A meeting that was supposed to chart the future of America’s disaster-response agency ended on Thursday before it could even begin.
The final report of a committee tasked by President Donald Trump with reviewing the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was scheduled to be presented and put to a vote Thursday afternoon. But shortly before 1 p.m., when the FEMA Review Council was scheduled to convene in Washington, a draft of the report was leaked to news outlets and the White House abruptly canceled the session.
The shakeup appeared to surprise even some of the review council’s own members, several of whom were still awaiting instructions outside the meeting’s planned location less than an hour before it was supposed to start, The Washington Post reported. Registered attendees only received notice of the meeting’s postponement after the event was scheduled to conclude. That announcement, a two-sentence email from the council’s designated federal officer, Patrick Ryan Powers, did not provide an explanation for the cancellation or a date for a rescheduled meeting.
The draft of the report signaled the review council’s plan to dramatically cut the agency even as climate change-fueled disasters increase, provoking swift condemnation from advocacy groups and emergency management experts. Critics panned the draft as a blueprint for weakening the nation’s primary emergency-response agency and shifting responsibility onto states unequipped and unprepared to manage crises alone.
“Today just paints the same big picture of this administration’s chaos and disorganization,” former FEMA press secretary Jeremy Edwards told Inside Climate News. “There’s too many cooks in the kitchen and none of them know how to use the oven.”
“Canceling the meeting last minute, after the report leaked, it doesn’t seem like [Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi] Noem is on the ball,” he added.
A Plan for Total Overhaul
Trump established the FEMA review council by executive order at the very start of his second term in office, alleging “serious concerns of political bias” within the federal agency. Trump told reporters in June that he hoped to “wean off of FEMA” and “bring it down to the state level,” promising to begin the overhaul of the federal agency before the end of the year. The council, tasked with reviewing the efficacy and structure of FEMA and recommending reforms, is comprised almost entirely of Republican officials. Their suggestions for overhauling the agency’s role and functions were set to be unveiled at Thursday’s much-anticipated meeting.
A White House official told Inside Climate News that the meeting was canceled Thursday morning while Noem was testifying because White House officials had not been fully briefed on the latest draft of the report, despite some officials at DHS thinking they had been. It is likely the secretary didn’t know the cancellation
had happened as she was already in her hearing, the White House official said.
The Washington Post reported that senior administration officials were displeased with the document’s abstract plan to restructure FEMA, prescribing huge cuts without providing specifics.
“It is time to close the chapter on FEMA,” the leaked report states, according to CNN, which reported that the draft calls for the most sweeping transformation of FEMA since its creation nearly five decades ago, including cutting half of the agency’s staff. Earlier drafts of the report were reported to have been substantially longer, before revisions, led by Noem, removed many of the council’s recommendations.
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While Trump has repeatedly expressed interest in axing FEMA altogether, the report apparently stops short of recommending the agency’s elimination. Instead, it frames the overhaul as a way to reduce red tape and speed up aid delivery, repositioning FEMA as a leaner support organization that intervenes only in the most catastrophic events.
“They’re saying they want the states to take over, but at the same time they’re taking away the resources states need to actually do that by canceling funding for disaster preparedness and halting grants for building resilient infrastructure,” Edwards said.
This year’s hurricane season spared the United States the kind of large-scale destruction that has become increasingly common in recent years as climate change drives more severe storms into areas less accustomed and prepared for extreme weather events. Disaster relief experts like Edwards worry the Trump administration may be drawing the wrong lesson from this year’s storms.
“This administration has three more hurricane seasons to stare down,” Edwards said, “and I don’t think they’re thinking about the impact their decisions now will have when next season rolls around.”
FEMA’s annual workload has more than doubled over the past two decades, as the warming climate supercharges Atlantic hurricanes, accelerates wildfire seasons and drives inland flooding with record rainstorms. What happens next with the review council’s recommendations may determine how the United States navigates a worsening era of climate extremes
“People experiencing the worst day of their life—maybe their car and house are gone, maybe they’ve lost family members—they’re expecting FEMA to show up for them,” Edwards said.
Public Backlash Mounts Amid Uncertainty
The Union of Concerned Scientists warned that the abrupt meeting cancellation, coupled with what it described as political manipulation of the council’s original findings, suggests that the administration may be preparing to weaken FEMA even more than previously assumed.
Shana Udvardy, a policy analyst for The Union of Concerned Scientists, warned in a statement Thursday that the reported recommendations would “gut FEMA, leaving states to shoulder the burden of disasters and putting disaster victims at risk of serious harm.”
“The next time a hurricane or horrific wildfires materialize, we may again experience a disturbing FEMA fiasco on par with Hurricane Katrina,” Udvardy added.
Many of the government’s most seasoned FEMA staff were already pushed out or sidelined in recent months, replaced, in some instances, by officials with minimal disaster management experience. Meanwhile, recent cuts to initiatives like the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program have restricted funds to states trying to bolster infrastructure and protect homes from worsening fires, floods and storms.
Dr. Treva Gear, a survivor of Hurricane Helene’s destruction in her native Cook County, Georgia, told Inside Climate News she worries that Washington’s political infighting over reforms to FEMA may endanger the lives of citizens in the path of the next natural disaster. She remembers FEMA as a critical lifeline after the severity of Helene caught everyone from her neighbors to Georgia officials by surprise. “We hadn’t seen a disaster at that level before, and we needed FEMA because the state just wasn’t equipped to help us, they didn’t have the infrastructure for it.”
Gear plans to travel with a group of around 80 natural disaster survivors to Washington on Monday to urge Congress to protect and prioritize federal disaster prevention, relief and recovery. “This shouldn’t be about politics, disasters don’t hit just one side of the aisle or the other,” she said. “This can affect anyone.”
“We’re experiencing stronger storms now because of climate change, these hurricanes are more frequent and more destructive,” Gear said. “This isn’t the time for FEMA to abandon the American people. Now is the time we’re going to need them the most.”
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Thank you,
Fellow
CD Goette-Luciak is an investigative reporter and a fellow at Inside Climate News. He has written for The Washington Post, the Miami Herald, The Guardian, Vox and NPR. He was an Investigative Reporting Fellow for the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University and a recipient of the Ferriss-UC Berkeley Journalism Fellowship. He also received an Overseas Press Club Foundation Fellowship to report for the Los Angeles Times from Mexico. Fluent in English, Spanish and German, he has covered stories in every country in the Americas, reporting on democracy, migration, climate change, human rights, organized crime and corruption. He previously reported for the Miami Herald, the Latin America Advisor and Radio La Ciudadana. He received a Master’s in Public Policy and a B.A. in Political and Social Thought from the University of Virginia, where he was a Jefferson Scholar.
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