Since the inception of disaster studies in academia after WWII, two kinds of actors have been distinguished as involved in disasters. On the one hand, disasters involve formal actors, such as professional aid workers employed by state-run relief agencies; on the other hand, disasters involve informal actors, including disaster victims, bystanders and volunteers. While in the immediate post-war years the role of the expert in disaster mitigation was valorised, since the 1970s there has been a shift in emphasis toward a more horizontal type of disaster relief that champions grassroots initiatives and bottom-up organising as the preferred method to combat disaster. Once construed as strictly a responsibility of the state, the mitigation and management of disasters has shifted since the 1970s into a matter for civil society: a shift which has been heralded as progressive, democratic and inclusive by existing disaster research.In the following, I argue that this perspective that valorises the participation of actors from civil society in the fight against disasters fails to grasp the systematic reconfiguration of social life that has taken place in the last decades of the 20th century under the banner of disaster. Focussing on the modifications to disaster management in the United States between 1970 and 2012, I show how the inclusion of civil society in the provision of aid services was accompanied by a structural withdrawal of the state from disaster relief and other welfare services. I contextualise this withdrawal in the US government’s general turn to austerity in response to the economic crisis of the 1970s. My account couples the notion of disaster with that of economic crisis on the one hand and structural violence on the other to examine disasters as a specific problem for social reproduction. Disaster thus becomes a lens through which to study the changing roles of the state and civil society in the overall management of social reproduction. Mapping the changes in the disaster sector onto the Long American Downturn between 1970 and 2012, I trace the following double-movement that has affected the spheres of the state and civil society in the second half of the 20th century. On the state level, I examine a movement of inclusion, in which formerly specialist authority on disasters is relinquished and the vernacular skills and capacities of the people are drawn on during emergencies. On the level of civil society, I show how this inclusion is complicated by a real movement of social exclusion, indexed by the increasingly harsh US austerity politics and the exponentially rising unemployment since the 1970s, that raises the number of surplus populations to staggering dimensions. This development informs my hypothesis regarding emergencies today: During the Long American crisis since the 1970s, disasters have served as occasions that absorb the reproductive labour of surplus populations as unwaged inputs, legitimising the U.S.state’s cutback on social spending. I discuss this dynamic in relation to three distinct case studies that travel from California over Chicago to New York to study the patterns of struggle and contestation that communities develop when faced with disasters.