The Federal Emergency Management Agency is gutting its disaster recovery workforce, leaving disaster-ravaged communities in a lurch, including in two states that voted for President Donald Trump, according to a new report.
The agencyis on pace to axe thousands of Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery, or CORE, employees, the boots-on-the-ground personnel who stay in disaster zones for years, Notus reported Friday. FEMA is simply not renewing their contracts.
A current CORE employee sounded the alarm.
“The impact is going to be huge,” the employee told the outlet about the layoffs. “I think of things like the LA wildfires and the Kerrville floods from last year that are really still in more of an active phase of recovery. There are recovery offices and FEMA staff performing essential recovery roles across the country for disasters going back five, six, seven years.”
Even award-winning employees recommended for renewal are being let go with one employee saying the decision is coming from Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security, not because of FEMA.
“If you don’t have the security personnel to handle any security threats, then the systems are gonna be wide open,” a former employee told the outlet. “If any of those systems that relay funds to the public is compromised, then that’s going to have a huge, huge impact if we do have a disaster. Because if those systems are compromised and not functioning, they’re not getting any funding. Especially if they need it immediately.”
CORE employees make up roughly 40% of FEMA’s workforce. North Carolina and Texas, still recovering from recent disasters, could see field offices vanish overnight. Both states voted for Trump in all three elections since 2016.
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