ICYMI: SOS Gives FEMA “F” Grade Heading Into Disaster Season
NOTUS: “Sabotaging Our Safety’s competing report criticizes several of the administration’s changes to FEMA over the last year”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Yesterday, in anticipation of Donald Trump’s FEMA Review Council’s so-called “FEMA Readiness Report,” Sabotaging Our Safety released a new scorecard with a real review of Trump’s FEMA to date. The analysis highlighted FEMA’s hollowed-out leadership, workforce cuts, and glaring hurricane preparedness failures.
Read coverage below.
NOTUS: Advocacy Group Gives FEMA ‘F’ Grade Ahead of Review Council Report
“The organization Sabotaging Our Safety, which is made up of disaster recovery experts and former FEMA employees, issued a report first reviewed by NOTUS that gave the agency “F” ratings for its leadership, workforce, strategic planning and hurricane preparedness.
“The findings are deeply disturbing,” the report states. “Leadership positions sit vacant. A tenth of the core disaster response workforce has been eliminated. No multi-year strategic plan exists.”
“Training exercises that have taken place every year for half a decade have simply not happened,” the report continues. “Weeks before hurricane season, FEMA is a hollowed-out shell of an agency, utterly unprepared to face even a moderate emergency — let alone a large-scale disaster like Hurricanes Katrina or Helene.”
Sabotaging Our Safety’s competing report criticizes several of the administration’s changes to FEMA over the last year, including the Department of Homeland Security’s reassignment of more than 100 disaster response workers to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the effort to terminate the agency’s hazard mitigation program.
‘Trump’s appointed panel wants to release their own report and pretend everything is fine, that FEMA can weather further cuts. Our scorecard shows exactly why it is not,” Davante Lewis, a Sabotaging Our Safety advisory council member, said in a statement. “Slashing the workforce in half and putting the burden of disaster recovery on the states would not save money. It would cost lives.’”
