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By David Richardson
FEMA's former acting director
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Recently, a leaked internal memorandum from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) outlined what those at DHS are hailing as a breakthrough: slashing D.C. centralization and lessening state reliance on federal disaster handouts.
In short, the plan calls for winding down routine disaster assistance within six months. Even though this aligns neatly with the recommendations included in my team’s Hurricane Strategy 2025, which was shot down by DHS HQ in May of 2025 shortly after I took over the agency, at this point it’s all noise.
My recommendation was nixed due to fear of the plan being out in front of the presidentially chartered FEMA Review Council. Indeed, it was, because dismantling the FEMA beast quickly and efficiently within the first year of the Trump administration was imperative. That transformation would have been in place a year ago, rather than sometime in the summer of 2027. Although laudable, the current plan won’t take wing. Here’s why.
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First, an informed professional approach to reducing centralized disaster relief and recovery includes a drastic reduction in staff at FEMA HQ, where there are currently 6,000 or so bureaucrats occupying cubicles in the service of a jobs program.
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While at FEMA, I did the analysis with a team of seasoned, mission-oriented federal employees, and on two separate occasions we concluded no more than 1,000 federal employees and contractors are needed at FEMA HQ to implement the seven or eight mission-essential tasks the law requires FEMA to do. I was fortunate to find federal employees who provided honest analysis and a willingness to garner the scorn of their peers. That’s rare.
Today, nobody at DHS or FEMA has the intestinal fortitude or the know-how to do that analysis and rescue the American taxpayer from the horde of federal bureaucrats, many hired under the grotesque Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion rubric and a better professional fit for Dairy Queen or the DMV. Few have anything to do with first-responder disaster and recovery.
Remove even one of these employees and the press will be informed by rank-and-file FEMA personnel, and headlines will read: Due to staff cuts, senior FEMA personnel believe the agency is not ready to handle a major disaster. This headline alone terrifies those who could make effective changes, reducing them to shivering functionaries of the overgrown system that has taken root across the federal government and is typified by FEMA. In short, the risk to reputation and position for political appointees at DHS is simply too high. Fear drives them to inaction.
Secondly, like junkies who know where to get their fix, state leadership and their own horde of bureaucrats have become reliant on the federal government as the first-line financial go-to during disaster and recovery. Rarely do they reduce their own coffers before reaching out to the federal government to cover disaster response and recovery costs.
Of course, many in Congress support using the federal government as the cash cow as well. Indeed, they work to ensure federal funds keep flowing to multimillion-dollar companies engaged in disaster recovery operations because these companies are sources of campaign funding. Transferring financial responsibility to the states will cause a political backlash most in Congress are not willing to support. It’s political suicide.
Lastly, DHS leadership is slack-jawed in the face of FEMA and the ticking clock. The agency is convoluted, owns roughly half the budget of DHS, and has self-preservation tentacles in Congress, state governments, and the disaster response and recovery industry. A cornered animal is the most resilient, and the FEMA animal was counting on midterms to rescue it from the current effort. Time may be on its side.
FEMA slow-rolled and timed out DOGE, the most effective government reduction effort of our time and led by none other than the genius of Elon Musk. FEMA’s organization chart and the number of contracts it funds is enough to bewilder even those with the best intent.
It would take President Trump himself, armed with a stubby pencil, a jargon translator, and a chess clock, to break the back of FEMA’s white-collar welfare kingdom, and he’s likely got bigger fish to fry. So, Americans are likely stuck with the federal carbuncle of FEMA, as painful as it is. But it’s not too late, the time is now to reform FEMA!
David Richardson is the former acting director of FEMA in 2025.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
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