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This week marks 20 years since Hurricane Katrina, one of the costliest and deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history. The storm increased focus on flood mitigation and altered the nation's approach to disaster management, a strategy that could soon shift once again as the Trump administration downsizes the Federal Emergency Management Agency.In August 2005, Katrina struck the Gulf Coast as a Category 3 storm, leading to nearly 1,400 direct and indirect deaths. Thousands of homes and businesses were destroyed, causing an inflation-adjusted $186.3 billion in damage, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "The world knows it wasn't just the storm; it was that these levees should've held," said Sandy Rosenthal, who founded Levees.Org after Katrina. Levee failures around New Orleans contributed to catastrophic flooding, which left nearly 80% of the city underwater. In the wake of the storm, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers created the first national database of U.S. levees with the goal of better monitoring conditions and improving community preparedness.A recent analysis of that data by the American Society of Civil Engineers found roughly 27% of FEMA-accredited levees are considered at moderate, high or very high risk. "The levees may have been invested in as part of the postdisaster process in New Orleans, but there are other areas throughout the country that continue to have aging infrastructure that could cause disasters of the magnitude that we saw 20 years ago," said Jeff Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University.The levees were only part of the problem. Schlegelmilch said Katrina exposed significant flaws in federal disaster response and preparedness. "You saw, in some cases, it not being clear which processes to follow and, in other cases, delays getting things in place and, probably most significant, is an inflexibility," Schlegelmilch said. One year later, Congress passed the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act. Schlegelmilch said the law increased FEMA's flexibility and clarified its authority, making it a distinct agency within the Department of Homeland Security, which had been "hyper-focused" on terrorism in the wake of 9/11. "We actually saw, in the aftermath of Katrina, one of the largest reorganizations of, and reenvisioning of emergency management in the United States since 9/11," Schlegelmilch said. Now, FEMA finds itself at yet another crossroads as President Donald Trump orders staff and funding cuts.Speaking in the Oval Office in June, Trump said FEMA "has not been a very successful experiment.""We want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level," Trump said in June. "So the governors can handle it. That's why they're governors. Now, if they can't handle it, they shouldn't be governor." Joel Scata, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Trump's approach could reverse hard-fought reforms."I think Katrina exposed the deadly cost of inequity and neglect, and 20 years later, unfinished reforms and FEMA’s weakening under the Trump administration are leaving communities vulnerable once again," Scata said.In a statement, an unnamed FEMA spokesperson said Katrina "taught us hard lessons about what happens when the system fails." "Americans deserve better than the slow, unprepared, and inadequate responses of the past. That’s why we’re overhauling outdated processes and replacing them with a system that gets help to people in need," the statement continued. Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, added, "FEMA’s outsized role created a bloated bureaucracy that disincentivized state investment in their own resilience." Jackson said a FEMA review council will present recommendations to the president for reform, "such that the federal role remains supplemental and appropriate to the scale of disaster.”The Trump administration declined to comment on the future of FEMA funding intended to strengthen infrastructure, like levees, before disasters strike, citing ongoing litigation with a coalition of Democrat-led states. Earlier this year, FEMA announced plans to end a program called the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, but later said in a court filing that it was evaluating it.