President Trump’s decision to shrink the Federal Emergency Management Agency has hampered the agency’s ability to respond to hurricanes and other natural catastrophes — particularly if multiple disasters hit simultaneously, a government oversight body found.
The report released on Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office found that the number of active FEMA employees dropped to 23,350 on June 1 from about 25,800 on Jan. 1, a decrease of about 10 percent, a decline that was heavily attributed to the Trump administration’s staff reduction efforts.
If the United States were to experience a hurricane season this year similar to last year’s, when Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton delivered a one-two punch along the Eastern Seaboard just weeks apart in September and October, FEMA would not have the staffing or resources to adequately respond, the report said.
“Given continued demands on the federal response workforce and recent staff reductions, the federal government will likely need to meet its disaster response mission with fewer available resources this year,” the report found.
“Should the U.S. experience a similarly catastrophic peak hurricane season in September and October 2025 as it did in 2024, meeting response needs could be a major challenge,” it said.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, noted that the G.A.O. report also found that during the Biden administration, just 4 percent of FEMA’s workforce was available to be deployed to disasters.
In a statement, she said that the Biden administration “over-declared disasters at a pace of nearly one every other day in 2024 (179 in total) while burning through FEMA’s budget on so called ‘climate change’ and DEI pet projects.”
She said the Trump administration was reshaping the agency to focus on “real disaster response.”
Nearly 200 FEMA employees warned in a letter to Congress last month that the Trump administration had gutted the nation’s ability to handle extreme weather events and had reversed much of the progress made in disaster response and recovery since Hurricane Katrina pounded the Gulf Coast two decades ago.
In response, the Trump administration suspended 30 of the employees who had attached their names to the letter.
Since taking office, Mr. Trump has called for the elimination of FEMA and at one point said he intended to wind down the disaster response and recovery agency by November. He has said he plans to shift the costs of disaster response from the federal government to the states, and has told states to expect “less money” from the government for disaster recovery.
In the wake of deadly flash flooding in Texas in July, the president appeared to back away from his plan to shutter FEMA, but the administration has continued to carry out major changes and budget cuts.
FEMA has for years suffered from chronic understaffing. The G.A.O. report is the first official tabulation of FEMA staffing losses under the second Trump administration. It found that the departure of the approximately 2,450 employees included veteran leaders with experience handling complicated disasters.
Those leaders included the head of FEMA’s disaster command center, who coordinated the national response to earthquakes, floods and other disasters, as well as the agency’s urban search and rescue chief. The G.A.O. said the departed staff included 24 senior employees who left just before the start of hurricane season, and one employee who had been deployed to more than 210 events and was described as one of the most experienced leaders in the nation.
Only about 12 percent of the agency’s incident management workforce was available to respond to disasters at the start of the current hurricane season, which began on June 1, according to the report. That was its lowest staffing level in four years, the report said.
That number is up to about 23 percent as of Tuesday, but only 7 percent of employees charged with coordinating disaster response are available, according to FEMA’s daily operations report.
When the federal disaster response is short-staffed, the government often turns to volunteers from other agencies, called “surge capacity.” FEMA indicated to the G.A.O. that it planned to use those volunteers to fill any gaps in the federal workforce.
But the report noted that FEMA also told investigators that it had only about 600 volunteers available to deploy because of staffing cuts at other agencies, compared with the approximately 1,300 volunteers who were deployed in hurricanes Milton and Helene.
At the same time, the G.A.O. noted that the number and frequency of disasters are increasing — there have been 710 major emergency declarations so far this year compared with 495 from January to July in 2022. Scientists have said that rising global temperatures, driven primarily by emissions created from the burning of fossil fuels, are linked to more extreme weather events like heat waves, droughts and wildfires.
“As FEMA is being called to help communities through more and more disasters across the nation, the Trump administration has left the agency with fewer resources than ever,” Senator Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey and one of the lawmakers who requested the report, said in a statement. “The staffing and resource gaps are damning and could cost lives.”
Lisa Friedman is a Times reporter who writes about how governments are addressing climate change and the effects of those policies on communities.
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