Former FEMA Official Slams Trump’s FEMA Review Council Report: “Hurricane Season Starts in Weeks”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Today, Donald Trump's FEMA Review Council released its long-awaited report on the future of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The report endorses transitioning FEMA projects to the states, leaving disaster victims behind by ending aid to people with damaged homes, and cutting or radically altering mitigation and relief programs –all while keeping FEMA under the Department of Homeland Security.
“The Trump administration spent over a year dismantling FEMA piece by piece, and now their own handpicked council is endorsing the wreckage. You cannot cut your way to a capable disaster response agency. Hurricane season starts in weeks,” said Rafael Lemaitre, Sabotaging Our Safety Advisory Council Member and former Director of Public Affairs at FEMA. “This report ignores the real issue: if we expect FEMA to show up for families after hurricanes, floods, and fires, then the Trump administration needs to stop starving the agency of qualified leadership and meaningful funding. The agency needs to be made truly independent in order to be protected from weaponization by the Trump administration.”
The report arrives weeks before the official start of hurricane season, as FEMA is already in crisis. Three of the top four FEMA leadership positions remain vacant. The agency cycled through three acting heads since January 2025 and still has no Senate-confirmed administrator. Over 1,000 on-call disaster responders were terminated earlier this year, and when last season began, only 12% of field staff were available to deploy — the lowest on record.
Today, Sabotaging Our Safety released a new scorecard with the real review of Trump’s FEMA. The findings tell a completely different story than Trump’s review council, cautioning that FEMA is failing across four critical dimensions — leadership, workforce, agency structure and strategic planning, and hurricane season preparations.
Read more about the real FEMA Readiness Report here.
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