A group of current and former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) employees warned Monday that the Trump administration is weakening the disaster response agency’s capacity and preventing it from carrying out its mission.
In a letter, the 181 current and former staffers particularly pointed to an administration policy requiring Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to conduct a “personal review and approval of all contracts, grants and mission assignments over $100,000.”
They said this “reduces FEMA’s authorities and capabilities to swiftly deliver our mission.”
“Consequences of this manual review became tragically clear during the July 2025 floods in Kerrville, Texas, when mission assignments were delayed up to 72 hours; FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue Branch Chief resigned, citing these delays as cause,” the staffers wrote.
They also lamented there is no congressionally approved administrator helming the agency and said its current leader is not qualified for the position.
The letter comes as the Trump administration has floated the idea of eliminating the agency altogether, and has generally sought to diminish its role while placing more responsibility on states.
The staffers said such policies are making things worse.
“Cuts to these programs prioritize the appearance of cost reduction and empowerment of SLTT [State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial] partners but will result in an opposite outcome,” they wrote.
“When we cannot work directly with our SLTT partners in providing training and technical assistance, we lose critical opportunities to maintain trust, strengthen systems, improve preparedness, and serve the American communities we swore an oath to protect at the moments of their most dire need,” they added.
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees FEMA, defended the Trump administration’s moves.
“The Department of Homeland Security, under the leadership of Secretary Kristi Noem, is committed to ensuring FEMA delivers for the American people. For too long, FEMA was bogged down by red tape, inefficiency, and outdated processes that failed to get disaster dollars into survivors’ hands. The Trump Administration has made accountability and reform a priority so that taxpayer dollars actually reach the people and communities they are meant to help,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
“It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform. Change is always hard. It is especially for those invested in the status quo. But our obligation is to survivors, not to protecting broken systems,” the statement continued, pointing to reforms including “Rapid, upfront funding was provided in New Mexico following recent flooding — a shift away from slow, reimbursable models that left families waiting for years in the past.”
In a letter called the “Katrina Declaration,” named after the 2005 hurricane that killed hundreds of people, the current and former FEMA staffers said the agency is losing progress made in the aftermath of the storm.
“Hurricane Katrina was not just a natural disaster, but a man-made one: the inexperience of senior leaders and the profound failure by the federal government to deliver timely, unified, and effective aid to those in need left survivors to fend for themselves for days,” they wrote.
The staffers noted that such failures resulted in the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 (PKEMRA), but warned that current policies could take the nation backwards.
“Two decades later, FEMA is enacting processes and leadership structures that echo the conditions PKEMRA was designed to prevent,” they wrote.
The letter was published online but was addressed to the Federal Emergency Management Agency Review Council, which the Trump administration set up to explore ways to reform the agency. It also was sent to various congressional committees.
The FEMA staffers had additional concerns that they outlined, including cuts to risk reduction programs, climate science and the agency’s workforce.
They called on Congress to make FEMA a “cabinet-level independent agency,” defend the agency from “further interference from DHS, including illegal impoundments of appropriated funding,” and protect employees from “politically motivated firings.”
The administration’s cuts to the disaster agency have come under particular scrutiny in light of the deadly floods in Texas. The administration has, in recent weeks, walked back its calls to ax the agency outright, but has doubled down on its assertions that it hopes to dole out less money through the agency and give states more responsibility.
Staffers at other agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have published similar letters.
Updated at 11:33 a.m.
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