Top House Democrats want assurances from the Trump administration that cuts to the Federal Emergency Management Agency won’t stifle the government’s ability to respond to the imminent hurricane season.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, the ranking member in the Committee on Homeland Security, sent a strongly worded letter Wednesday to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with questions he claims she had an “inability to answer” during this month’s budget hearings.
“I asked you about your desire to ‘eliminate’ FEMA and what plans DHS or FEMA has for responding to catastrophic disasters as the United States heads into hurricane season if FEMA is subject to ‘dramatic reforms,’ as you put it,” Thompson wrote in his letter to Noem. “You testified that DHS and FEMA have no plans.”
President Donald Trump’s 2026 fiscal-year skinny budget proposes cutting $646 million from FEMA’s spending on top of already making staffing cuts and ending some of its grant programs. On Wednesday, FEMA announced the departure of 16 senior executives in a sweeping reorganization of the agency.
Thompson’s letter comes two weeks after Noem reemphasized Trump’s desire to “eliminate FEMA as it exists today” and a day before White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt rejected the idea that storm readiness was being overlooked by the administration.
Leavitt told reporters she couldn’t speak to the decision to shake up FEMA leadership — including the firing of acting chief Cameron Hamilton — right before what’s predicted to be an above-average hurricane season, though she insisted that disaster response would be intact.
“The administration and the National Security Council here at the White House is monitoring storms and national disasters that are happening across the country at all times,” Leavitt said. “We’re briefed on those. The administration is briefed on those and Secretary Noem is leading that effort for sure.”
It’s not just Democrats with requests regarding disaster response.
After a devastating tornado struck areas throughout Kentucky and Missouri on Friday, Sen. Josh Hawley asked Noem on Tuesday to expedite the Missouri governor’s request for FEMA funds to clean up debris and for individual assistance. He also said the state has three pending requests from previous storms which have gone unanswered by the administration.
“We’ve lost almost 20 people now in major storms just in the last two months in Missouri. It has been a terrible spring for us,” Hawley said. “We are desperate for the assistance in Missouri.”
Thompson told NOTUS the White House’s reassurances are not enough.
“No one should take any comfort from statements from the White House indicating that they are at all ready for hurricane season,” Thompson said in a statement following Leavitt’s press briefing. “In fact, we know 20 percent of FEMA’s staff has left and just yesterday we heard they purged senior career leadership. This is setting FEMA back and hurricane season hasn’t even begun yet.”
Beyond its preparation for the hurricane season, Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee want to see proof of FEMA’s failures and dysfunction at the agency that the president says warrant its dismantling. During Noem’s hearing with the committee two weeks ago, ranking member Rep. Rosa DeLauro requested a follow-up report with evidence of this.
“That would be important to those of us who are appropriating dollars,” DeLauro told Noem. “I think it’s very clear from what you said that you and the president both really want to dismantle the federal government and the agencies that have provided service to the American people for decades.”
Thompson and other lawmakers worry that as disasters pile up in different regions, scaling down the federal government’s current mechanism for storm response is counterproductive.
“With dozens of disaster declarations still pending around the country, and hurricane season starting in just 10 days, we know that the Trump administration will be unable — or unwilling — to properly respond to a disaster,” Thompson said. “They have no plan and we know states simply cannot handle disasters solely on their own. This will only put lives at unnecessary risk — all in the name of politics.”
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Calen Razor is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.