At a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, President Trump said that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had swiftly deployed personnel to Central Texas, as catastrophic floods roared through the region.
“You had people there as fast as anybody’s ever seen,” Mr. Trump told Kristi Noem, who leads the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA’s parent agency.
But FEMA has been slow to deploy certain teams that coordinate response and search-and-rescue efforts, according to half a dozen current and former FEMA officials and disaster experts, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
The current and former officials cautioned that every disaster presents unique challenges and that FEMA plays a supporting role to state and local emergency management agencies.
Still, the experts said that the extent of the destruction in Texas, the number of missing people and the complexity of the response would normally trigger a bigger, faster deployment. The death toll in Texas from the floods climbed to at least 111 on Tuesday, with at least 173 people still missing, including 161 in Kerr County, which sustained the worst damage, state officials said.
In an internal update on Tuesday morning, FEMA said it had deployed about 70 search-and-rescue workers to Kerr County and had sent around a dozen others who could help manage responses to Austin. Another unit of about 40 personnel was on standby, able to be in place on short notice.
That staffing was dwarfed by the response from the state, which had deployed more than 1,750 personnel and more than 975 vehicles and other equipment by late Monday, according to the Texas Division of Emergency Management.
In remarks on Tuesday, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, made a point of highlighting state action as well as assistance Texas had received from other states, such as a loan of four Blackhawk helicopters from Arkansas. He thanked “fellow governors, other states” with hardly a mention of the federal government.
“Texas has a very robust emergency management program,” said Elizabeth Zimmerman, a former associate administrator at FEMA and now a senior executive adviser at IEM, a consulting firm. She added that W. Nim Kidd, chief of the Texas Division of Emergency Management, had decades of experience and “a huge staff to support him.”
Representatives for FEMA did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday, including questions about how many personnel were on the ground in Texas and what they were doing.
At the cabinet meeting, Ms. Noem said, “We as a federal government don’t manage these disasters; the state does. We come in and support them. And that’s exactly what we did in this situation.”
Under Mr. Trump, FEMA faces an uncertain future. The president has said he wants to eliminate the agency by the end of November and to shift more responsibility for emergency management as well as more of the cost to the states.
Since its creation in 1979, FEMA has grown more complex and expensive, as climate change has made extreme weather events more frequent and severe. The agency’s budget for the last fiscal year was roughly $35 billion. Mr. Trump has established a council to decide FEMA’s fate; the panel is set to meet on Wednesday.
Two former FEMA officials expressed surprise that the agency had not dispatched a larger team to Texas to coordinate efforts with state and local emergency management agencies. A larger team would typically help set up a disaster recovery center where flood survivors could apply for financial assistance from FEMA.
In comparison, on the fifth day after Hurricane Helene battered several Southeastern states last fall, FEMA deployed about 160 personnel to help manage the response, with half the workers in the hardest-hit parts of North Carolina, according to the agency’s internal update that day. Mr. Trump repeatedly criticized FEMA’s handling of Helene under the Biden administration.
One factor contributing to delays is bureaucratic red tape at the Homeland Security Department, according to a government employee familiar with the matter. Secretary Noem is requiring that she review and approve all new expenses over $100,000, including the deployment of search-and-rescue teams, according to the employee and an internal memo reviewed by The New York Times.
“Requests for approval of obligations above the $100,000 threshold must be submitted via memo through the Executive Secretary process,” Ms. Noem wrote in the memo. “As with any request for secretarial approval, please allow a minimum of five days for front office review.”
Since Mr. Trump took office, FEMA has lost about a quarter of its staff, including some of its most experienced leaders, like the head of the agency’s disaster command center.
Cameron Hamilton, FEMA’s former acting head, was pushed out of the agency in May after he testified before Congress that he did not believe the agency should be eliminated. David Richardson, his replacement, has no background in disaster response and told employees last month that he did not realize the country had a hurricane season. It was not clear if Mr. Richardson was joking.
Mr. Trump said last month that if a state were to get hit by a hurricane or another disaster, “the governor should be able to handle it. And frankly, if they can’t handle it, the aftermath, then maybe they shouldn’t be governor.”
When asked on Monday whether the Trump administration still planned to dismantle FEMA, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, demurred.
“The president wants to ensure American citizens always have what they need during times of need,” she said. “Whether that assistance comes from states or the federal government, that is a policy discussion that will continue.”
Christopher Flavelle contributed reporting.
Maxine Joselow reports on climate policy for The Times.
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