FEMA Is at Risk of Being Unprepared When America Needs It Most — Is America Better Yet?

Thousands of workers left FEMA. Its strategic plan was canceled. Staffing cuts were made without first determining how many people the agency needs. Now federal auditors warn that a major disaster could expose what has been lost.

By Roberto Zapatero
Is America Better Yet?
Updated August 16, 2026

When a hurricane comes ashore, a river jumps its banks, a wildfire crosses a highway or a tornado tears through a town, most Americans do not think about federal staffing charts.

They think about who is coming to help.

That is why a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Congress's independent auditing agency, deserves national attention.

GAO found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, lost more than 4,300 employees during fiscal year 2025. That represented about 17 percent of its workforce and a 55 percent increase in departures compared with the previous fiscal year. FEMA officials told investigators that the losses took experienced people and institutional knowledge with them.

As of April 18, 2026, FEMA reported employing about 20,968 people.

But the number of people who left is only part of the warning.

GAO found that FEMA made major workforce reductions in 2025 and 2026 without first conducting the analysis needed to determine how many workers, with which skills, the agency actually needed to do its job.

In May 2025, FEMA also canceled its 2022-2026 strategic plan. As of July 2026, GAO said the agency still had not issued a replacement.

That means the nation's main federal disaster agency has been losing people while lacking both an updated strategic plan and a completed workforce analysis showing what it needs to handle the disasters ahead.

GAO's conclusion is difficult to dismiss:

FEMA is at risk of being under-resourced and unprepared to respond effectively to future disasters. GAO specifically warned that the agency could face critically low staffing if large or simultaneous disasters strike during the 2026 hurricane season.

That finding brings new urgency to a remarkable investigation by WNYC's On the Media.

Four episodes that explain how we got here

In May, On the Media released a four-part investigation called American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA.

Reported by Micah Loewinger with additional reporting and writing by senior producer Eloise Blondiau, the series does something important: It does not pretend FEMA was working perfectly before the Trump administration arrived.

It shows how FEMA's real failures, secrecy and bureaucratic problems created fertile ground for distrust. It then documents how that distrust became mixed with misinformation, partisan politics and a campaign to dramatically shrink or even dismantle the agency.

Part One: A strange beginning

The first installment goes back to FEMA's creation in 1979.

The agency combined disaster relief with Cold War civil-defense responsibilities. Some of its work involved secret government plans for surviving nuclear war. On the Media traces how that secrecy helped feed suspicions and conspiracy theories that followed FEMA for decades.

The lesson matters today.

Public trust in an emergency agency can become a life-safety issue. If people believe the agency is lying to them, stealing their land or working against them, some may refuse assistance when they need it.

But distrust did not grow from conspiracy theories alone.

FEMA gave Americans real reasons to question it.

Part Two: Katrina

The second installment examines Hurricane Katrina.

FEMA knew that a catastrophic hurricane could flood New Orleans. A major emergency exercise called Hurricane Pam had explored a similar scenario the year before Katrina struck.

Yet the response in 2005 became one of the defining failures in the agency's history. On the Media reports that FEMA's workforce had already dwindled substantially before Katrina, while organizational changes after the September 11 attacks had placed FEMA deeper inside the Department of Homeland Security.

Congress responded with the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act.

Among other changes, the law was designed to strengthen FEMA and protect its ability to perform its mission. GAO now points to that law when warning that DHS should not substantially reduce FEMA's ability to carry out its responsibilities.

Katrina left behind a simple lesson.

Knowing the danger exists is not the same thing as being ready for it.

Twenty-one years later, that lesson is relevant again.

Part Three: Hurricane Helene and a crisis of trust

The third installment moves to Hurricane Helene and western North Carolina.

It documents something FEMA had not faced on this scale before: an information emergency unfolding alongside the natural disaster.

False claims spread that FEMA had taken disaster money and used it for migrants. Other rumors claimed the government was stealing damaged property or creating FEMA camps. Threats against relief workers became serious enough to disrupt some operations.

On the Media also examined cases in which early reports about threats were exaggerated, showing how difficult it had become to separate genuine danger from rumor.

That distinction matters.

FEMA is not above criticism. Neither is journalism.

But when false information convinces disaster survivors that the people trying to help them are actually their enemies, misinformation becomes more than political speech.

It can interfere with disaster response.

Part Four: The effort to dismantle FEMA

The fourth installment moves inside the Trump administration.

Former FEMA officials Cameron Hamilton and MaryAnn Tierney told On the Media that senior Department of Homeland Security officials directed them to examine ways FEMA could be abolished or radically reorganized.

Tierney's description was direct:

“We were tasked to write a memo on how we would abolish FEMA.”

The reporting also makes clear that the memo examined legal obstacles and that many changes would have required Congress. It was not, by itself, an order abolishing the agency.

The distinction is important.

So is the fact that the discussion occurred at all.

President Donald Trump had publicly suggested eliminating or fundamentally restructuring FEMA. His January 2025 executive order created a FEMA Review Council to evaluate the agency and recommend changes.

The council eventually recommended substantial reforms, including a greater role for states and changes intended to reduce FEMA's workforce.

There is a legitimate policy debate here.

FEMA has real problems. Its programs can be slow, confusing and bureaucratic. Some experienced emergency managers interviewed by On the Media argued that smaller disasters could be handled more often by states, leaving FEMA to concentrate on catastrophes that overwhelm local resources.

That argument deserves consideration.

But there is a fundamental difference between reforming an agency after determining what capacity the country needs and cutting the agency before determining what capacity it needs.

GAO says the second is what happened.

Then came Texas

The consequences of limited capacity are no longer theoretical.

When catastrophic flooding struck Texas on July 4, 2025, FEMA reported that only 15 percent of its incident-management workforce was available for deployment.

GAO later found that FEMA also struggled to answer calls from Texas flood survivors.

FEMA officials told investigators that the agency had reduced its call-center surge resources by about half after call volumes dropped earlier in 2025. When disaster struck, survivors encountered long waits and unanswered calls.

This was not limited to Texas.

In a separate April 2026 investigation, GAO found that most survivors it examined from Hurricanes Helene and Milton and the Texas floods faced long waits or were unable to reach a representative through FEMA's disaster helpline.

GAO also found that state and local governments are not necessarily ready to replace FEMA.

Officials emphasized that they would need time to prepare for major changes in federal responsibilities. Four states affected by Helene and Milton told GAO that they did not have their own individual-assistance programs for disaster survivors.

Moving responsibility from Washington to the states does not automatically create the workers, money, training, communications systems, temporary housing or disaster-response infrastructure needed to perform that responsibility.

Someone still has to do the work.

The number that should worry Congress

GAO found another number that deserves attention.

FEMA officials expected to have about 240 employees available for federal surge support during the 2026 hurricane season.

In 2025, that number had been about 600.

Surge personnel are the people who help when normal disaster staffing is not enough.

The concern is not simply whether FEMA can handle one hurricane.

The concern is what happens when events overlap.

After Hurricanes Helene and Milton struck less than two weeks apart in 2024, FEMA deployed about 13,500 employees. By November 1, only about 4 percent of its incident-management workforce remained available for another deployment.

Disasters do not make appointments.

A hurricane does not wait because FEMA is already handling floods.

A wildfire does not wait because federal workers are still helping another state.

An earthquake does not check whether the call center has enough employees.

That is what surge capacity is for.

And that is why the loss of experienced personnel matters.

The hurricane forecast does not erase the danger

There is some good news.

NOAA updated its Atlantic hurricane outlook on August 6 and now says a below-normal season is most likely.

Forecasters give that outcome a 75 percent probability. They still expect 7 to 13 named storms, including 2 to 6 hurricanes and as many as two major hurricanes.

A quieter Atlantic season would be welcome.

It is not a preparedness plan.

Seasonal forecasts cannot tell us whether a hurricane will strike a particular city. And FEMA responds to far more than Atlantic hurricanes. Floods, fires, tornadoes, earthquakes and other emergencies can occur at the same time.

The question is not how many disasters America will have.

The question is whether the system will work when the wrong disasters happen at the wrong time.

Some of the damage may be reversible

The situation is changing.

Kristi Noem is no longer Homeland Security secretary. Markwayne Mullin succeeded her, and On the Media reported that some policies imposed during Noem's tenure were being eased.

Cameron Hamilton, who previously served as FEMA's acting administrator, was confirmed by the Senate on August 7 and sworn in as FEMA administrator on August 10.

GAO made three recommendations to FEMA: issue a new strategic plan, create a real workforce-planning process and make future staffing decisions based on that analysis.

The Department of Homeland Security agreed with the recommendations.

Those are important developments.

They do not restore 4,300 departed employees.

They do not instantly replace years of experience.

They do not answer how many trained FEMA workers could be deployed tomorrow if several major disasters struck at once.

We found no current public record in the sources reviewed for this article establishing that FEMA has already rebuilt enough capacity to resolve the risks identified by GAO.

That remains an open question.

The warning

This investigation does not establish that FEMA will fail during the next disaster.

No one can honestly make that claim before the disaster happens.

What the evidence establishes is troubling enough.

FEMA entered the 2026 hurricane season after thousands of employee departures.

Its strategic plan had been canceled and not replaced.

Major workforce reductions were made without a completed analysis showing how many workers the agency needs.

Its surge-support pool was expected to be substantially smaller than the year before.

Recent disasters had already exposed shortages in deployable personnel and survivor call-center capacity.

And the federal government's own independent auditors now warn that FEMA is at risk of being under-resourced and unprepared for large or simultaneous disasters.

That is not partisan rhetoric.

It is a warning contained in the public record.

Government exists for many reasons.

One of the most basic is to help protect people when circumstances overwhelm what one family, town, county or state can handle alone.

The time to discover whether that system works is not after the water reaches the roof.

What remains unanswered

Congress, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security should be able to answer several questions now:

How many fully trained FEMA incident-management workers are deployable today?
How many simultaneous major disasters can the current workforce support without pulling workers away from unfinished recoveries?
Which skills and positions were lost in the 2025 and 2026 workforce reductions?
How many experienced workers have been replaced?
When will FEMA publish its new strategic plan?
When will FEMA complete the workforce analysis GAO says it needs?
Has the 2026 surge-support capacity increased from the approximately 240 workers FEMA projected to GAO?
What is the current average call-answer rate during a sudden surge in disaster applications?
Which responsibilities may move to states, and have those states demonstrated that they have the money, personnel and systems to take them over?
What safeguards will prevent workforce reductions from leaving FEMA unable to meet the requirements Congress imposed after Hurricane Katrina?

Those answers should not have to wait for the next catastrophe.

A living record

Is America Better Yet? will continue tracking FEMA staffing, disaster-response capacity, congressional oversight, implementation of the GAO recommendations and additional reporting from On the Media and other news organizations.

If FEMA rebuilds capacity, we will report it.

If the government produces evidence that answers the concerns raised here, we will add it.

If another disaster exposes additional weaknesses, we will document those too.

The purpose is not to predict disaster.

It is to ask whether we are prepared before one arrives.

Sources

U.S. Government Accountability Office, FEMA Workforce: Staff Reductions and Lack of Planning May Impact Mission Readiness, GAO-26-108427, August 4, 2026.
U.S. Government Accountability Office, Disaster Assistance High-Risk Series: FEMA Assistance for Disaster Survivors, GAO-26-108154, April 22, 2026.
WNYC Studios, On the Media, American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA, complete four-part project.
On the Media, Episode 1, American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA, May 1, 2026.
On the Media, Episode 2, American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA, May 8, 2026.
On the Media, Episode 3, American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA, May 15, 2026.
On the Media, Episode 4, American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA, May 22, 2026.
On the Media, How the U.S. Government Built an Underground City, and Other State Secrets, August 14, 2026 rebroadcast.
The White House, Executive Order establishing the FEMA Review Council, January 24, 2025.
NOAA Climate Prediction Center, updated 2026 Atlantic hurricane-season outlook, August 6, 2026.
U.S. Senate / Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, confirmation record for Cameron Hamilton as FEMA administrator, August 7, 2026.
FEMA, announcement of Cameron Hamilton's swearing-in as administrator, August 10, 2026.

I write for you,

— Roberto

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