The Trump administration is approaching hurricane season with the smallest disaster workforce since 2021, a huge backlog of state aid requests and 15 vacancies in top emergency management jobs.
President Donald Trump’s cuts to agencies that help with everything from clearing roads to finding emergency lodging are raising fears that a catastrophic hurricane could overwhelm the government’s ability to help desperate people and demolished communities.
Overall, that could mean the U.S. is less prepared for this hurricane season, beginning Monday, than it was at the start of last year’s unusually quiet summer and fall, said several emergency managers.
“There is a feeling of holding our breath, hoping for an easy season again,” said Judson Freed, a past president of the International Association of Emergency Managers.
NOAA recently predicted three to six hurricanes this summer, which is below the annual average of seven hurricanes.
The highest levels of concern are directed at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which leads the government’s disaster response and has lost nearly 20 percent of its staff since Trump took office, federal records show. The top echelon of career FEMA employees is down 35 percent.
“FEMA has lost a lot of higher level people with a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge over the past year and a half,” said Josh Morton, emergency management director in Saluda County, South Carolina, and current president of the emergency managers’ group. “FEMA staffing all the way around has dropped drastically.”
FEMA said in a statement that it is “fully prepared for hurricane season,” adding that the Trump administration is “committed to ensuring Americans affected by hurricanes receive help as quickly and efficiently as possible.”
The staffing cuts come as scientists say climate change is intensifying storms. The Government Accountability Office said in December that natural “disasters have become costlier and more frequent.”
Those strains have been amplified by cuts to FEMA’s workforce.
In the summer of 2017, when separate hurricanes damaged Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, the agency’s massive response “imposed an unprecedented strain on FEMA’s disaster workforce,” an agency report found.
In the fall of 2024, devastation caused by hurricanes Helene and Milton “exacerbated long-standing FEMA workforce management issues,” GAO wrote in September.
“Recent workforce reductions,” GAO added, “may exacerbate existing workforce challenges and impact federal agencies’ capacity to respond to future high-impact disasters.”
It noted that FEMA staff had dropped from nearly 26,000 in January 2025 to 23,300 in June.
Agency staffing was down to 21,100 in March, according to the latest Office of Personnel Management figures.
“As bad as it was, there were a lot of bodies to throw against the problem. Now there are fewer bodies, and a lot of those bodies don’t know how to do the job,” Freed said.
Jonathan Lord, head of emergency management in Flagler County, Florida, said he can no longer count on FEMA workers to canvass neighborhoods and help survivors after a disaster.
“The writing is on the wall that workforce may not be available to us based on the current footprint for FEMA,” said Lord, who is president of the Florida Emergency Preparedness Association. “It’s local managers’ responsibility to have an alternative ready to go.”
Nine out of 18 FEMA leadership positions are vacant, according to the agency’s website, which also shows that six of FEMA’s 10 regional offices have no permanent administrator.
In Washington, FEMA has rifled through three acting administrators since Trump took office. None of them had emergency management experience. The president recently nominated Cameron Hamilton, who would be the first permanent administrator in Trump’s current term.
Hamilton was fired last year from his position as acting leader, a topic that promises to be raised during his Senate confirmation hearing, which has not been scheduled.
“That whole agency is in desperate need of permanent leadership,” said Peter Gaynor, who was FEMA administrator in Trump’s first term. “People are there because they love the mission. They want to help their fellow citizens, and they want to be led by good leaders. And that is lacking.”
Shrinking agencies, growing disasters
Staffing is also down at other agencies that provide crucial disaster help under FEMA’s direction.
EPA, which tests drinking water when a disaster knocks out treatment plants, has seen its staffing drop by 20 percent — from 17,000 in January 2025 to 12,700 in March. It’s at the lowest level since at least January 2015, the first month for which OPM data is publicly available.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which clears roads and cleans up debris during disasters, had 11 percent fewer employees in March than in January 2025, OPM figures show.
Army Corps officials told GAO in August that “they anticipated there would be impacts to their disaster response efforts from workforce reductions but were still determining the magnitude of such impacts.”
Noting the staff reductions in its September 2025 report, GAO said that “meeting response needs could be a major challenge” if major hurricanes strike.
“FEMA and other federal agencies spreading a reduced number of staff across the same or higher number of disasters nationwide could reduce effectiveness of federal disaster response,” GAO added.
Other agencies that help FEMA during disasters also have seen staffing levels drop under Trump. Since 2012, FEMA has issued 42,000 “mission assignments” to federal agencies during disasters with a total value of $24 billion, agency records show.
EPA, which has handled nearly 8,000 mission assignments, said it is “fully prepared to support FEMA.”
“Staffing levels do not determine disaster response capacity, readiness does,” the agency said in a statement to POLITICO’s E&E News. “The agency’s emergency response capabilities are intact, our specialized response teams remain ready to deploy, and EPA will meet every mission assignment FEMA directs to us — just as we have in every previous hurricane season.”
The Army Corps said in a statement that it is “fully prepared to execute its disaster response missions” and that it “mitigates” staff reductions by moving employees into disaster areas from unaffected regions.
“We continue to aggressively recruit and train specialized response personnel,” the Army Corps said.
‘Just not paying people’
Six months ago, the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona asked Trump for disaster aid after severe storms and flooding damaged its reservation.
Trump has taken no action on the request — or on 17 others he received from governors and tribal leaders more than four weeks ago. Presidents have exclusive authority over disaster requests.
The total backlog of pending requests was 23 on May 28 — the largest number on that date by a wide margin since at least 2017, according to FEMA records..
Trump has delayed acting on disaster requests since he took office. He has taken an average of 62 days to approve or deny requests — nearly double the 33 days taken by President Joe Biden, whom Trump has excoriated for what he said was a slow handling of disasters. In his first term, Trump took 25 days on average to decide on disaster requests, according to an E&E News analysis of FEMA records.
The delays — combined with Trump’s repeated vows to reduce the federal role in disasters — have cast a shadow of uncertainty over the process.
“We do know that disaster declarations have been slower than historically,” said Morton, the emergency manager in South Carolina. The likelihood of getting federal disaster aid “is definitely less certain than it has been historically.”
Trump has quickly and reliably approved disaster aid when governors requested an expedited decision due to extreme damage. That aligns with his goal of focusing FEMA on the most extreme disasters while steering it away from helping with smaller floods and storms.
Yet the White House has slowed disaster payments to states, due partly to a policy established last year by then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who insisted on personally approving any FEMA payment of more than $100,000. The policy was rescinded by her successor, Markwayne Mullin, who was sworn in as DHS secretary in late March.
FEMA also has not improved the longstanding problem of disasters remaining open for as long as 20 years as the agency and states reach final agreement on payments. The backlog of more than 650 disasters diverts FEMA staff and money, and leaves billions of dollars “unavailable for … current disasters,” the DHS inspector general found in 2024.
The policy was part of a broader strategy of closely scrutinizing FEMA spending, but it has led to a record number of appeals by states over funding decisions, FEMA records show.
“True readiness requires strict fiscal stewardship, not spending every congressional appropriation just because it is available,” FEMA said in its statement. “By maintaining disciplined capability, we ensure taxpayer dollars flow directly to survivors when they need it most.”
Gaynor, the former FEMA leader, said the Trump administration is “doing reform without any policy or legislative change. They’re just not paying people. That’s how they’re forcing reform.”
