She'd Do It Again, Not the Same Way

The Futures section presents speculative fiction. Margaux "Go" Godbout is an imagined character. The federal programs, documented failures, and institutional patterns she describes are real.¹²³

We meet at a Waffle House off Highway 24 in Houma, Louisiana, because Go suggested it and I wasn't going to argue. Nobody who's worked with her calls her Margaux. She's 46, compact, with reading glasses pushed up on her head and a laptop bag that has survived several administrations. She orders coffee and a pecan waffle. She eats while she talks. She talks a lot.

Go spent eight years as a state-level coordinator on one of the first federally funded community climate relocations in the United States. The kind of project that gets described in grant applications as a "replicable model" and in congressional testimony as a "blueprint." She secured funding, navigated inter-tribal politics, translated HUD fair-housing law to families who had been promised something more specific, and managed reporting relationships with at least five federal agencies at once. The first families moved in 2022. By 2025, residents were reporting rainwater seeping through doorways, malfunctioning appliances, and flooded yards.² Management of the site has since transferred to its third institutional home.⁴

She still works in climate adaptation. She still believes the move was necessary. She ordered a second waffle.

You spent eight years on a project that's now widely described as a cautionary tale. How do you hold that?

Go: I hold it the way you hold anything that took eight years. Badly, and with my whole body. [laughs] No, look. The island was losing land at a rate that was not theoretical. People were watching their yards become ocean. So the options were: move now, with federal money and some kind of plan, or move later, alone, after a storm, into a FEMA trailer. That's it. Those were the two doors. I picked the one with a floor.

But the homes are failing.

Go: Yeah.

That's it?

Go: What do you want me to say? The homes are failing. I know. I've read the same reporting you have. I've talked to the families. Some of them still have my cell number. Chris Brunet said it wasn't a celebration.² He's right. It's not a celebration. But he's not in the Gulf of Mexico, either, which is where his old house would be.

Tell me what the job actually was. Day to day.

Go: Oh God. Okay. Imagine you're a wedding planner, but the bride and groom have different last names for the wedding, the caterer is a federal agency that requires a benefit-cost analysis before they'll confirm the menu, the venue is owned by a state office with different ideas about the guest list, and also there's no lead coordinator. You're just the person everyone calls.⁵ That's the job. You are the phone that rings.

And most of what I did was reporting. Each agency has its own cycle, its own metrics, its own definition of "progress." You're writing the same story seven different ways for seven different audiences, none of whom are the families. The families are the thing the reports are about. They're not the audience. They never were.

The GAO found that no federal agency has the authority to lead climate migration assistance.⁵ What does that mean in practice?

Go: It means you're building a house and nobody owns the foundation. HUD money for the structures, but HUD doesn't do infrastructure. FEMA money for resilience, but FEMA's whole framework is disaster response. They're designed to put things back the way they were, not build something new. BIA's relationship is with the tribe, not the state, and when there's a political dispute within the tribe, BIA freezes funding and you're standing there with a half-built community and a reporting deadline.

You're describing what happened in Alaska, at Mertarvik.

Go: I'm describing what happened everywhere. Federal money arrives in pieces, from different agencies, on different timelines, with different rules. Nobody funds operations. Nobody funds maintenance. The capital project gets built. The ribbon gets cut. The cameras leave. And then the community is alone with a sewage system designed for a school and a dormitory, not a town.³

Were you the one who told families it would be better?

Go: [long pause]

I told families it would be different. I told them the new site was above the flood line. I told them the homes would be built to current code. Both of those things were true. What I did not tell them, because I did not know, because nobody knew, because there is no manual for this⁶, is that the contractor would cut corners. That the state would rush construction to meet a political timeline. That the appliances would fail in the first year. That management would transfer to a third agency before anyone fixed the drainage.

I told them what I believed. I believed it because the grant application said it. The grant application said it because that's what you have to say to win a competitive federal process.⁴ You don't win $48 million by writing, "We think this will be moderately better than the catastrophe these families currently face, assuming sustained institutional commitment that historically does not materialize." You win by saying "replicable model." You win by saying "blueprint."

And then you have to live inside the thing you said.

Do you think about the word "blueprint" differently now?

Go: A blueprint assumes someone will actually build the thing. We had the document. What we didn't have was [stops] ... we didn't have the country. We didn't have a country that knows how to do this. We had a pilot program for a program that doesn't exist.⁷

Jackie Schaeffer, who worked on the Alaska relocation for years, called it "a cautionary tale instead" of a model.⁶ Does that fit yours too?

Go: Jackie's right. She's been right about most things longer than most people have been paying attention. But a cautionary tale still assumes someone's listening. Someone has to have made the first mistake for the tale to work. And I'm [taps the table] one of the people who made the first mistake. I'd do it again. Not the same way. But I'd do it.

Why?

Go: Because the island is gone. Because Newtok is gone. Because the next twenty communities on the list don't have eight years to wait for a better federal framework.⁸ Because somebody has to be in the room when the grant comes through, and that person has to know the grant is not the same thing as the outcome, and she has to push anyway.

You want to know what keeps me up? It's not the policy failure. Policy fails all the time. It's that I stood in front of families and said this will work, and then the agencies that were supposed to make it work saw the damage and walked away. I carry both of those. The promise I made and the system that broke it. Both of those are mine.⁹

But the alternative was nobody in the room. The alternative was the storm, the FEMA trailer, the scattered diaspora, the tribe that never reconstitutes. That's not theoretical. That's what happens to the communities that don't get the grant.

What would you tell the next coordinator?

Go: [long pause] Fund the maintenance. Fund the operations. Don't let anyone call it a blueprint until someone's lived in it for five years. And [looks out the window] don't give out your cell number.

[She laughs. It doesn't quite land.]

Go pays for both waffles. She has a meeting in Thibodaux at 2, consulting on a drainage study for a parish considering a buyout program. She says it's going well. She says that about everything.

Footnotes

1. Inside Climate News / Floodlight, "As Millions Face Climate Relocation, the Nation's First Attempt Sparks Warnings and Regret," September 28, 2025. https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28092025/louisiana-isle-de-jean-charles-climate-relocation/ ↩

2. Floodlight, "Isle de Jean Charles Climate Relocation: Broken Promises," September 26, 2025. https://floodlightnews.org/isle-de-jean-charles-climate-relocation-broken-promises/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. ProPublica / KYUK / Washington Post, "Newtok Was Supposed to Be a Model for Climate Relocation. Here's How It Went Wrong," May 29, 2025. https://www.kyuk.org/science-and-environment/2025-05-29/newtok-was-supposed-to-be-a-model-for-climate-relocation-heres-how-it-went-wrong ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Louisiana Office of Community Development, Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement Project. https://locd.la.gov/programs/isle-de-jean-charles-resettlement-project ↩ ↩²

5. Environmental and Energy Study Institute, "Last Resort and Next Frontier: Community-Driven Climate Relocation," June 17, 2025. https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/last-resort-and-next-frontier-community-driven-climate-relocation ↩ ↩²

6. KYUK, "There Are Lessons to Be Learned from What Went Wrong with Newtok's Relocation," June 11, 2025. https://www.kyuk.org/public-safety/2025-06-11/there-are-lessons-to-be-learned-from-what-went-wrong-with-newtoks-relocation ↩ ↩²

7. Type Investigations, "Leaving the Island," investigative podcast series, March 10, 2025. https://www.typeinvestigations.org/investigation/2025/03/10/leaving-the-island/ ↩

8. Center for Public Integrity, "Leaving the Island: The Messy, Contentious Reality of Climate Relocation," 2022. https://publicintegrity.org/environment/harms-way/leaving-isle-de-jean-charles-climate-relocation/ ↩

9. The Lancet Planetary Health, "Moral Injury as an Inclusive Mental Health Framework for Addressing Climate Change Distress," March 2023. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(22)00335-7/fulltext ↩