FEMA at 'high risk' of disrupting 'life-saving' disaster relief, per internal memo

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Hurricane season in the United States kicks off this Sunday, June 1st, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is not prepared.

In an internal memo obtained by The Handbasket that was sent on Thursday to Acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson by Stephanie Dobitsch, Associate Administrator for Policy & Program Analysis, Dobitsch outlined the status of “critical functions” at the agency that a working group determined were at “high risk” of not properly functioning because of “significant personnel losses in advance of the 2025 Hurricane Season.” It offers justifications for certain functions being included in the report, and “corrective action” staff can ostensibly take to fix them. The document paints a picture of an agency in charge of mitigating disasters that’s in the midst of its own.

One slide in the memo, which was also shared with approximately 30 members of FEMA senior leadership, pertains to staffing at Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center, a critical high security facility in Virginia. (It contains the nuclear bunker where congressional leaders were stashed on 9/11.) The slide states that “staffing was already at a critical low at the beginning of 2025” and because of departures “the facility is at risk of not being fully mission capable.”

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem visited Mount Weather in early April and posted on X, “This DHS Command Center is crucial to emergency relief and federal coordination in the face of disaster.” But now Acting Administrator Richardson has been made aware that the facility is in astonishing danger.

Another slide in the memo details the high risks facing FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery—what a FEMA staffer told me is “THE disaster response program.” It lists issues with Resource Deployment; Disaster Staffing; Operational Guidance; Planning, Training and Exercising; Interagency Coordination; and Pre-Staging Assets. “Failure to mitigate or eliminate identified risks in critical functions will challenge the Agency's ability to execute response and initial recovery operations and may disrupt life saving and life sustaining program delivery,” the slide reads.

Under the heading of “Resiliency,” the memo details the high risk of “Potentially lapsing almost $3B in grant funding to hundreds of direct grantees and thousands of subgrantees.” It attributes the issue to, among other things, “Inability of ICE to advise on Sanctuary Jurisdictions and accept role for program design.” The resiliency slide also notes the high probability of “Timely Payment of Flood Insurance Claims” being disrupted. 

The memo also notes that FEMA Mission Support lacks critical Information Technology (IT) infrastructure to “build out secure and maintain services supporting local field office disaster operations.” In other words, they lack the technical manpower to quickly stand up a field office when disaster strikes. 

FEMA has found itself between a rock and a Trump place since January. The administration has made it clear it wants to vastly reduce the size of the agency or scrap it altogether, allowing states to be responsible for a majority of their own disaster recovery. When former Acting Administrator Cameron Hamilton testified before Congress in early May that he didn’t think the agency should be eliminated entirely, he swiftly found himself out of a job.

The day before the internal memo went out, Wired reported that FEMA had scrapped its 2022-2026 strategic plan with no replacement to speak of. “We are huge planners,” one employee told Wired. “Things like the strategic plan have big downstream effects, even if it’s not immediate operationally.”

Also concerning for FEMA is the recent departure of 16 members of leadership, as Reuters reported last week. “The mass departure of senior talent represents a significant loss of institutional knowledge that will further degrade FEMA's capacity to respond to disasters,” Michael Coen, former FEMA chief of staff under the Obama and Biden administration, told Reuters. 

The internal concern of high risk of critical functions being lost, combined with the scrapping of the strategic plan and loss of upper-level staff make it seem inconceivable that FEMA could adequately respond to the disasters that are sure to come—especially as disasters are made worse by climate change.

For staffers who remain at FEMA, the frustration builds by the day. “FEMA employees want to be ready for hurricane season and meet the needs of the mission, but the staffing cuts and uncertainty have removed or driven away loads of talent and institutional knowledge,” one staffer told me. They described an environment with extremely low morale where employees feel like they could be fired at any moment.

Compounding all of these factors is Richardson’s leadership, which began with him telling all staff “Don’t get in my way…I will run right over you.” Richardson joined FEMA this month from the DHS Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, where he had zero emergency management experience. He brought along a team with him from that office to help him manage his new role, creating more gaps in knowledge, according to FEMA staffers.

A few days after Richardson’s initial introduction to staff, he held a town hall meeting via Zoom to give a little speech and answer some pre-vetted questions. I listened in on the town hall in its entirety, which was a mixture of ignorance, incoherence and blind loyalty to Trump. Staffers I spoke to about it were aghast at Richardson’s clear lack of knowledge while holding the agency’s top role.

While agency staffers wait with bated breath for guidance about how to do their jobs with scarce resources, or to find out if they even have jobs at all, Richardson seems intent on carrying out Trump’s agenda by denying federal aid.

The same day this latest memo went out, Richardson sent a letter to North Carolina Governor Josh Stein rejecting his appeal for FEMA to cover 100% of extended aid in the devastating aftermath of Tropical Storm Helene. Richardson told Stein, a Democrat, it was “not warranted.”

Apparently properly staffing the agency tasked with responding to disasters is also not warranted.

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