Whiplash or Progress? The Executive Order Shaking Up Infrastructure

If you were a screenwriter trying to think of an occupation for a boring character, you can’t do much better than insurance salesman. People relate to the eyerolling-ly boring nature of insurance. Many don’t understand it and object to paying for it at all. The objection comes from the idea of paying every month for something you may never need. You may be lucky enough to never crash your car or have a tree fall on your house, but you pay your insurance anyway. However, the moment that you have a medical emergency or another unexpected event, you are happy that you have it. Last week, President Trump signed a new executive order titled Achieving Efficiency Through State and Local Preparedness . Among other things, this order says the federal government is going to stop buying insurance for state and local preparedness and resilience. Not literally, the government doesn’t buy actual insurance for an aforementioned boring insurance salesman. They provide a series of grants and funding opportunities that many state and local municipalities depend on to put toward their collective resilience. This is insurance that will hopefully prevent the federal government from needing to intervene in a local disaster. Unlike your medical or homeowners insurance, this kind of insurance suffers from a problem: it is hard to prove that an action resulted in the absence of something. Building resilience is like that. You invest and success is nothing happening. But there’s a real opportunity within this executive order. The title of the order mentions “efficiency” and the rest of the document is littered with references to achieving efficiency. Creating efficiency might sound difficult when the funding is going away, but this is where state and local government have an opportunity to build artificial intelligence (AI) into their revised resilience plans and strategies. Achieving efficiency with less funding will fundamentally mean that processes and workflows must change. But this change is happening at the right moment. It’s happening as AI is reaching a technical capability that can truly create efficiency if it is specialized and it preserves privacy. Right sized AI deployments are the answer to this shock to the resilience and preparedness system at a time when efficiency is the stated goal. The Federalist System Without sounding like the second most boring screenwriter occupation choice, high school civics teacher, the federalist system is a control on centralized federal power by pushing responsibilities to states and localities. This check on federal power is enshrined in the constitution and has several implications. For emergency response, it means that the first response to a disaster is local. Think local police, fire, and other emergency responders. If that locality (or localities) is overwhelmed, they must request resources and assistance from the state. If the state is overwhelmed, it may then request federal resources. A good example of this is the response to Hurricane Katrina in Mississippi and Louisiana in 2005. The horrible storm caused many deaths through wind damage, flooding, and other disruptions to critical services. The response to the disaster included US military assets such as the USS Iwo Jima , a warship. The warship was moored to a pier in the Mississippi River in New Orleans providing services, to include being the only functioning airport in the region for several months. However, the federal government cannot just send a warship to a state. It must be requested, which it was by Governor Kathleen Blanco. Federal assistance was rendered but only after the request was made. Buying Insurance Since municipalities are the first required to respond, there is significant benefit to building resilience. Each municipality is different since the threat may be a flood or a wildfire or another potential problem. Building resilience means preventing and quickly recovering from any disaster. Reducing the resources that must be brought against a disaster benefits all in the response chain. The federal government has for many years offered a series of grants and other funding mechanisms that only cities and states are eligible for specifically to help them build that resilience. One of the largest is the FEMA Grant Program . In the world of resilience and preparedness, this is what buying insurance looks like. The federal government invests in programs for localities so that it does not need to send things like warships to respond to local disasters. There will always be large disasters that require a large, coordinated response, but the goal is to minimize those that require major federal assistance. That’s what the FEMA Grant Program buys. Share The problem with this kind of insurance is that its efficacy cannot be measured the same as your car insurance. If you have an accident and your car insurance takes care of the problem, the insurance clearly benefitted you. In resilience and preparedness, the measure of success is that something did not happen. This is something humans are not good at. When I was in the graduate school, I had a professor explain international deterrence this way: “You know, last month I put a tiger trap in my front yard here in Virginia. And you know what? Since then, not a single tiger has come into my yard.” Investment in resilience is the same. You can say that you used federal funds to harden the electrical grid, but how do you know that your money prevented an outage? Maybe there would have never been an outage to begin with! The new executive order makes clear that the federal government is going to stop buying insurance against state and local resilience and preparedness investments. This is a shakeup to the system but provides an opportunity for state and local officials to create efficiency in a new way that creates long term benefit. Efficiency and Automation If the policy of the federal government is going to be that state and local entities must invest in their own resilience, they must find right sized ways to do so (the order actually says that state and local authorities must take a more active role in planning, but they always have). A major part of resilience is knowing as much as possible to the left of the incident (i.e. before the incident occurs). This means pulling together as much information from previous events as possible to include after action reports, alerts, geospatial data, data on individual affected, and much more. These data help build out a risk picture that is data driven and can help state and local decision makers make the right decisions on the resources they need to invest in. Efficiency extends to how money is allocated, particularly when federal funding will soon cease. During an emergency, state and local leaders should have one goal: reduce the time from data to decision. Emergency responders have mountains of data, and the mountain is growing. From social media to the weather, there are incoming inputs of data from everywhere. Leaders should be asking themselves whether they are getting any value from that data or if they are creating more noise. It is possible to overwhelm a human emergency manager, no matter how seasoned, with too much data. This is, however, exactly what AI was built for. Pairing AI with a human domain expert under a strategy that places the human as the decision maker and the AI as the supporting element is how efficiency will be created during a crisis. There is a real concern here about data and privacy because some may believe this is an artificial barrier to entry. Even in an emergency, we have the obligation to maintain security and privacy for those affected. PII cannot be simply pasted into a public cloud or AI model. Strict security and privacy measure must be undertaken. Therefore, building an AI for state and local resilience and preparedness means building a specialist system that has privacy and security as foundational requirements. State and local leaders will not achieve efficiency through cloud native AI systems but have a real opportunity to build more targeted models that are specially trained on emergency response data and inputs. Together, this is a path for municipal leaders to achieve efficiency in the face of falling federal funding. Privacy and security cannot be negotiable, and they should focus that power left of incident and for the critical moments during an incident. Strategy and a Path Forward The executive order calls for a rewritten National Resilience Strategy , which will replace the one published just two months ago by the Biden Administration. This might feel like whiplash, but the bottom line is that resilience and preparedness strategies will need to be rewritten around the country. Those strategies should conform to the new National Resilience Strategy when it is released but should focus on the efficiency requirement of the EO. Focusing on finding efficiency through AI will save municipalities considerable money in the long run at a time when future funding sources are uncertain. Achieving efficiency means leaning into automation and pairing human domain expertise with AI in data heavy environments. Doing so with privacy and security built in is a foundational requirement. The path forward for state and local leaders following the new EO is one where each investment dollar must count. Getting clearer pictures of the risk environment and reducing the time from data to decision is a way to get the most out of invested dollars. State and local officials should begin with a full policy and strategy review. They should focus on workforce upskilling to set the foundation for AI and automation systems. Once the resilience strategy is published, they should be ready to invest in AI tools and pool resources through government, academic, and private sector partnerships. State and local officials have always been the primary sources of decision making for resilience and preparedness. Now they are doing so without insurance. Resilience and preparedness cannot end because people and economic interests are at stake. But resilience will look different in 2025 and beyond. Those that can invest smartly in right-sized AI solutions will achieve the efficiency that is needed to build resilience against modern risks. Connect with us: Substack , LinkedIn , Bluesky , X , Website To learn more about the services we offer, please visit our product page. Nick Reese is the cofounder and COO of Frontier Foundry and an adjunct professor of emerging technology at NYU. He is a veteran and a former US government policymaker on cyber and technology issues. Visit his LinkedIn here . This post was edited by Thomas Morin, Marketing Analyst at Frontier Foundry. View his Substack here and his LinkedIn here . Subscribe now Leave a comment