Probably it was during the Katrina storm in New Orleans that most of us started thinking of FEMA as playing a big part in Americans’ lives. “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” President George W. Bush famously called out to his FEMA chief Michael Brown, whether or not such a job was really being done.

Around the country in the decades since, there have been numerous other natural disasters that have required the deployment of the Federal Emergency Management Agency amid chaos, death and displacement caused by hurricane, by flooding, by earthquake.

The government organization brings staffing, food, medicine, temporary shelter as lifelines for those in need.

Its latest deployment is right here, right now, in the horrific firestorms that have devastated Altadena, Pasadena, Sierra Madre, Pacific Palisades and Malibu.

But President Trump, having visited the North Carolina flood zone created by Hurricane Helene before flying out to view the aftermath of the L.A. fires, said that he thinks that perhaps FEMA should be done away with, leaving the individual states to provide disaster relief for themselves. “It’s not good,” Trump said of the federal agency.

Do you agree with the president that FEMA should be eliminated?

That’s our Question of the Week for readers.

“I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away and we pay directly,” Trump said last week. “We pay a percentage to the state. The state should fix it.”

So under that scenario, federal money would still go to the states experiencing big trouble from a force of nature. But the Washington, D.C.-based agency coordinating such relief would disappear.

Is that only fitting and in line with Trump’s campaign promises to shrink the bureaucracy?

Are the states best equipped to meet their own disaster needs?

Or do we still need the national coordination of FEMA, which operates as a kind of insurance policy that we all pay into and get benefit of when in dire need?

Email your thoughts to opinion@scng.com.