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. 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. 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. 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.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
