When you work in crisis for long enough, you stop chasing perfection and start aiming for “less bad.” That’s how Juliette Kayyem thinks about national security, disaster response, and even parenting in 2025.
A professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, former Massachusetts Homeland Security Secretary, and Obama DHS leader, Kayyem has spent decades inside the rooms where uncertainty is the only constant. In this conversation with Monica Medina and Dr. Sweta Chakraborty, she maps the risks Americans face now—from weather to cyber to political violence—and the practical mindset shifts that help families, schools, and cities stay safer.
“In national security, two plus two doesn’t equal four. It’s a range—and often a range of bad choices. My standard is less bad.”
How she got here—and why women excel in crisis
Kayyem never set out to be a “security person.” A civil-rights litigator at the Department of Justice before 9/11, she entered counter-terrorism as a skeptic steeped in civil-liberties cases. Katrina changed her again. Watching basic services fail pushed her from a prevention mindset to preparedness and response.
Along the way, she noticed something the research now backs: women often make faster, sound decisions with incomplete information—a defining condition of crisis leadership.
“We do good enough every day. In crisis, that comfort with limited information is an advantage.”
What’s changed: from “all hazards” to one note
America is still juggling the same categories of risk—weather, cyber, terrorism—but Kayyem warns we’ve drifted from an “all-hazards” approach (prepare broadly; empower locals) to a singular, distorting focus on immigration enforcement. That shift diverts talent and resources away from child-exploitation units, cyber, and other public-safety priorities.
She’s equally alarmed by talk of deploying the National Guard to blue cities: not because cities don’t have crime, but because militarizing local safety breaks the civil-military norm and ignores what actually reduces crime—community policing, outreach, and trust.
“Unicorns and rainbows can’t be your standard. Crime isn’t zero anywhere. Compare across time, not to an imaginary baseline.”
Venezuela, narco-terror, and refusing the wrong frame
On maritime interdictions and rhetoric about “narco-terrorism,” Kayyem is blunt: the facts don’t fit the frame. If the goal is stopping drugs, you don’t pack eight people onto a smuggling boat. And fentanyl supply chains aren’t running through Venezuela. She sees something else: saber-rattling that risks normalizing force without clear legal thresholds or congressional briefings.
Building trust (and using carrots & sticks)
Most Americans still follow public-safety guidance when credible messengers deliver it. The work is tactical: pick the right messengers for each community; be clear about consequences during evacuations; and remember that people who say they don’t trust government still expect it to work when they dial for help.
A darkly effective evacuation line she’s seen used: write your name and SSN on your arm if you refuse to leave—because rescue won’t come for three days. Many “Mr. Freedom” holdouts promptly got in the car.
Radicalization, phones, and the price of aloneness
Kayyem sees a new, unnerving pattern: acts of political violence untethered from clear partisan identities. One driver is isolation—not just loneliness, but aloneness. Her take is specific: more bell-to-bell phone bans in schools; more unstructured, in-person time; fewer helicopter-parent constraints so kids don’t retreat online to find autonomy.
“We’ve limited offline freedom, so kids go where we aren’t.”
Three takeaways for families (the “72 on you” rule)
Kayyem dislikes fear-mongering. She likes agency. Her household playbook is simple:
“72 on you.” Be prepared to self-sustain for three days. That’s water (one gallon per person per day), meds, glasses, diapers—your specifics. It frees first responders to reach those who truly can’t prepare.
Assume comms will fail. Make a plan everyone actually knows (kids included). Phone trees, meeting spots, the hotel’s name when traveling—basic, boring, lifesaving.
Model risk reduction. Wear the helmet. Turn off the nonstop doom TV around anxious kids. Show, don’t just tell.
