When I introduced the junk drawer a few posts back, the example was a physical one. Most kitchens have a drawer that holds the screwdriver, the rubber bands, the takeout menus, the AAA batteries, and the one weird key nobody can identify. The drawer is not a failure of organization. It is the part of the organizational system that handles things which do not fit anywhere else — and, more importantly, things that would not fit any better if you tried to file them somewhere else.
The screwdriver is the canonical example. You could put it with “tools,” but you do not have a tools drawer in your kitchen, because the screwdriver is the only tool you use in your kitchen often enough to want close at hand. You could put it with “things made of metal,” but then you would need a category for things made of metal, and it would contain a screwdriver and four spoons that escaped the spoon drawer. The screwdriver lives in the junk drawer because the junk drawer is, structurally, the right home for it.
People keep reading “junk drawer” as a pejorative. It is not. The junk drawer is doing work. The legitimate critique of a junk drawer is internal — too full, too disorganized, screwdrivers buried — not categorical. “Get rid of the drawer” does not move you toward an organized kitchen. It moves the screwdriver somewhere worse.
Disasters Do Not File Neatly
Hurricanes, wildfires, floods, derechos, and ice storms do not respect agency org charts. A major storm in Florida is, simultaneously, a public-health event (HHS), an infrastructure event (Transportation, Energy), a housing event (HUD), a small-business event (SBA), an agriculture event (USDA), and a long list of other things. It is not “an X event” for any single value of X.
The federal government’s response to this categorical messiness is FEMA. FEMA exists precisely because disasters are not filable. They are screwdrivers — cross-cutting objects that touch enough other categories that putting them inside any one of them breaks something. So we built a drawer.
That is not a description of FEMA’s failure mode. It is a description of what FEMA is. A working FEMA is the federal government’s junk drawer in the same sense that a working kitchen drawer is the junk drawer: a designated, acknowledged location for the cross-cutting work that does not fit elsewhere, with the screwdrivers within reach of the people who know how to use them.
Reading the Barton Memos
This is why the recent reporting on Victoria Barton’s internal memos reads the way it does to people who have actually run the agency. Barton is the Trump-appointed Associate Administrator at FEMA’s Office of External Affairs. Earlier this year she wrote a series of internal memos warning of “increased operational risk,” “workforce strain,” and a growing backlog. Peter Gaynor, who ran FEMA during the first Trump administration, called the memos “spot on.” Michael Coen, FEMA’s chief of staff during both the Biden and Obama administrations, said the warnings track concerns shared across the agency’s recent leadership.
Note what Gaynor and Coen are not saying. They are not saying FEMA should not be a drawer. They are not saying disasters should be filed elsewhere. They are saying the drawer is messier than it needs to be — and that the people who own the screwdrivers are watching items accumulate that should have been dealt with years ago.
The clearest example in the reporting is the legacy-disaster count. There are 661 federally declared disasters still open. 348 of them were declared more than five years ago. The Trump administration has closed four of them since Barton wrote her January memo. These are the rubber bands at the back of the drawer that were once useful and are now mostly preventing the drawer from closing. They consume staff time. They distort workload. They generate the kind of low-grade noise that makes it harder to find the screwdriver when you actually need one.
Barton’s proposed fix — a “surge” to close out the legacy disasters — is the recognizable household equivalent of an afternoon spent cleaning the junk drawer.
Who Owns the Screwdriver
There is one more structural point in the article worth pulling out. Coen’s most striking quote is not about disasters at all. It is about decision rights. He says that when he was chief of staff at FEMA, the agency would never have asked DHS for permission to make the kinds of administrative changes Barton is proposing. FEMA would inform DHS — we are changing the process — and proceed.
In the language we have been using here, DHS is the residual claimant for FEMA’s risk. The agency above FEMA in the org chart absorbs the political and budgetary consequences of FEMA’s mistakes, so DHS gets the briefing, gets the after-action report, and — appropriately — gets to weigh in on big strategic moves. But the residual claimant for FEMA’s risk is not the same as the person who decides where the screwdriver goes. FEMA holds the screwdrivers because FEMA is the agency that knows what they are for and how to use them in the dark, with the power out, while the rain is coming sideways. DHS owning the risk does not change that.
What Barton is documenting, perhaps without intending to, is a structural shift in which the residual claimant has started to be asked for approval rather than advice. The screwdriver has not moved. The decision about the screwdriver has. The drawer feels messier as a result not because more things are in it, but because more permissions are required to touch any of them.
The Drawer Is Not the Problem
The point of the junk drawer framework is not that mess is fine. It is that the drawer is doing real work, and that work is invisible until you try to redesign the kitchen without one. Two former FEMA administrators, from administrations of both parties, are looking at the same drawer and saying the same thing. The drawer needs cleaning out. The drawer is not the problem.
With that, I leave you with this.