If, like me, you’re worried about a large hurricane making landfall on the United States, you may be particularly worried about whether Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will have the resources needed to respond to a major storm. That’s because the second Trump administration has carried out severe attacks on FEMA, including calling for dismantling the agency, pushing the burden of disaster response and recovery to the states and reducing and delaying disaster assistance funding to states and communities. Add to that a government shut down, and state and local governments must be prepared to face their next disaster with limited FEMA resources.
A fair question to ask is:
Will FEMA be ready for disaster response and recovery in its current hobbled state, especially when many other federal resources will literally be shut down?
A look at FEMA’s ‘normal’ response and recovery operation
First let’s explore what a typically effective FEMA response looks like: Hurricane Milton is a good case study of how FEMA is supposed to respond in a hurricane.
On October 9 last year, Hurricane Milton made landfall as a category 3 hurricane in Siesta Key in the Tampa Bay area, causing major destruction across central and eastern Florida and impacting six states due to high winds, storm surge, rain and flooding. The storm followed Hurricane Helene and hit many of the same areas in rapid succession in a year when the Atlantic hurricane season was particularly active with 18 named storms and five that made landfall in the US and two as major hurricanes (Hurricanes Helene and Milton).
Ahead of Hurricane Milton making landfall, FEMA had five staging bases to store food and water ahead of time and had 1,000 responders on the ground. Also ahead of landfall, President Biden issued emergency disaster and major disaster declarations for a few Florida counties that were going to be hit hardest, enabling resources to support efforts such as evacuations and sheltering.
Post landfall, President Biden issued additional major disaster declarations for the Florida counties that were in Milton’s path and allocated both public and individual assistance to the those counties. By October 13, FEMA had 8,500 staff deployed to help response and recovery for both Hurricanes Helene and Milton.
The total federal disaster assistance funding for Hurricane Milton included a total of $1.2 billion of Public Assistance for emergency and permanent work, $852 million for Individual and Households Program and $42 million for the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP). According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the total obligations for Hurricane Milton within the first three months were $2.6 billion and an estimated $4.4 billion for the year. FEMA officials stated the “agency reached the highest level of deployed staff in agency history” in response to Hurricanes Helene and Milton.
Fast forward to today: A glimpse of FEMA in disarray
Today, President Trump has been in office for nine months, and during this time has wreaked havoc on FEMA, putting the agency in an even worse situation during a government shutdown. What will happen if a hurricane makes landfall or if FEMA must respond to some other disaster like the tragic Texas flash flooding?
My top concerns on FEMA’s ability to respond to a major disaster are:
- Very low disaster funds: FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund (DRF) which supports federal disaster response and recovery is extremely low. As of September 15, the DRF monthly report reports $2.3 billion available for major disaster declaration assistance and readiness (the majors/base balance) and $4.8 billion for pre-disaster mitigation for a total of $7.1 billion in the DRF. A proposed $22.5 billion supplemental funding package is caught up in the stalled budget negotiations and nothing will happen during the shutdown.
- FEMA staff downsized: At the start of the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, FEMA had an exceedingly low level — 12 percent — of its incident management workforce available to respond to disasters. We then saw the Trump administration implement a FEMA workforce reduction by 9.5 %, a portion of whom were FEMA leadership, causing a major brain drain to the agency. The current government shutdown has furloughed another almost 4,000 FEMA employees (roughly 15% of employees that won’t be available). If a disaster happens, FEMA will be strained to provide sufficient employees to respond given the enormous reduction in workforce. FEMA will hopefully contract “Surge Capacity Force” volunteers (a deployment of federal workforce volunteers during catastrophes). However, it remains unclear what this administration will do given their actions and policies to date. Historically, there are no documented cases of a hurricane making landfall during a federal government shutdown.
- Delayed disaster declarations and cancelled assistance: President Trump is playing politics with congressionally allocated disaster relief funds in ways that we’ve never seen before by delaying disaster declarations and reimbursements to states and local governments and revoking Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) funding which is typically allocated along with public and individual assistance after a major disaster declaration. In addition, the president attempted to cancel and redirect $4 billion from the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program, leaving local governments in the lurch. Thanks to a court injunction, FEMA legally can’t redirect the funds elsewhere, but states are still unable to access the funds granted to them. Both HMGP and BRIC funding are critical pieces of pre-disaster assistance that support communities in ways that help them rebuild and restore their infrastructure like wastewater treatment plants and bridges to withstand future storms. Finally, President Trump halted $300 million in Emergency Management Performance Grants (EMPG), a crucial pot of funding for communities in their efforts to prepare for disasters. The EMPG helps fund local emergency management staff and related costs such as training, equipment, and public education that is so badly needed.
- FEMA bureaucracy: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and FEMA acting administrator David Richardson together have added a level of bureaucracy and dysfunction never seen before at FEMA. Secretary Noem issued an order that any contract over $100,000 must be personally approved by her, which will continue to slow down response and recovery actions that need to happen rapidly. We saw the tragic results of this policy during the flash flooding in Texas. The Wall Street Journal reported that basic contracts for things like computer operating systems haven’t been renewed, slowing down grant and contract approvals for a wide variety of things such as drinking water, updating flood maps and storm surge monitoring data. The same article found that to get funding approvals for the level of spending for Hurricanes Helene and Milton, employees would need to process a minimum of 80 funding approvals through Secretary Noem.
- Lack of FEMA leadership: As I’ve written previously, acting FEMA administrator David Richardson has zero emergency management experience (a requirement for the job) and was literally missing in action during the tragic Texas flash flooding. His own staff were unable to reach him by phone for 24 hours, even as he holds two jobs within this administration (yes, you read that right).
In yet another blow to disaster preparedness, this time in the flood insurance arena, Congress and the Administration let the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) lapse. While existing policy holders are not affected, no new or renewal policies can be issued. Homebuyers looking to purchase a home in flood prone areas may not be able to close on the property. If a homeowner is caught with a lapsed NFIP policy and is unable to afford a private insurance policy and is hit by a flood, they could be financially at risk.
What’s the bottom line?
Together these five concerns are a bleak picture for FEMA’s ability to adequately respond to a major disaster in a timely and organized fashion with resources and staff that can be deployed ahead of time if possible. I worry we’ll see yet another delinquent response similar to how FEMA’s leadership mishandled the tragic Texas flash flooding.
State, local, tribal, and territorial governments must prepare to be on their own as a worst-case scenario. If there is another storm like Hurricane Milton, we must expect the opposite of what we saw for that response: a lack of pre-positioning resources like water, food and first responders, a delay in getting resources to the disaster site, a delay in emergency and disaster declarations and allocating the three types of disaster assistance (public and individual assistance, and hazard mitigation), and tragically above all, survivors will suffer needlessly.
Action during the calm before the storm
While I hope the Atlantic hurricane season ends quietly, and even if no additional disasters come to pass this year, we need Congress to hear from you. Please reach out to your members of Congress and urge them to:
- provide oversight and accountability of the Trump administration’s FEMA leadership;
- pass supplemental funding for the Disaster Relief Fund;
- pass robust budgets for FEMA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA);
- release the disaster assistance and pre-disaster mitigation funding states and communities are counting on; and
- reauthorize NFIP and make meaningful progress towards major reforms to the program.
For those who live in the Washington, DC area and would like to support FEMA, there will be a rally outside of FEMA headquarters on October 17, 2025.