This past week saw the first stage of a Gaza Agreement agreed to by both Israel and Hamas (cease fire, hostage release, and prisoner exchange, as well as Israel moving back a border it occupies), and action should be realized this next week. Coincidentally, it was also the beginning of announcements of the 2025 Nobel prizes, perhaps the most highly prized global awards bestowed annually.

I’m writing this column on a sunny Sunday morning in a country that still has three branches of government, though two of them have been mostly overrun by machinations that threaten democracy. Article 1 of the Constitution is given over to the Legislative branch because elected representatives were given the power to override the Judicial and the Executive branches when those branches strayed outside the powers that the Constitution granted them. The checks and balances are straightforward, designed to prevent a concentration of power in any one branch:

President Carter established the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in 1979 with two missions: emergency management and civil defense. FEMA’s charter was further enhanced in 1988 with the Stafford Act, which laid out clear instructions and a framework for disaster response and recovery between the federal government and the states. After 9/11/2001, the federal government reorganized and created a new overarching cabinet department, Homeland Security (DHS), and absorbed FEMA and twenty-one other federal organizations to better coordinate and communicate where both civil defense and emergency management were concerned. Following the devastation along the Gulf Coast that Hurricane Katrina caused, Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act of 2006 which redefined FEMA as a separate agency within DHS, defined its main role, made the FEMA Administrator a principal advisor to the President, the Homeland Security Council and the Secretary of Homeland Security for all matters related to emergency management in the United States.

No matter how many column inches are written about the Trump administration to analyze its behavior, the facts do not change and they lead to an inescapable conclusion, best summarized by Bruce Springsteen on the opening night of his European tour in mid-May.