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After Hurricane Helene ripped through North Carolina, Francesca got to work. As an employee for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, she was deployed to the state for a month to coordinate aid for impacted residents, which included feeding families and sharing information at community events.
From the start, her work was more challenging than usual. Helene left behind a level of devastation so extreme “nobody should have to contemplate or hold in their head,” Francesca, which is a pseudonym to protect her identity for fear of retribution, tells me fourth months after the storm. In the weeks since, FEMA employees have been told they are no longer allowed to speak to the media without direct authorization, according to an internal email provided to Rolling Stone.
There was one day on the job in particular that has stuck with her. She had just wrapped up an impromptu presentation to a crowd and was hanging out in the lobby to answer any questions when a woman walked up to her “vibrating with rage,” Francesca recalls.
“She starts basically just repeating every conspiracy theory that you’ve ever heard,” Francesca says. “As she’s yelling, a crowd starts to form, and other people start to interject with conspiracy theories that they’ve heard about border response. And then one man starts getting into my face.” She was accused of sending resources to migrants instead of helping North Carolina residents and of trying to steal survivors’ lands and hide their deceased neighbors’ bodies.
This was not Francesca’s first deployment, and it wasn’t the first time she’d been yelled at while at work. But it was the first time she’d found herself literally and figuratively backed up against a wall, unable to do her job.
“My mission is to help people before, during, and after disasters,” she says, “and I do that best by letting these survivors have a moment to freak out at me, but then meeting them where they are and reminding them that I’m not the bad guy and I’m just trying to help.”
In this case, though: “That was impossible.”
While Francesca is now home, distrust and accusations have followed her. Along with the rumors that FEMA was in North Carolina to steal land or hide bodies were easily disprovable claims that the agency would only provide storm survivors with $750 (which is just an initial offering for emergency provisions) and that the agency wasn’t even there at all despite the presence of workers like Francesca. Others acknowledged that FEMA employees were there but said it was only to block and confiscate aid. These statements circulated social media and were boosted by Russian accounts, according to researchers. Cameron Hamilton, who is now FEMA’s acting administrator, also amplified some of these rumors on his X account.
Misinformation about FEMA funding being sent to support migrants caught on in particular. Since 2019, during Donald Trump’s first term, Congress has additionally tasked the agency with reimbursing local and state governments for sheltering migrants. On social media and from the mouths of politicians, this was twisted to imply the agency was supporting this population at the expense of disaster survivors in need. Several Republican members of Congress echoed this misinformation, despite the fact that the funding program in question was created under their watch, as did Trump.
“They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season,” Trump said at an October rally.
For the first official trip of his second term, President Trump went to North Carolina in late January to survey the ongoing recovery efforts. While there, he re-upped his criticisms of the agency, this time floating “fundamentally reforming or overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA.”
“I think, frankly, FEMA is not good,” he said. Later that day, he signed an executive order to create a council to assess the agency.
Since then, members of his administration have frozen FEMA funds and programs, fired more than 200 FEMA employees, and rescinded grant money the agency had approved and allocated to New York City, actions that have placed FEMA in the epicenter of debates and legal cases over federal spending and executive authority over agencies.
FEMA is no stranger to conspiracies and legitimate criticisms, and the agency has been subject to multiple significant congressional reforms throughout its nearly 50-year run. But emergency managers from across levels of government tell me the current attempts to destabilize, politicize, and dismantle the agency are having ripple effects far beyond Washington, D.C., threatening their ability to plan for the worst and calling into question the already winding path to recovery for disaster survivors.
AS THE UNITED STATES’ GO-TO agency when things go wrong, FEMA is responsible for coordinating the federal government’s response to and distributing aid dollars for a seemingly ever-expanding list of disasters. There are the natural hazard-related events the agency is best known for addressing, from storms like Helene to tornadoes, wildfires, and earthquakes; FEMA is also the federal government’s coordinator when there are acts of terrorism, toxic spills, and pandemics. This work goes beyond simply responding to individuals who have been affected by disasters — FEMA also supports public infrastructure repairs, business continuity, identifies emerging threats, and enables emergency communications and alerts, among a long list of other tasks.
As the agency’s portfolio of responsibilities has grown over the decades, so has the scrutiny of its work. Congress has repeatedly investigated the agency and passed laws to alter its authorities, particularly in the wake of major disasters. FEMA, once a cabinet-level agency, was folded into the Department of Homeland security after the 9/11 attacks. It was reorganized again after its slow and ineffective response to Hurricane Katrina, which compounded the devastation residents were already dealing with. Congress passed additional legislation to expand FEMA’s capabilities following Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and as recently as 2018, when Trump signed into law the Disaster Recovery Reform Act, which included a provision to provide more hazard mitigation funding to local governments.
Still, in recent years, FEMA has been the subject of multiple oversight committee and council reports, which have warned that the agency is overburdened and understaffed, among other issues. And you’d be hard-pressed to find any emergency managers who believe FEMA is perfect as it is right now, says Carrie Speranza, the president of the International Association of Emergency Managers, a nonprofit that provides education and certifications for people working in this field. Speranza, who has also served on the National Advisory Council advising the FEMA administrator, says many working with and within FEMA have been among the loudest voices calling for Congress to once again reform the way it operates over the past two decades, often citing a lack of sufficient resources and a frustratingly bureaucratic approach as two of the reasons why FEMA is not equipped to meet needs heightened by the climate crisis.
There is a general consensus that FEMA needs to change, Speranza says. But she believes the rhetoric around ending the agency is “incredibly extreme” and does not take into account how FEMA fits into the larger disaster response ecosystem in the U.S. “It’s really important that [people] understand that it doesn’t just need to be fixed at the federal level — it’s an enterprise-wide approach,” she says.
Emergency management in the U.S. functions under a command structure that calls for disaster preparedness, response, and recovery to be handled at a local government level, then supported by the state government as needed and the federal government in cases of true overwhelm. There are thresholds that must be met and requests required to receive this escalating aid, and the vast majority of disasters never make it all the way up that chain. So, when FEMA arrives at a disaster zone, it’s not because someone in the agency has deemed it necessary, it’s because the state’s governor submitted a declaration that the president has approved. And while it’s common to hear politicians pledging to meet any and all needs of survivors in the early days after disasters, that has never been part of FEMA’s mission, nor is it something the agency has the resources to follow through with, numerous emergency managers tell me. Instead, it’s meant to be one part of the recovery puzzle consisting of individual preparedness, insurance coverage, nonprofit assistance, assistance from state and local governments, and support from other federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Now, many of those agencies are facing their own cuts, further calling into question what sort of support will be available for cities and states facing future disasters.
SO, WHILE THE PROBLEMS WITH FEMA certainly didn’t start in North Carolina, they reached a fever pitch there, setting the stage for the federal showdown that is now playing out under the Trump administration. From the beginning, FEMA’s response to the storm in North Carolina was criticized for failing to meet the urgency of the crisis and the depth of needs, but some lines of critique quickly stemmed into the conspiracies that hounded Francesca’s deployment.
Former FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell described the resulting level of misinformation as “absolutely the worst I have ever seen” on a call with reporters, and Francesca’s experience of being confronted in real life with online rumors was not unique. At one point, FEMA made a tactical shift in how it deployed its employees in North Carolina due to threats against the staff, which resulted in one man being arrested. One FEMA supervisor in Florida was later fired for advising her staff to avoid door-knocking to offer aid at homes with pro-Trump signage, which has since sparked a lawsuit, congressional hearings, a federal investigation, and set the stage for Trump’s executive order questioning the agency’s very existence, in part due to “serious concerns of political bias.” The order calls for a “full-scale review” of the agency and its role, to be led by a newly created council.
The administration has not yet announced all of the members of the council created under this order, but all of the appointees so far are political allies of Trump, and none have direct experience with emergency management. Francesca says this speaks to her other fear about the reform — that it is politically motivated, designed to create a system that rewards those who agree with the federal government. The president has already suggested putting strings on congressional aid for the Los Angeles wildfires and reportedly delayed or temporarily denied aid to Democratic states during his previous administration.
In recent days, the Department of Government Efficiency has set its sights on FEMA, with a particular focus on migrant funding. On Feb. 12, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander announced the federal government had taken back $80 million in reimbursements through this program that had been previously approved by FEMA, a move he called “highway robbery” and potentially illegal. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — whose agency oversees FEMA — announced she had fired four employees related to the initial payments, referring to them as “deep state agents.” The administration has yet to release any documentation of this alleged wrongdoing, instead citing media reports and Elon Musk’s tweets.DOGE has also reportedly accessed sensitive disaster survivor data, according to members of Congress.
Less than a week later, more than 200 additional FEMA employees were fired from departments across the agency. This was part of a larger effort across agencies to cut employees on the probationary periods that are mandated for most the first year of most federal roles. While it often means these are new hires, it also included employees like Christopher Page, who worked for FEMA for nearly 15 years but had recently accepted a new role, as he wrote in a LinkedIn post. As the news of these cuts surfaced, those remaining at the agency were also dealing with a new disaster declaration for deadly flooding in Kentucky.
All of this has cast doubt on the ongoing accessibility of FEMA’s programs, including its funding. Many state and local offices have come to rely on FEMA as a “checkbook,” says Emily Martuscello, who has worked for FEMA as well as state and local emergency management roles. In fact, Martuscello, who is now emergency management director for the city of Nashua, New Hampshire, tells me her role is the only full-time emergency management position in the state that does not rely on outside funding. You’ll hear similar stories across the country, according to Speranza, who says FEMA funding has become crucial for day-to-day operations in many local emergency management offices, which are notoriously under-resourced.
Others questioned if they’ll get the reimbursements they were promised for money they already spent or if their open disaster declarations from events in 2024 will be approved. Multiple local emergency managers told me the agency owes their jurisdictions for previously promised grants, which can total hundreds of thousands of dollars. Adding to their funding frustration is the question of how to apply for future grants now that the administration is no longer recognizing climate change as a threat and is actively rooting out instances of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” in its programs. As of Feb. 21, the agency had removed its landing page for Community Disaster Resilience Zones, which is a congressionally mandated program that identified areas at particularly high risk of environmental disaster based on both geographic and social vulnerabilities. This information is supposed to help inform which areas were selected for grant funding.
It’s also not just funding emergency managers rely on FEMA for — the National Flood Insurance Program and the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System used for sending emergency alerts, among other programs, fall under FEMA’s purview. Given all of these responsibilities, proposing to simply eliminate FEMA “completely denies the reality of emergency management in the United States of America,” Francesca believes. “It is just so divorced from reality that it’s almost laughable if my job wasn’t on the line and if people’s lives weren’t on the line.”
IN THE EARLY WEEKS AFTER HURRICANE Helene caused unprecedented flooding in the town of Marshall, North Carolina, sending some of her neighbor’s houses down the river and leaving many of the rest in a wreckage of muck and mold, Gina Heath says FEMA was not hard to find. The agency had set up shop in the local county library, a place Heath knew well from going with her three young children. But that site had since shut down, as had another one she had previously tried to visit in Asheville. So, in early February, she watched the kids while her husband went searching for an open office again.
“It’s confusing and we just don’t know what’s happening, because we were told the process would look like one thing by FEMA,” Heath says. So far, they have had to submit proof of homeownership to the agency three times in hopes of getting funding to cover their temporary housing costs.
Like many storm survivors still in the early stages of recovery, the family has relied on a composite of care to make it through the winter. First and foremost, their neighbors, some of whom formed a Marshall Relief Alliance, a grassroots effort to muck out homes, feed neighbors, and organize regular meetings to address evolving needs. There have also been nonprofits, like the Red Cross, which were among the first outsiders to reach the community after it was largely cut off by washed-out roads in the harrowing early days following the hurricane. And then there was the government aid, including FEMA.
“People have gotten thousands of dollars, so I don’t want to say that FEMA is not helping,” Heath says. “But I’m saying there’s a big gap between what FEMA’s doing and what’s needed.”
The Heath family is one of thousands impacted by Hurricane Helene and more than 1 million people across the U.S. who have received some type of assistance — from financial aid to free water or meals — from FEMA in just the past year. Over the past four years, FEMA has responded to 278 major disaster declarations, which equates to more than one a week. And that doesn’t take into account the hundreds of declared disasters further in the past that the agency is still responding to. For example, the agency is still paying for building and drainage projects in Louisiana stemming from Hurricane Katrina nearly 20 years ago and is still in the process of reimbursing local governments millions of dollars for their responses to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Yolanda Cruz remembers feeling relief when she first heard FEMA was being sent to her community nearly three years ago. Cruz lives in the burn scar of the Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak Fire in New Mexico, a blaze the Forest Service started in 2022 in a prescribed burn gone wrong. Given the federal responsibility, Congress allocated nearly $4 billion for survivors and called for the creation of a dedicated office to process applications for aid, which promised to be more comprehensive than typical FEMA claims. But the resulting system has been frustratingly slow, Cruz says, as the new office has had to figure out how to account for covering losses that typically don’t fall under FEMA’s purview. Many in her community are still awaiting aid, including those whose properties are considered “total losses” from the fire.
Cruz moderates an active Facebook group for fire survivors with nearly 13,000 members. As the news of Trump’s comments and executive order regarding FEMA broke, members shared links, expressing a mix of hope that the system many feel have failed them could be fixed and concerns about their own aid timelines. Given her experience, Cruz fears that “anything to disrupt the system is going to take longer than we’ve already waited.” Recent layoffs at other agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture, have also left her concerned that projects like landscape restoration and reseeding, private property damage assessments, and other recovery efforts in her community might be further stalled since these were carried out by federal workers.
If they are going to change things from the top down, she hopes officials will take into consideration communities like hers, who have had to become experts in how the system works as they advocate for their own recoveries.
“You look at — OK, what are the issues? What are possible solutions?” Cruz says. “How do we get input from the impacted people for those solutions and work from there?”
WHILE DISASTER SURVIVORS ACROSS THE country tell me their interactions with FEMA have not yet been affected by the changes happening in the federal government, emergency managers say they are in a tailspin trying to keep up with changes. And despite FEMA having faced existential challenges before, Speranza says this feels different, citing the magnitude of disasters the agency is now handling. The threat of losing the agency is also heightened by the simultaneous gutting of other federal agencies, Sarah Miller, assistant professor and chair of emergency management at Pierce College, says. The very responsibility of emergency managers is coordinating government response across departments and agencies, which means they also rely on resources from various sources.
Miller, who has experience working as a local emergency manager, cites the forecasts from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Centers for Disease Control’s now-stopped daily briefings on potential disease outbreaks as two examples. She’s also worried about how wildfire mitigation and response will fare given the cuts to agencies that oversee the bulk of wildland firefighters, such as the U.S. Forest Service, which lost about 3,400 employees in the recent cuts.
What happens next remains relatively unclear, though some emergency managers tell me they’ve been looking to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 for clues since the administration has been following many of its proposals. While there is not much on FEMA in the document, it does call for largely reducing the agency’s role,including reducing preparedness and response funding and privatizing the National Flood Insurance Program.
Beyond dismantling FEMA, Trump has suggested shifting the bulk of disaster response responsibility to the states, an approach Secretary Noem later endorsed. The details of how they would do this are unclear, with Trump at one point speaking of distributing the funds himself and Noem endorsing block grants, which come with less federal oversight. But according to The New York Times, the administration is also planning to gut the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s office that currently is responsible for doling out disaster recovery block grants.
Shifting more costs to the states is a proposal some emergency managers have generally supported in the past, including previous FEMA administrators, who have said this could lead to more resilience-focused policies.
“States do a lot less than they should, because they’re looking over their shoulder and they know that if anything happens, FEMA is going to come in and it’s going to help their people,” says Kelly McKinney, vice president of emergency management at NYU Langone Health, speaking from his experience working in public, private, and nonprofit roles. McKinney adds that he still believes FEMA needs to exist, particularly to handle complex, multistate disasters, including future pandemics.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the idea is unpopular with members of Congress, particularly those whose districts often experience disasters. FEMA’s authorities are largely laid out in the Stafford Act, with funding authorized by Congress, so making significant reforms would legally require the legislative body to take action. And even some of Trump’s strongest supporters in Congress have spoken against eliminating the agency.
“FEMA can’t go away,” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said, according to Politico. “I think the first job of the federal government is to protect people and property.”
The logistics are also complicated, with few state and local agencies currently at the operating capacity needed to fund, organize, or allocate aid for the sort of billion-dollar disasters that have become common. While politicians in some states, including Oklahoma and Vermont, have introduced legislation to enhance their emergency management offices, actually making those changes will take time. Multiple emergency managers told me they believe this change — particularly at the current clip the administration has been moving at — would cause untold devastation and deaths during future disasters.
“None of this has happened on a timeline that state and local governments can adapt to,” Miller says. And that means the shift would potentially leave millions without a major thread in the safety net they’ve come to rely on, flawed as it is.
