ANNISTON, Ala. — It’s the disaster she didn’t see coming.
Aileen Reneau, 30, had worked at the Federal Emergency Management Agency for less than a year, helping to train first responders at FEMA’s Center for Domestic Preparedness, the only such facility in the country. She was also deployed to North Carolina for six weeks after Hurricane Helene.
The Air Force veteran and mother of two was laid off on Presidents Day.
“It hurts,” she said. “It was a stab in the back.”
Since Inauguration Day, more than 200 employees at FEMA have been cut — just 1% of the roughly 20,000 employees in the agency. Still, a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that FEMA had a 35% gap in necessary staffing in 2022, and a heavy workload was leading to burnout and retention issues.
“We all know that these disasters are going to increase in frequency and in severity,” Reneau said. “Climate change is real, and unfortunately, we already were understaffed, and now we are absolutely gutted.”
A senior White House official said President Donald Trump plans to sign an executive order soon that will be aimed at empowering state and local governments to handle disaster relief. Trump has previously said he wanted to give at least a percentage of federal money set aside for FEMA to states instead.
Reneau said she was blindsided when she learned she was being let go. She had glowing performance reviews, she said, yet her termination letter cited poor performance. She is appealing the decision.
“I believed that the reduction in force might be something to be reckoned with, but I wasn’t concerned about losing my job in what is, quite frankly, an unethical and illegal matter,” she said. “I thought, well, they’re going to use care and attention, they’re going to take a scalpel to fraud, waste and abuse, not just hack off the entire limb.”
Cuts by the Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency are rattling communities both large and small. Some 80% of the federal workforce is based outside of the Washington, D.C. area.
Reneau said she loved her job. So did one of her co-workers, John Wippler, a 31-year-old Marine Corps veteran and father of three who is also appealing his termination.
“I’m sure there are some things that do need to be cut down and removed, but does everything need to be?” Wippler said. “I think the stability and security of it was really exciting. To have really good health care for the first time for my family. To feel like I was really providing in a really important way and finding a different avenue to kind of serve my country, where it wasn’t in the Marines.”
The Trump administration has laid off tens of thousands of workers across the federal government. The White House has said repeatedly that cutting waste, fraud and abuse was a key reason voters chose Trump, who has railed repeatedly against FEMA, especially in the aftermath of last year’s Hurricane Helene.
“Very bureaucratic and it’s very slow,” Trump said of the agency in January.
In an interview Monday on Fox Business, DOGE leader Elon Musk defended the cuts.
“FEMA is an agency that is meant to take care of Americans in distress, and a bunch of their money was being sent to pay for luxury hotels in New York for illegal immigrants,” Musk said.
Reneau said she feels betrayed, and worries states will not have the resources to effectively deal with natural disasters.
She said Trump should “really look at what you’re doing to families and individuals across America in small towns, counties and states that voted for you, and realize that you’re not draining the swamp.
“You are just hurting your everyday blue-collar and white-collar workers that were trying to be public servants and help you make America great again.”
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