The Trump administration has the Federal Emergency Management Agency in a doom loop, according to current and former employees frustrated with its direction.
President Donald Trump has called for overhauling the agency and letting states take the lead in disaster response to streamline a process that conservatives criticize as too bureaucratic. But current FEMA leadership has added more red tape and decimated morale, creating an environment that is antithetical to efficiency, these sources say.
More than a dozen current and former FEMA employees told NOTUS that a culture of fear and anxiousness plagues the agency.
“The mood’s been very anxious, very confused, very stressed,” one employee who works in the agency’s Office of Response and Recovery and anonymously signed a letter warning about the future of the agency told NOTUS. “We are used to working in environments where the information changes a lot. Disasters, the information changes all the time, you have to be able to shift, like, on a dime.”
“With this leadership, the information has been so inconsistent, and the guidance we’ve been getting has been so inconsistent that it has basically ground a lot of activities in the agency to a halt,” the employee continued. “There’s a lot of fear at the agency right now. Because we’ve seen that they will move faster to punish us than they would to save kids in Texas.”
Nearly 200 current and former FEMA employees signed an August letter warning members of Congress that the agency’s leaders had compromised its ability to respond to disasters. They said they were concerned it could result in a catastrophic response like the one to Hurricane Katrina.
Phoenix Gibson, who worked on public-assistance mitigation for FEMA in Kansas City, Missouri, but was suspended after signing the letter, described flyers and handouts covering the walls of offices and break rooms advertising mental health resources like suicide hotlines. It struck her as a telltale sign that “indicates a shift within the agency.”
In a statement to NOTUS, a FEMA spokesperson stood behind its current leadership, including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and David Richardson, the acting FEMA administrator.
The statement said that the agency’s “obligation is to survivors, not protecting broken systems.”
“FEMA recognizes the departure of several employees who have played a part in the operation of FEMA under its former focus,” the spokesperson said. “However, it is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform. Change is always hard, especially for those invested in the status quo.”
In conversations with current and former staffers, the concern wasn’t just about past priorities: It hinged around the agency’s work now and in the future.
“I think the general culture of FEMA itself, before it seemed like an agency whose primary mission was to save people,” said James Stroud, one of more than a dozen employees suspended after signing their names to the letter. “Now it seems like the primary goal is to cut costs, and if we save some lives, OK, I guess.”
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FEMA’s response to the July floods in Texas that killed at least 134 people was widely panned as being too slow, even as the Trump administration insisted to NPR that the agency’s disaster call center responded to every call “swiftly and efficiently.” But FEMA employees say that the agency’s response to the floods was delayed by Noem’s rule that expenses over $100,000 require her personal sign off.
In a statement to NOTUS, the administration defended the sign-off policy for spending above $100,000, arguing that it’s aimed at making sure “every recovery dollar is used as effectively as possible” and combines “speed with accountability.”
But nearly every source NOTUS spoke with pointed to this policy as an example of the bottleneck that current leadership has created at the agency. FEMA employees working in disaster recovery told NOTUS that the approval process for spending is “about seven steps,” and applies to everything from disaster aid funding to funding for lighting, supplies and other infrastructure at the agency.
It’s a pace that has infuriated some employees.
“One of the best ways to convey the true scale or depth of this is to say that you, as an adult person living on your own, has to call your mother for every expenditure over $10,” one of the FEMA employees said about the process. “Pretty much everything FEMA does is over $100,000.”
Even making the request can get complicated. Four FEMA employees told NOTUS the memo template frequently changes, sometimes multiple times a week. FEMA staff only have one page to justify their spending and can’t use any acronyms because, as one of the previously mentioned current employees put it, “DOGE is included in the process and they don’t know the acronyms.”
As of Sept. 8, there were nearly 200 memos from FEMA waiting to be approved by the Department of Homeland Security, according to a spreadsheet reviewed by NOTUS tracking documents requiring Noem’s personal sign-off for spending above $100,000. FEMA did not answer a question from NOTUS about how many requests are currently waiting for Noem to green-light.
Current employees told NOTUS they have sent dozens of memos to Noem’s office each day to be approved, but normally receive only a few back. One employee who has been with the agency for more than a decade added that they are left in the dark after the memos are signed “because nobody at the department tells us” when they’ve been signed.
“It’s an absolutely ridiculous system,” this employee told NOTUS. “And for an administration that came in touting how much they’re gonna cut the red tape and bureaucracy, it’s comical the level of bureaucracy they put in place instead.”
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Internally, employees have been concerned about FEMA’s leadership since the start of the second Trump administration. First there was Cameron Hamilton, who served as the head of FEMA from January until May, and wasn’t popular among some FEMA employees, particularly for changes he instituted like canceling the agency’s door-to-door canvassing for disaster survivor victims. In addition, Hamilton halted the agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, program, which allocated federal funding for projects that would decrease the costs and risks of natural disasters.
Five sources say these changes will affect the way the agency conducts outreach and provides service to rural and vulnerable communities.
Hamilton was called before a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee in May, and testified that it wasn’t in the “best interests of the American people” to eliminate FEMA, as Trump and Noem had previously called for. He was fired a day later.
His replacement, Richardson, didn’t improve relationships with staff, according to multiple FEMA employees NOTUS spoke with.
One of those sources told NOTUS that Richardson’s first meeting with FEMA employees — a crowded, early morning in-person all hands at the National Response Coordination Center — in May was both “comical” and terrifying.
FEMA leadership tried “to shove two office buildings into a single room” and several people were turned away as Richardson began speaking, that source said, describing the event as “poorly planned.” Richardson, meanwhile, delivered a serious edict: Stand in his way and he would “run right over you.”
“There’s somewhere south of 20% that decide that they are going to get in the way of change. You can ask anybody, that those 20% of people are a problem. And they have to be sidelined. So don’t get in my way if you are those 20% of people,” Richardson said during the meeting.
This assertion left some of those in the room shaken.
“We were all just, like, a little freaked out,” the source who described the meeting as “comical” said. “Personally, I think my immediate reaction to a lot of things that have happened this year have just been like, OK, this is absurd. And if it weren’t so scary, it would be kind of funny.”
Gibson told NOTUS that she was in Iowa working on recovery efforts following the state’s 2024 flooding disaster when Richardson’s all hands happened. She was “shocked” when she listened to the call later, saying that it played a role in creating a “culture of fear” in the agency.
Richardson is now perhaps best known for reportedly saying that he did not know that the U.S. has a hurricane season. After making that comment, several employees said he became a quieter voice during operations meetings.
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After the Texas floods, White House officials reportedly said that the administration no longer plans to fully terminate FEMA, as the president once floated. But according to the employees NOTUS spoke with, that’s done little to provide relief internally, where staff say the agency’s become untenable.
“What we’ve seen from the Trump administration is there’s just been an erosion of the capacity and capability across the agency with offering early departures,” said Michael Coen, who was FEMA’s chief of staff during the Biden and Obama administrations. “So we’ve seen career staff part, we’ve seen a lot of executives with institutional knowledge depart, which will adversely affect the agency’s ability to rapidly respond and support states for future disasters.”
A FEMA employee in disaster recovery told NOTUS that the change in culture at the agency has taken a toll on staff.
“The severe fatigue that I’m seeing from people, both from all the changes and trying to keep up and the trauma, has fundamentally changed some people into the worst versions of themselves,” the employee said. “And it has been devastating to watch happen.”