Hurricane Isaias to test FEMA after Trump-era staffing cuts

Over 4,300 FEMA employees left in fiscal year 2025, GAO reports

Hurricane Isaias is bearing down on the U.S. Gulf Coast, expected to make landfall late Friday or early Saturday, and emergency management experts are watching whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency can mount a large surge response after the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts and restructuring of the agency and a recent court ruling against the administration’s plan to halve the workforce. The Guardian reported Thursday that Gulf state officials have expressed confidence in their coordination with FEMA, but outside experts described the storm as the agency’s most consequential operational test since the cuts.

A recent Government Accountability Office report, cited by The Guardian, found that more than 4,300 FEMA employees left the agency in fiscal year 2025, about 17% of the workforce. The staffing reductions, GAO found, were not carried out systematically to ensure FEMA could still meet its statutory obligations. “It’s not whether Fema is going to respond. They’re going to respond. It’s more about the depth,” Chris Currie, director of homeland security and justice at the GAO, told The Guardian.

Many of the departures came through early retirement, which meant the agency lost disproportionately experienced personnel. From January 2025 to January 2026, 58 senior executive service employees left FEMA, compared with an average of about 13 senior executive service separations per year over the prior three fiscal years, according to the GAO report. Among the top officials who departed last year was the Region 4 administrator, who oversees eight states including Florida and Alabama, where Hurricane Isaias is expected to come ashore.

Deanne Criswell, who led FEMA under the Biden administration, told The Guardian that the loss of institutional knowledge outweighs the raw headcount. “My biggest concerns are always the loss of institutional knowledge. You lose that knowledge. You lose the people who had been through these big disasters in the past,” she said.

In a written statement, FEMA said the agency is actively monitoring and preparing for Hurricane Isaias. “Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin’s leadership, the safety of the American people is DHS’s top priority,” the statement said. “Fema incident management assistance teams are deploying to Alabama and Florida, and Fema personnel are embedded in state emergency operations centers. Fema is also prepositioning emergency supplies at Maxwell air force base in Montgomery, Alabama, to supplement state resources if requested.”

Governors of Florida, Georgia and Alabama have declared states of emergency for counties projected to be in the storm’s path. State emergency management personnel in Louisiana and Mississippi said they have been in regular contact with FEMA and received full support from the agency earlier this year during Tropical Storm Arthur, which brought flash flooding and tornadoes across the Gulf Coast. At a news conference Thursday, Jared Perdue, the Florida Division of Emergency Management executive director, described close coordination with FEMA, according to The Guardian.

But Currie warned that the agency could quickly find itself stretched thin if it has to respond to more than one natural disaster at a time, a possibility that could become “quickly consequential as El Niño strengthens and the agency heads into the fall and winter months.” As an example, Currie cited 2024, when Hurricanes Helene and Milton made landfall in Florida less than two weeks apart and FEMA deployed 13,500 employees. “Fema has struggled to have the right number of people with the right qualifications, even before these cuts,” he said.

In June, FEMA had active recovery efforts for more than 1,000 open emergency disaster declarations, according to Currie. If the agency is forced to deploy personnel to multiple new disasters, as it did in 2024, it would likely have to pull staff from those existing recovery operations and put them on hold, he said. “Even though it’s been said that it’s been a quiet hurricane season, it could still be a busy disaster season,” Currie said.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that the Trump administration’s plan to cut FEMA staff by 50% was unlawful, The Guardian reported. The administration has also been slow to approve major disaster funding this year, according to an analysis by the Texas Tribune. Most major disaster declarations by FEMA in 2026 came a month after the initial request, about three times longer than average, the Texas Tribune found.

Ginny Goldman, founder of Rebuild: the National Disaster Survivors Association, a member organization of climate disaster survivors, told The Guardian that survivors of flooding in Texas Hill Country this summer still have not received FEMA individual assistance. In a Truth Social post, President Donald Trump said the federal government would send $50 million for disaster recovery assistance. “Where is it at? What about the folks struggling to get back on their feet?” Goldman asked, according to The Guardian. Hurricane Isaias, she said, would be the “biggest test of Fema” since the Trump administration’s staffing cuts, “and it’s coming at a challenging time because there are so many other compounding factors that are making life hard for people in America.”

Goldman added that disaster survivors are likely to feel the impact of FEMA’s reduced capacity more sharply than state officials. “If you’re a disaster survivor that is trying to navigate a system that is already broken, versus a civil servant in a government agency that is used to navigating a broken system day-to-day, you will have a different perspective on whether it’s broken or not,” she said.