The Federal Emergency Management Agency is no longer in the Trump administration's crosshairs, according to its former leader. President Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the country's top disaster agency. In the first week of his second term, he attacked FEMA, saying, "I think, frankly, FEMA is not good," arguing that the agency should be eliminated.
That rhetoric was echoed by top administration officials, including then-Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, who controlled the agency's budget. Other federal agencies have since been stripped down or even eliminated, including the Department of Education, Voice of America and USAID. But despite his own significant efforts to dismantle FEMA, the man who ran the agency at the time says FEMA isn't going anywhere.
"I think they're probably in a go-along-to-get-along kind of mode," says David Richardson, who led FEMA as acting administrator for much of 2025 and has since left the federal government. "I don't see there being a whole lot of change." That shift is apparent inside the agency. In recent months, the fear of wholesale agency abolition or mass layoffs has dissipated among FEMA workers, according to multiple current FEMA employees who requested anonymity because they fear retaliation for speaking to a journalist.
But the attempts to kill it have compounded some of FEMA's longstanding problems, like understaffing, and delays in getting disaster recovery money to survivors. "Looking back, I think what we saw was an ill-advised attempt to reduce the size of FEMA without fully understanding all the different functions that the agency has," says Andrew Rumbach, who studies disaster policy at the nonprofit Urban Institute. A recent report from the Government Accountability Office raised concerns about whether the agency is adequately staffed.
Parts of the agency that handle disaster recovery are still understaffed and struggling to get long-delayed money to disaster-stricken states, according to the FEMA employees who spoke to NPR. It's only now that "serious reform efforts" are potentially on the horizon for the agency, Rumbach says, and those efforts no longer include eliminating it. In response to questions from NPR about whether the agency's goals have changed since the president took office, a FEMA spokesperson wrote in an email, "FEMA remains fully operational and focused on its core mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters.
As a matter of policy, we do not comment on accounts in forthcoming books, internal operational deliberations, or personnel matters." The White House declined to comment. In one of his first interviews since leaving the agency late last year, Richardson sat down with NPR to talk about his time at FEMA and what he saw as his mission while he was there. Richardson, who served as an artillery officer in the U.S.
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