It’s Hurricane Season. Do You Know Where Your FEMA Director Is?
Dark days at the disaster agency under Trump, with senior leaders gone, staffing down, and money not going out the door as expected.
IT’S BEEN NEARLY SEVEN WEEKS. And they’re still looking for bodies.
On July 4, torrential rains from the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry caused the Guadalupe River to overflow its banks in central Texas, creating a flash flood of such destructive fury it ripped buildings off their foundations. As the waters rose by ten, twenty, and eventually more than thirty feet, people reached for tree branches, grabbed for mattresses or pieces of wood—anything to stay afloat.
Many couldn’t. The floods had torn through a summer camp for girls, killing more than two dozen—including 11- and 13-year-old sisters whose bodies were discovered hours later, still clinging to one another. In a house not far away, a young father died saving his wife, mother, and two small children—telling them, in his final moments, that “I’m sorry, I’m not going to make it. I love y’all.”
It was a heartbreaking natural disaster and, with a death toll that now stands at 138, one of the country’s deadliest of the last quarter century. Yet somehow the subject has more or less disappeared from the national conversation, even though it should be raising alarm bells about the multiple governmental failures that made the tragedy worse—and about what those failures say when it comes to our readiness for the next natural disaster.
The biggest failures appear to have been at the local level, where county officials had rejected proposals to install an early-warning system of sirens, despite the known flood risk to the area—and then, in the days leading up to the flood, failed to make sure the right personnel were on the job and ready to act.
But the federal government seems to have failed too, in ways that trace directly to decisions by the Trump administration—in particular, those of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. One of her responsibilities is overseeing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). And one of the policies she introduced after taking office was requiring that any spending requests for more than $100,000 go through her office for review.
That policy reportedly prevented FEMA from pre-positioning search-and-rescue teams. It also left call centers understaffed and slow to respond because the contract for staffing those centers had lapsed and Noem had yet to approve renewal, according to reporting in the New York Times and National Public Radio.
Holding up money for approval by a cabinet-level official is not the way the federal government has handled disaster spending in the past, and for good reason, as homeland-security expert Juliette Kayyem explained in a Bulwark interview with me last week.
“Either you’re going to deploy those resources or you’re not—deploying them three days late doesn’t help anyone,” said Kayyem, who has served in both state and federal office and now teaches at Harvard. “That search-and-rescue effort has to start within hours to make it worthwhile.”
Administration officials have bristled at the suggestion their policies let down the people of Texas, with Noem insisting “the response time was immediate” and Trump saying at a press conference that a reporter was “evil” for asking questions about the government response.
But neither contradicted any of the reporting about the government’s slow response. And while it’s impossible to know just how much difference the delays in federal action ultimately made, it’s also impossible not to see those delays as part of a larger pattern of management—or, rather, mismanagement—since Trump took over.
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TRUMP HAS TREATED FEMA the same way his administration has treated virtually every other federal agency, by reducing staff through a combination of layoffs and retirements—and withholding, canceling, or cutting spending that Congress had already authorized.
That includes a multi-billion-dollar program to fund state and local disaster-mitigation projects. “It’s really put some communities in tough spots,” William Turner, emergency management director for Connecticut, told me in a phone interview.
Among the affected projects in his state was an initiative to build seawalls and pumps in coastline cities like Stamford and New Haven, where there are signs that flooding is becoming more frequent and more severe, possibly because of global warming.
States have challenged the program’s cancellation and recently won a victory in the lower courts, though that’s no guarantee they will prevail as the case moves through the legal system. “The outlook for those programs is unclear,” Turner said, “unless we can find some other source of funding.”
And the Trump administration may be doing more than holding back mitigation funds. North Carolina has been waiting on more than $100 million in funds to help rebuild after Hurricane Helene, according to an early August investigative article in the Washington Post.1 And that seems to be part of a pattern of approvals for fund requests tending to be slower, according to Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.
Labowitz, who maintains a tracking website called the Disaster Dollar Database, contrasted the quick approval of funds for the Texas floods with much slower approval of funds for the St. Louis area following deadly tornadoes there. “They were really on their own for three weeks in response to an extremely acute disaster, and that’s unusual,” Labowitz told me.
It’s hard to know whether the slow approval of disaster relief reflects a considered policy decision, or simply a bureaucracy that isn’t as responsive as it used to be. One reason to suspect the latter is that, as of April, FEMA was expected to lose more than 20 percent of its workforce through dismissals and early retirements that were part of the Trump administration’s DOGE process.
“We are being set up for a really, really bad situation,” one anonymous employee told Wired in April amid the DOGE cuts. And that was before August, when the administration shifted some FEMA employees over to immigration enforcement—yes, just in time for the heart of hurricane season.
BUT THE MOST WORRISOME SIGN to some emergency-preparedness veterans is what’s happening at the very top of the agency, where leadership has been in chaos.
In May, Trump fired Cameron Hamilton, his initial choice to lead FEMA, one day after Hamilton said during congressional testimony that “I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” With that statement, Hamilton had directly contradicted Trump, who has been talking about eliminating the agency and shifting responsibility to states ever since he toured North Carolina and California in January to see the effects of disasters there.
“I say you don’t need FEMA, you need a good state government,” Trump said at the time.
The official now in charge of FEMA is David Richardson, although technically he is only the “senior official performing the duties of FEMA administrator.” That provisional status is most likely because, by law, the FEMA administrator must have prior experience overseeing emergency management. Richardson doesn’t. (Hamilton didn’t either, and for that reason held the same title.)
Richardson didn’t exactly make a great impression upon taking over. He announced in an early staff meeting that he intended to “run right over” anybody in the department who resisted the administration’s new direction. He also told staff he hadn’t been aware the United States had a hurricane season, although he and the White House said later that was a joke.
Trump plucked Richardson from another position at Homeland Security, where he was serving as director of the Office of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction—a job he was still performing alongside his FEMA responsibilities as of early August, administration officials confirmed to Politico.
It’s not unheard of for officials to hold two positions in the early days of a new administration, when most staff positions are still being filled. But Trump has been president for half a year now.
And it’s not like Richardson has a deep bench of advisers he can call upon for help: Multiple FEMA positions are currently vacant, including the deputy administrator and deputy chief of staff, as well as at least three of the ten regional administrators. Two of those missing regional administrators had responsibility for the Southeast and Gulf regions—in other words, the two parts of the country most likely to deal with hurricanes.
The three recently departed career regional administrators collectively had many decades of experience, according to Pete Gaynor, who ran emergency management for the city of Providence and then all of Rhode Island before serving in (and eventually leading) FEMA during Trump’s first term.
Experience is critical in a disaster, Gaynor said, because it means the people managing the federal response have the contacts, knowledge, and trust to act quickly—and to coordinate activities among a variety of government agencies and private-sector organizations.
“When you have lost three [regional administrators] that probably have 120 years of experience between them in virtually the same month, in the beginning of hurricane season,” Gaynor told me in an interview, “let’s just say that if I was the administrator today, I would have the fire alarm going on right now.”
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS have offered a variety of rationales for their hasty, sweeping overhaul—arguing, for example, that FEMA’s disaster-preparedness and mitigation program was wasteful and more about “political agendas than helping Americans recover from natural disasters.”
But the primary argument has been about the balance between federal and state responsibility—and the need for states to take on more, or at least use that responsibility differently. Figuring out how to do that is one of the goals for a FEMA Review Council that Trump created, and that has met a handful of times since the spring.
That’s reasonable enough in principle. There’s no shortage of ideas for improving FEMA, and plenty of opportunities for productive debate about the contours of the federal-state relationship. The more you talk to the people whose background includes working in emergency preparedness directly, the more you hear ideas—or at least encounter an openness to ideas—that cross party lines, or aren’t partisan at all.
One such person is Kayyem, who served in Democratic administrations (and who once ran in the Massachusetts gubernatorial primaries as a Democrat). In our interview, she said she thought there was a strong case for changing financial incentives for post-disaster spending, so that communities especially prone to disasters don’t keep rebuilding in the exact same way in the exact same places.
That could mean some tough love in a red state like Louisiana or Texas—or in a blue redoubt like California—and Kayyem was not shy about suggesting Biden could have done more to be tough with states.
But these are difficult political conversations, Kayyem acknowledged. That’s why the best way (and perhaps the only way) to make that kind of progress is through a careful, deliberate, bipartisan process led by well-established and widely trusted leaders.
That’s not Trump’s way, Kayyem noted, pointing to the many times he has injected politics into disaster management2 during his first term. And if things go wrong during or after a disaster in this term, she predicted, he’d look to deflect the blame.
“‘Being ready’ is such a hard thing to prove, to quantify,” she told me in a follow-up conversation this week. “Obviously, fewer people and dollars committed to disaster management means fewer needs will be met. But I suspect Trump will say that any bad response or deadly disaster is the fault of the states or locals who were not ready, as compared to a deficient federal response that was meant to support them.”
The good news is that, despite the DOGE cuts and leadership exodus, FEMA is still full of career public servants who bring their own skills and experience to the job. With their efforts, FEMA may be able to handle the next hurricane—or flood, or wildfire, or tornado—not because of Trump’s leadership but in spite of it.
Jonathan, Thanks for the excellent reporting on this critical topic. Everywhere you look inside our government has been diminished by Trump and his administration. Trump has no regard for anybody but himself ,his family and billionaire buddies. When people die from disasters, shootings or health care failings Trump rarely says a word unless it's somebody he liked or supported him. He's a one in a millennium abomination and Americans are going to suffer greatly because of it.
What, you didn’t point out that Trump shared resources with Puerto Rico, don’t you remember, he threw paper towels into the crowd!