Here's a fun riddle. The same government that needs eighteen months to approve a building permit can deploy ten thousand National Guard troops overnight. The same bureaucracy that takes six weeks to process your tax refund can stand up emergency hospitals in parking lots within days. Same institutions, same people, same funding streams — wildly different speed.

This isn't a contradiction — it's a feature. Crises activate a completely different operating mode in government, one with fewer meetings, shorter chains of command, and rules that suddenly become guidelines. Understanding how this switch flips reveals something fascinating about why government moves slowly by default — and what happens, both good and bad, when someone pulls the emergency brake in reverse.

Most of the time, government officials operate inside tightly defined lanes. Your local health department can inspect restaurants but can't close roads. FEMA can prepare disaster plans but can't just start writing checks to survivors. The Environmental Protection Agency can monitor air quality but can't commandeer private resources. These boundaries exist for very good reasons — they prevent overreach and keep power properly distributed across institutions.

Then someone declares an emergency, and those lanes practically evaporate. Emergency declarations are essentially legal skeleton keys. They unlock spending authority that bypasses normal appropriation processes, waive regulations that would normally take years to change, and grant individual executives decision-making power that would ordinarily require committee votes, public comment periods, and multiple layers of bureaucratic review.

Consider the scale of this transformation. During COVID-19, the FDA authorized vaccines through emergency use authorizations in months rather than the typical years-long approval timeline. During Hurricane Katrina, FEMA had authority to spend billions without the usual competitive procurement rules. These dormant powers sit in statute books all the time — they're just sleeping. A crisis is their alarm clock. And when it rings, government wakes up with capabilities that surprise even the people who work there every day.

Takeaway

Government isn't slow because it can't move fast. It's slow because the rules deliberately prioritize caution over speed. Emergencies don't create new capacity — they remove the brakes.

If you've ever tried to get two government agencies to share a database on a Tuesday afternoon, you know it can feel like negotiating an international peace treaty. Agencies protect their turf, guard their budgets, and communicate through formal memos that travel at roughly the speed of continental drift. Interagency coordination in normal times is where good ideas go to quietly die in committee.

But put a hurricane on the radar, and something remarkable happens. Suddenly the Army Corps of Engineers, FEMA, state emergency management, local fire departments, and the Red Cross are all working from the same playbook in the same room. The Incident Command System — originally developed for fighting California wildfires in the 1970s — gives everyone a shared structure, clear roles, and a single chain of command that actually functions.

The secret ingredient isn't the crisis itself. It's that disasters create something vanishingly rare in government: a shared, undeniable priority. In normal times, every agency believes its mission matters most. The education department thinks literacy is the top concern. The transportation department is convinced it's roads. But when a Category 4 hurricane is bearing down on a major city, nobody argues about whose budget line covers the bottled water. The shared threat dissolves turf wars like nothing else can.

Takeaway

Agencies don't struggle to coordinate because they lack ability. They struggle because they lack a shared priority compelling enough to override institutional self-interest.

Speed has a price, and in government, that price is usually oversight. All those rules that make normal operations feel painfully slow — competitive bidding, environmental reviews, public comment periods, inspector general audits — exist because someone, somewhere, at some point abused the absence of those rules. Every annoying piece of red tape started life as a perfectly reasonable safeguard against a very real problem.

When crises suspend these safeguards, the door opens for both heroic improvisation and spectacular waste. After Hurricane Katrina, emergency contracts worth billions went to politically connected firms with minimal competition or scrutiny. During COVID-19, fraud in emergency relief programs reached staggering levels — estimates suggest well over a hundred billion dollars in improper payments across various pandemic programs. That is not a rounding error.

The uncomfortable truth is that we don't have time for normal processes is sometimes completely genuine and sometimes suspiciously convenient. Some officials use crisis authority to cut through real bureaucratic barriers and get help to people faster. Others discover that emergency powers are a remarkably comfortable place to operate — and aren't particularly eager to hand them back. In the thick of a crisis, telling the difference between the two is nearly impossible.

Takeaway

The same flexibility that enables rapid crisis response also creates the conditions for waste and abuse. Speed and accountability exist in genuine tension, and crises force societies to choose between them in real time.

Crises don't transform government into something it isn't. They reveal capacities that are always there but deliberately restrained. The speed, coordination, and decisiveness we admire during emergencies could theoretically exist every day — we've just collectively decided the trade-offs aren't worth it most of the time.

The real lesson isn't that government should always operate in crisis mode. It's that we need better systems for scaling oversight up and down — ones that move fast when lives depend on it without quietly abandoning accountability along the way.