FEMA Isn't Ready for Disaster Season, Workers Say

Less than two months before the official start of hurricane season, the nation’s primary disaster response agency faces an uncertain future. Employees working across the Federal Emergency Management Agency tell WIRED that a rapid erosion of tools, external partnerships, and practices—as well as the looming threat of staffing cuts and the exodus of senior staff—is bad news for the country as it heads into the summer, even if the agency reaches the season somewhat intact. FEMA staffers who spoke to WIRED were granted anonymity because they aren’t permitted to speak to the press.

The agency hasn’t seen “huge sweeping changes yet, but it doesn’t take much to completely screw a [disaster] response up,” one employee says. “We are being set up for a really, really bad situation.”

FEMA was established in 1979 as an independent agency by an executive order signed by President Jimmy Carter; after 9/11, it was moved under the Department of Homeland Security. In recent years, expensive disasters like Hurricanes Ian, Ida, and Helene, as well as the Covid-19 pandemic, have caused the agency’s spending to skyrocket.

The agency has long been a favorite target of conspiracy theorists. But last year, after Hurricane Helene tore through parts of North Carolina, Donald Trump, encouraged by right-wing influencers, amplified misinformation around the agency’s response to the storm, putting a political bullseye on FEMA leading into his second presidency.

During his first week in office, Trump signed an executive order establishing a council to review past disasters managed by FEMA and evaluating its current ability to respond to events, with the order criticizing the agency’s “efficacy, priorities, and competence.” In late March, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said publicly at a cabinet meeting that DHS would “eliminate FEMA.” A day later, according to reporting from Politico and the Washington Post, Noem laid out a plan to cut the agency down to just immediate disaster response by October and move it under the purview of the White House.

“Unlike the previous administration’s unprepared, disgraceful and inadequate response to natural disasters like Hurricane Helene, the Trump administration is committed to ensuring Americans effected [sic] by emergencies will get the help they need in a quick and efficient manner,” Geoff Harbaugh, FEMA’s Associate Administrator of the Office of External Affairs, told WIRED in an email. “All operational and readiness requirements will continue to be managed without interruption in close coordination with local and state officials ahead of the 2025 Hurricane Season. Emergency management is best when led by local and state authorities.”

Exactly who is on the review council appointed by the White House—other than Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, co-chairs appointed by the executive order—remains a mystery; some lawmakers claim to have been tapped to serve, but no public list has been published of official members. While January’s executive order requires the council to meet by April 24, the council’s only action thus far appears to be a request for public comment “to gain an understanding of [the public’s] experience with FEMA during disasters.” At the meeting in late March, CNN reported that Noem and other officials discussed the possibility of rescinding the executive order that established the council altogether. (WIRED asked FEMA for a list of council members and updates on when they plan to meet; the agency did not provide those details.)

Nearly three months into the new administration, FEMA also remains without an official leader. The acting chief administrator, Cameron Hamilton, is a former Navy SEAL with no large scale disaster management experience—the first FEMA leader without these qualifications since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which has prompted calls from some Democrats for an investigation into how, exactly, Hamilton got the role.

Around 200 probationary FEMA employees—about 1 percent of staff—were cut in February, part of a massive layoff across the federal government. Since then, subsequent reductions in force have severely crippled other agencies. At Health and Human Services, for instance, thousands of employees in the CDC were fired earlier this month, wiping out entire offices in one fell swoop. It remains to be seen whether or not FEMA will experience mass firings like the recent ones at HHS.

Those looking to make cuts at FEMA have an advantage in the structure of the agency itself, as the majority of staff are already on fixed-term or temporary contracts. The agency’s workforce is designed to be flexible, to scale up or down when needed during disasters. Almost 40 percent of FEMA’s workforce is made up of what are known as Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery Employees, who go by the acronym CORE. CORE employees work in 2–4 year full-time contracted stints, but many stay at FEMA for years, renewing their contracts to work a variety of jobs across the agency. Reservists—a temporary workforce called upon as they’re needed—make up more than a third of the agency’s staff. Just under a quarter of FEMA’s overall staff are part-time or full-time salaried employees.

An email sent mid-April offering retirement and buyout options for FEMA—analogous to the first “fork in the road” email offering deferred resignations that was sent across the government in late January—made some crucial distinctions among staff. The email, seen by WIRED, notes specifically that CORE employees are not eligible for the deferred resignation or early retirement options available to other employees and offered to federal workers at other agencies.

A separate email sent to staff in March, first reported by CBS News and seen by WIRED, instructs supervisors to submit extension requests to the Secretary of Homeland Security for many types of CORE positions. “This change will apply to most FEMA positions, as two-year and four-year COREs and Reservists compose much of the workforce,” the March email reads. The agency, which is already suffering a staffing crisis, could see further cuts if most CORE employees are laid off, or are simply denied for their re-extensions.

Project 2025, the right-wing playbook for the remaking of the federal government that the Trump administration appears to be using as a blueprint for many of its policy decisions, did not explicitly call to eliminate FEMA. It did recommend severe cuts to the agency, stating a need to “shift the majority of preparedness and response costs to states and localities instead of the federal government.” In March, Trump signed another executive order that encouraged shifting the responsibility for disaster management to the states.

But states are now struggling with funding their basic emergency management needs which, in the off season, include planning and preparing for future events as well as recovery from past disasters. This is thanks in large part to frozen FEMA funding, which has been caught up in a broader Office of Management and Budget directive from late January instructing agencies to temporarily pause disbursement of federal assistance to states, and to review that funding to ensure it’s "consistent with the President’s policies and requirements.” Twenty-two Democratic states filed a motion for enforcement against the federal government in February, alleging that the administration’s review of funding has held up crucial FEMA funds for both disasters and state-level emergency management staff.

A representative from Oregon’s emergency management program told WIRED that FEMA was still withholding millions of dollars in funds, including the state’s Emergency Management Performance Grant, which the state uses to pay local emergency managers. Oregon usually reimburses counties for staff salaries at the end of each quarter, but if funding continues to be frozen, the representative said, “we will not be able to reimburse local jurisdictions.”

Local partnerships are also breaking down following new agency policies. Last summer, Middletown, New York, a flood-prone rural city in the Hudson Valley, was selected to participate in a program as part of FEMA’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program. FEMA representatives came out to Middletown to tour floodplain areas, vulnerable water wells, and bridges that had been impacted by floods. Town representatives began regularly meeting with FEMA to talk over grant opportunities and share expertise.

In mid-February, minutes before a scheduled 9 am meeting with town representatives, Middletown’s FEMA contact sent an email cancelling the call and sharing that the BRIC program had been paused. When town council member Robin Williams began searching for other grants to replace the federal funds, she says she realized information from FEMA designating Middletown as a specific at-risk disaster zone had been deleted from the agency’s website, just a few days after the canceled call. FEMA never reached back out to the Middletown group; Williams learned that the BRIC program was ending earlier this month from an article on the environmental news site Grist.

“They haven’t said, ‘Hey, sorry, the program’s actually over with,’” Williams says. “They haven’t said anything.”

An internal FEMA communications memo seen by WIRED sent in early March instructs employees that activities—ranging from webinars to conferences to external meetings—not related to current disasters now require submitting an authorization form to get approval before staff can attend or participate.

“I’ve submitted a ton of things and have been shot down every time,” an employee says. “Thing is, flood and tornado and fire season is practically here. And now we are expected to just sit and wait for these terrible things to happen before we can so much as pick up the phone and talk to our partners.”

In its press release announcing the cancellation of BRIC, a FEMA spokesperson described the program—meant to help vulnerable communities prepare for future storms, floods, and hurricanes—as “another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program.”

“Ending this program will help ensure that grant funding aligns with the President’s Executive Orders and Secretary Noem’s direction and best support states and local communities in disaster planning, response and recovery,” the press release states.

But direct disaster response during a crisis is “only a small slice of what we do and what’s important to talk about,” a FEMA employee says. “Preparedness events, training, webinars, relationship building are essential to emergency management."

Some of the interagency tools FEMA workers rely on for planning are also breaking down. One sea level rise calculator, maintained by the US Army Corps of Engineers, has gone completely offline. Two FEMA employees told WIRED that the administration’s attack on DEI means that many employees have started to steer clear of using any and all tools or datasets that incorporate information on social disparities. This includes the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index. FEMA employees and external partners used the dataset to compare disaster areas with social markers: to identify regions, for instance, with fewer public transportation options, where evacuations might be more difficult, or impoverished areas where low insurance rates mean homeowners might require more financial assistance.

The new lack of this data in FEMA operations, employees say, takes away a valuable tool that allows the agency to better prepare for what’s coming.

“If you can mitigate, you won’t spend as much money constantly responding,” one employee says. “But none of these people are trained in emergency management…[they] just want to gut us so we are only responding to things after they are terrible.”