A disaster recovery advocacy group is giving the Federal Emergency Management Agency a failing grade hours ahead of the expected release of the FEMA Review Council’s recommendations for the agency.

The organization Sabotaging Our Safety, which is made up of disaster recovery experts and former FEMA employees, issued a report first reviewed by NOTUS that gave the agency “F” ratings for its leadership, workforce, strategic planning and hurricane preparedness.

“The findings are deeply disturbing,” the report states. “Leadership positions sit vacant. A tenth of the core disaster response workforce has been eliminated. No multi-year strategic plan exists.”

“Training exercises that have taken place every year for half a decade have simply not happened,” the report continues. “Weeks before hurricane season, FEMA is a hollowed-out shell of an agency, utterly unprepared to face even a moderate emergency — let alone a large-scale disaster like Hurricanes Katrina or Helene.”

President Donald Trump established the FEMA Review Council last year to provide guidance on how to improve the agency. After months of delays, the review council is set to unveil its final report on Thursday at a meeting led by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Sabotaging Our Safety’s competing report criticizes several of the administration’s changes to FEMA over the last year, including the Department of Homeland Security’s reassignment of more than 100 disaster response workers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the effort to terminate the agency’s hazard mitigation program.

“Trump’s appointed panel wants to release their own report and pretend everything is fine, that FEMA can weather further cuts. Our scorecard shows exactly why it is not,” Davante Lewis, a Sabotaging Our Safety advisory council member, said in a statement. “Slashing the workforce in half and putting the burden of disaster recovery on the states would not save money. It would cost lives.”

The report also notes that several agency decisions have left its workers unprepared to respond to hurricane season, which begins in June. As an example, it points to FEMA skipping this year’s National Hurricane Conference, which is aimed at helping local communities prepare for the storms.

The agency played a key role at the conference from 2021 to 2025, the report states. In addition, the advocacy group notes that key stimulations aimed at helping the agency prepare for its response during hurricane season have not been “scheduled or documented.”

The report also notes that leadership vacancies in a FEMA region covering Texas and Louisiana are particularly troubling as hurricane season approaches.

The FEMA Review Council’s recommendations were initially set to be released in December, but that meeting was abruptly canceled. In November, reports surfaced that former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem edited the report. Since then, Trump has extended the charter for the review council multiple times.

The review council was planning to recommend shrinking the size and scope of the agency, according to a copy of the report obtained by CNN in December. But FEMA employees with knowledge of the situation told NOTUS last year that the council initially recommended strengthening the agency and removing it from DHS’s purview.

Since taking the helm at DHS, Mullin has reversed several of the changes made to the agency under Noem. He removed the agency’s expense-approval rule and reinstated some employees who were previously placed on administrative leave for criticizing agency leadership.