurricane analyses.

When a hurricane is bearing down on us, we take information, real-time information, we are able to feed that information to assess which communities will be hardest hit.

And now due to the various programs that have incentivized people to leave, as well as now myself being put on administrative leave, there is now one person who can make these runs, who can disseminate this information to states and territories.

So I was there, I could have helped, but now I no longer am there.

And we have one person who can do this.

- You know, Ms.

Criswell, one of the statements of opposition outlined in this Katrina Declaration is that "There have now been two individuals placed in charge of FEMA who lack proper qualifications and the authority to lead this agency."

And I wonder what makes these successors to your job less qualified?

- Well, I think when you look at both of them, Hari, they just don't have emergency management experience.

And that was one of the things that we learned from Hurricane Katrina.

You had a leader that didn't have emergency management experience, and so they don't have the knowledge and the background to anticipate what the potential impacts of a severe weather event might be.

Just as you heard Katherine talk about the planning that they do, you know, when you have a leader that has that knowledge and that experience of responding to situations like that, they know the right questions to ask.

They know how to interpret the data that's coming to them.

Now you have a leader that doesn't have that experience and you've also lost that institutional knowledge to try to get them up to speed.

And so you really create a vacuum of capability in trying to anticipate what an impact to a community might be.

So you can move resources ahead of time and make sure that they're there to support that community, to support that state, to support that local community.

You know, I'll say at least when Cameron Hamilton was there, he was trying hard to learn and he went and talked to all of the different leaders, and he made an effort to make a difference.

But we're not seeing the same thing from where I sit, right?

And I'm sitting outside the agency, but from where I'm sitting, I just don't see that same effort from the current acting administrator.

- Now, just recently last month, the Department of Homeland Security, Deanne, which oversees FEMA, for our audience, they just put out a press release, a press release that said, "For too long, disaster response has been bogged down by red tape, inefficiency and a one-size-fits all approach that left too many Americans waiting for help that came too late.

And, that relatively speaking, to someone from the outside seems logical.

Hey, make it more efficient after a disaster to get me the aid that I need to get my community back up on its feet, right?

Are there reforms that you feel that the agency needed to make?

- Hari, I think the first thing that I wanna point out with that statement is they're talking just about response.

And we've heard a lot of conversation about we need to push the responsibility for response back to state and locals.

State and locals have always had the responsibility to manage response and recovery.

And in my four years as the FEMA administrator, never once did I have a governor complain to me about the response.

There are plenty of frustrations from governors and emergency management directors at the state and local level in the recovery space.

There is a lot of opportunity to create efficiencies in how communities get reimbursed.

I think remembering that FEMA primarily is a reimbursement agency.

They provide funding to reimburse communities as they rebuild their infrastructure.

And that can be delayed by a number of things.

And it can sometimes just be plain oversight, like procurement regulations and environmental regulations.

But sometimes it's also just asking too many questions, requests for information, you know, asking for too much detail.

Things that frustrated me during my time as the FEMA administrator, we spent a lot of time focused on improving the efficiency of the individual assistance program and making sure that it wasn't a one-size-fits-all approach.

The same level of effort does need to be given and analysis to the public assistance program.

And how do we make those same types of efficiencies better?

And give the states and the locals more ability to have say in how the recovery is gonna be rebuilt without unnecessary bureaucracy.

- Deanne, I'm old enough to have covered Katrina on the ground, and I think for me personally, that was kind of a moment where I watched the trust in the institution that is FEMA, and the government's response really erode significantly.

And I wonder even now, there are people who have concerns about FEMA's response to say Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017 or Hurricane Ida.

But I wonder if this decrease in trust that we have ends up fueling what the administration wants in its major reforms.

- Well, I think one of the things, Hari that's really important is, you know, there's still so many people that have vivid memories of Hurricane Katrina.

And you and I both can still remember all of the challenges that happened at all levels, federal, state, and local level.

And everybody has a role to play.

There have been tremendous improvements since Katrina over the last 20 years that we've talked about.

But I think for me, it feels like with the increase in the ability to spread information on social media, that it creates greater opportunity to feed that mistrust, whether it's appropriate or not.

I mean, I go back to Hurricane Helene.

I led the effort for Hurricane Helene, I think at six states initially, I think eight states, you know, and had declarations.

I was on the ground before Helene made landfall in North Carolina.

Yet you had a little bit of commentary that was not accurate, was proven to be inaccurate, but it spread like wildfire on social media, and it created this mistrust.

But that mistrust was all outside of the area.

When I talked to the governor, when I talked to the county sheriffs, when I talked to the local mayors, they were all grateful for everything that we were doing.

But I think it all boils down to a lack of understanding of what FEMA's role really is in response, right?

FEMA, they're not the firefighters, they're not the EMTs, they're not the law enforcement professionals.

Yes, they can send in search and rescue capability to help augment those amazing first responders that are taking care of their communities.

But essentially they only come in to provide support that the state or the local doesn't have.

And when you're stabilizing that incident, it could be like the Army Corps of Engineers that's on the ground helping to assess the water treatment facility or damage to bridges and the security or the stability of those bridges.

It can be Health and Human Services that's trying to assess, you know, the impact to hospitals or setting up mobile health teams.

That's all FEMA.

- Katherine, we should note in the letter that was informing you that you were put on administrative leave with pay, it said, "Your placement on administrative leave is not a disciplinary action."

And I'm wondering whether you are concerned, along with the other FEMA current employees, that speaking with us right now could shift your status from administrative leave to just being fired.

- Yeah, absolutely.

This, as was my decision to put my name publicly on the letter, it was a calculated decision.

It was a risk that I knew existed.

But I think it is really important that we can listen to the people within FEMA right now to give a voice to the employees that are being steamrolled over by this administration.

And I am nervous, but I am okay with it.

I'm okay with the risk and I'm happy to be taking it.

- For the record, we reached out to FEMA for comment about both the Katrina Declaration and Katherine, your case in specific, and as we speak, they haven't yet responded.

Deanne, I have kind of a 30,000-foot question for you.

On his first trip in his second term to disaster sites in California and Louisiana, President Trump said, "I'll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA.

I think, frankly, FEMA's not good."

I guess the question for my audience is if there was no Federal Emergency Response Agency, what would happen in another Katrina-like disaster?

- I think it would be even worse than Katrina because you can't expect state and local jurisdictions to replicate all of the capability that the federal government can bring, right?

We're talking about economies of scale here.

When FEMA has several distribution centers that are strategically placed around the country that then can move those resources like food and water and tarps and infant and toddler kits, move them closer to the impacted area, right?

You move them as the need arises.

To expect state and local jurisdictions to represent or recreate all of that capability, one is a really poor use of taxpayer dollars and it's just not efficient.

And my fear would be that they're not going to be able to replicate that level of capability individually in each state.

Some states might be able to.

States that have a lot of disasters and have a lot of Funding like Texas and Florida, like they could probably get close.

But other states that just have disasters infrequently, they're not gonna be able to create that.

And so I think when you see a big event happen and you don't have those kind of federal resources, you know, 28 urban search and rescue teams that are strategically placed across the US, which are trained and funded by FEMA, but they're local first responders, right?

When Texas happened, they brought in Texas Task Force 1, they're funded and trained by FEMA.

All of that goes away.

And so I think we just see a less capable nation and we will see more vulnerable communities not get the necessary help that they need and they deserve.

- Katherine Landers is a geospatial risk analyst at FEMA who is currently on administrative leave.

And Deanne Criswell was the former administrator of FEMA.

Thank you both for joining us.

- Thank you.

- Thanks, Hari.

- I covered Katrina and I remember how desperately needed those reforms were.

And finally, we want to take a look back at the extraordinary life and legacy of the Kindertransport survivor Dame Stephanie Shirley who passed away last month at the age of 91.

Shirley went from escaping Nazi persecution, arriving in England as a child refugee at five years old to becoming a multi-billion dollar tech entrepreneur.

Thriving in what was a male-dominated industry in the 1950s Britain, she also established herself as one of the country's foremost philanthropists, supporting children with special needs.

We spoke back in 2016 during the refugee crisis that was sweeping Europe then and when anti-immigration rhetoric was reaching a peak in Europe and the United States during Donald Trump's first term.

And as the kind of rhetoric seems to be once again on the rise, and with Trump back in the White House, Shirley serves as an incredible example of the resilience of refugees fighting against the toughest odds.

You came to London, to England as a refugee yourself in 1939.

What can you remember about stepping off that, whatever it was, train, boat?

- What I can really remember, all the childish things 'cause I was very luck, I was only five years old.

And so I'd been protected from some of the problems.

Though that was obviously my sister who was older, remembered much more of children throwing stones at her and things that didn't happen to me.

- As Jews.

- As Jews.

You know, my father lost his job and everything went wrong really.

So what I remember of that period is of the just general family unsettlement and moving around very frequently, trying to find a safe place, and for my father to get some work.

The lost doll seemed to be much more important than the lost home.

I remember the long and terminable two-and-a-half day journey from Vienna to London.

- We know that quite a lot of kids are coming to England right now, refugee children, many of them unaccompanied and not really having a whole lot of support when they get here.

What should this government be doing?

- Well, in '39 when things were dreadful in a different place, and there always seems to be dreadful things going on in the world, there were these Kindertransport trains and they were organized by the religious organizations, the Christian and Jewish activists who set up them up.

Quaker Society of Friends kept it going when it ran out of money, a lot of volunteers helped to share, administer what was then the largest ever migration of unaccompanied children.

So something like that that's a bit more structured, that families know that they will be put into hospitals, they will be able to settle with their families.

- So you mentioned, you know, the biggest migration of children during the Second World War.

Now we have the biggest refugee crisis in the world since the Second World War.

And there have been only very few leaders who have been distinguished by their compassion.

- Britain also has an aging population, so we need young, educated people coming in.

- You are a prime example of somebody who came over here and gave back in spades, and you went on to be a phenomenal business woman, and now you're a philanthropist.

How did you get to the business from being a refugee child?

- I think when you go through some trauma in childhood like that, it drives your life for a long time, forever really.

And as far as I'm concerned, my Kindertransport experience left me with... Having dealt with that change and the trauma of that, I can deal with any change that life throws at me.

And in my high tech career, that was quite useful.

I've learned to actually love change.

And I've also realized that the life that was saved had to be made worth saving.

And so I really try not to fritter my life away.

And basically I have done what is in me to do.

And finally, of course, I am deeply patriotic and love this, my adopted country.

And it was a crusade for women and for women who were then second class citizens really.

And I'd had enough being patronized as a Jew and patronized as a woman, and I really wanted to provide opportunities first for myself and for the many educated women.

- So how did you launch this crusade?

What did you do for the women?

- I set up this software house and sold tailor-made software, which at that time was given away free with the hardware.

So everybody laughed.

"You can't sell software, it's free."

And structured the company so that all we women, we all worked from home, including me.

I still work from home.

I've learned to really enjoy that flexibility.

- So flexi schedule, flexi work before anybody knew that term.

- Before anybody knew it, and the idea of telecommuting or working from home, using not high tech in those days, it was the simple telephone, that's all we had.

- Well, lest anybody think it was a small boutique operation, you were eventually worth 150 million plus pounds.

- I was personally, yes.

- Yes, and the company?

- The company was valued at $3 billion.

- 3 billion.

Good for you.

Yeah, and in fact, if I'm not mistaken, you called yourself Steve in order to be taken seriously rather than Stephanie.

- Nobody answered my letters, which I was sending out by the dozen to introduce my company' services.

And my dear husband of now over 50 years, he suggested that I use the family nickname of Steve.

So I wrote Steve Shirley instead of that double feminine.

And people began to want to see me.

And I was through that door shaking hands before anyone realized that he was a she.

- If I'm not mistaken, he was a she, all or most of your employees were women?

- Oh yes.

In the first 300 staff, I think we had three men.

- Of course tech is still a highly male-dominated industry but what Dame Shirley did for women in that business, women with flexible work hours, remains a really lasting legacy.

That's it for our program tonight.

If you wanna find out what's coming up every night, sign up for our newsletter at PBS.org/Amanpour.

Thank you for watching and goodbye from London.

(lively music)