The Trump administration cut the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s workforce without a plan, Congress’ watchdog found.
The disaster-response agency is at risk of being unprepared and without the necessary staff to respond to future emergencies, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released Tuesday.
As of May, FEMA has pushed out over 6,400 employees since President Donald Trump took office last year, according to data maintained by the Office of Personnel Management. FEMA is now trying to hire nearly 350 employees deemed a priority by the agency, according to the GAO, although the watchdog says that as of last month, FEMA still hasn’t done the analysis and planning related to its workforce necessary to make sure that it’s prepared for future disasters.
“FEMA did not base its workforce reduction decisions or proposed future workforce actions on an analysis of the current state of its workforce or a forecast of future requirements,” the report says. “As a result, FEMA does not know the impact of these changes on its capacity to meet mission needs now or in the future.”
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After scrapping its strategic plan in May of last year, the agency waited to develop a new one until a FEMA Review Council established by Trump issued its report, which didn’t happen for another year due to several delays in its release. Typically, FEMA’s strategic plan would be used to guide workforce planning. The panel ultimately recommended in May of this year that much of the responsibility for disaster response be shifted to state and local government.
In the meantime, FEMA is still without goalposts to guide its actions. Because of this, FEMA hasn’t conducted workforce planning for future incidents — including the 2026 hurricane season, the GAO says.
The office said that it found “no evidence” that DHS or FEMA leadership assessed the impact of the agency’s move earlier this year to reduce the number of on-call employees who help with disaster recovery. In May, the agency began offering employees new appointments after previously not renewing their contracts.
Since Trump took office, FEMA did submit a staffing plan to DHS late last year that proposed cutting FEMA’s workforce in half. But there isn’t any evidence that that was based on a workforce analysis, either, the GAO says. That proposed reduction to 11,383 employees was made despite staffing analysis from program and regional offices that recommended the agency have 23,000 employees.
“With the start of the 2026 hurricane season and the increasing cost and complexity of federal support as natural disasters become more frequent and intense, FEMA is facing similar or greater risk of disaster workforce capacity and competency limitations than the agency faced in 2024 following Hurricanes Helene and Milton,” the watchdog agency said in the report.
Long-standing workforce challenges hampered FEMA’s response to those back-to-back disasters in 2024, the GAO has previously reported.
As part of its latest report, the GAO recommended that lawmakers consider providing “additional accountability” by mandating that future workforce changes at FEMA are informed by workforce planning at the agency and requiring that FEMA report to Congress on its workforce planning process before every hurricane season.
The report comes after a tumultuous year and a half for the agency, which has had four acting administrators since January 2025. This is both the longest it hasn’t had a confirmed administrator and the highest turnover in at least 15 years, according to the GAO.
Trump nominated one of those previous acting administrators, Cameron Hamilton, to lead the agency in May after ousting him just a year prior over Hamilton publicly breaking with the administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency. He’s yet to be confirmed by the Senate.
FEMA is also in the midst of an ongoing lawsuit arguing that separating the agency’s on-call response and recovery employees by refusing to renew their terms was unlawful.
DHS said in a response included in the GAO report that it “remains committed to continuing to help people before, during, and after disasters, as we seek to bring real reform to FEMA to meet the challenges of mission delivery and enhance how we assist survivors.”
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