‘We’re not preparing’: As Trump officials vow to eliminate FEMA, the agency is already in turmoil

A member of the FEMA Urban Search and Rescue Task Force searches a flood-damaged property with a search canine in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene along the Swannanoa River on October 4, 2024 in Asheville, North Carolina. (Mario Tama/Getty Images North America/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

As U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vows to “eliminate FEMA,” the agency is in turmoil, with disaster assistance, grant money, and hiring largely stalled, threatening its ability to respond to major disasters, multiple FEMA officials tell CNN.

Top officials from FEMA and U.S. Department of Homeland Security met Tuesday, CNN has learned, to discuss the future of the disaster relief agency and their options for shutting it down.

The group, which included Noem, FEMA Acting Administrator Cameron Hamilton, and long-time Trump ally Corey Lewandowski, debated the possibility of rescinding U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order establishing a FEMA Review Council and instead moving more quickly to dismantle the agency, according to multiple sources familiar with the meeting.

It’s the latest in a series of actions and attacks on FEMA that have stalled the agency’s work and raised concerns about its ability to respond to hurricane season, which is just weeks away.

“March is typically when we’re finalizing hurricane plans. A lot of that got paused,” a FEMA official, who works directly on disaster response, told CNN. “So, it’s already having an impact, which is that we’re not preparing.”

Last week, FEMA employees received an email titled “Hiring Update,” which outlined a new process, effective immediately, requiring that the majority of the agency’s workers, many of whom hold two-to-four-year term positions, be directly approved by Secretary Noem’s team in order to be renewed for another term.

The positions mentioned in the memo, obtained by CNN, include most of the public-facing roles that help deliver assistance to communities during disaster response and recovery. They hold a wide range of responsibilities, such as verifying disaster damage, operating recovery centers and helping victims register for aid.

“It’s practically everybody that goes out in the field,” a FEMA official said. “They are the backbone of the response, particularly in sustaining operations.”

The impacted positions, according to the memo, include the Cadre of On-Call Response Employees (CORE), Reservists, Local Hires, and Temporary Fulltime Employees.

CORE and Reservist employees make up roughly 74 per cent of FEMA’s workforce, according to a report from the Government Accountability Office.

“I think their terms will be allowed to expire, and they won’t be renewed,” another FEMA official told CNN. “I don’t know that it will really be felt until something big and bad happens. And I think the really scary thing is that states are now afraid to complain, because they’re afraid of what the fallout will be.”

Instead of preparing for hurricane season, one official told CNN, they’ve spent days checking workers’ renewal dates and working on justifications for their roles.

“It’s now a fear of, what else?” the official said. “Are we able to get back to work and focus? Our feeling is, no, there will be something else that will pop up that’s going to require a lot of our attention.”

Frozen funds

More than US$100 billion of previously awarded grant money and disaster assistance is currently frozen at FEMA, as agency staff await guidance for issuing payments to ensure they follow Trump’s executive orders restricting funding for immigration programs and sanctuary cities, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.

FEMA officials finally received that guidance Tuesday, which should help those funds start flowing again, according to multiple sources, although the timeline to execute those payments is unclear and concerns about the disruption in the funding persist among officials who spoke to CNN on condition of anonymity.

Nearly all FEMA payments outside of individual disaster assistance have been paused, preventing states, localities and nonprofits from being reimbursed. That includes entities like fire departments that are frequently awarded federal grants to pay for equipment and staffing as well as disaster recovery money to help in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and the wildfires in California.

In February, four FEMA employees, including its chief financial officer, were fired and accused by the Department of Homeland Security of circumventing leadership after approving payments of roughly $80 million in federal grant money to New York City to help shelter migrants. DHS quickly clawed back the funds.

At the time, a spokesperson for DHS told CNN the fired workers “effectively laundered the forbidden funding” and “knowingly hid this information from legal counsel to manipulate the funding process and undermine the Secretary’s order.” Court documents state the payments were mistakenly made “because FEMA was under the misunderstanding” that they were allowed.

The incident has had a chilling effect on FEMA workers, multiple sources have told CNN. Several have voiced fear that a misconstrued payment could cost them their job.

The Trump Administration has already imposed a hiring freeze at FEMA.

Earlier this month, FEMA Acting Administrator Cameron Hamilton sent an email to agency staff announcing he had submitted a plan to Secretary Noem for reducing FEMA’s workforce.

“The plan broadly outlines an approach to reduce the agency’s staffing posture through unification of like-functions and with care that enhances our ability to deliver the mission, examines our geographic footprint, and rebalances federal and state roles in disaster preparedness, response and recovery,” Hamilton wrote in the email, which CNN obtained. “The plan leaves critical decision space for President Trump’s FEMA Review Council to drive long-term systemic change for the future of our agency.”

FEMA has not responded to repeated requests for comment on the details of the reduction in force plan.

Meanwhile, a bipartisan pair of congressmen have introduced a bill that would detach FEMA from DHS and establish it as a cabinet-level agency that reports directly to the President.

The FEMA Independence Act, introduced this week by Florida Representatives Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat, and Byron Donalds, a Republican, aims to cut red tape at the disaster relief agency, which faces an increasing frequency of destructive natural disasters.

Gabe Cohen, CNN