Trump Administration Quietly Guts FEMA's Disaster Response Teams
Rafael Lemaitre: “All it takes is just one major disaster to make those failures come to the forefront again. And I’m afraid that’s the path that we’re on.”
WASHINGTON, D.C. — FIRST: For months, Sabotaging Our Safety has been raising the alarm about the Trump administration's dangerous politicization of FEMA under DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. The organization sent a letter demanding FEMA become an independent cabinet-level agency following a year of incompetence that left millions of Americans in heightened danger.
THEN: On New Year's Eve, dozens of FEMA disaster workers were suddenly fired — employees who worked on the critical Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) teams that provide essential support for communities in the aftermath of disasters.
NOW: A new NOTUS investigation reveals the full scope of the administration's assault on FEMA's disaster response capacity. The Trump administration is systematically slashing the agency's workforce and forcing states to shoulder more of the burden for disaster response — all while keeping FEMA under Noem's incompetent and overtly political control.
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Rafael Lemaitre, who served as FEMA director of public affairs under the Obama administration, told NOTUS that CORE employees also help with educating communities on precautions they can take before a disaster hits.
“What seems to be happening now in these firings, and the latest indication of this is that the administration is essentially hitting rewind and eroding and hollowing out FEMA to where it was before Katrina,” said Lemaitre, who is a member of the disaster preparedness advocacy group Sabotaging Our Safety and a Texas resident. “And all it takes is just one major disaster to make those failures come to the forefront again. And I’m afraid that’s the path that we’re on.”
Another former employee at the agency said he thinks there’s a better way to approach reductions at the agency.
“There doesn’t seem to be any sort of concerted strategy, like we’re only going to not renew COREs who started on this date or from this area,” Jeremy Edwards, the former FEMA press secretary in the Biden administration, told NOTUS. “You could hypothetically see a world where there was a thoughtful way to achieve that level of reduction that you would do in a way where it’s like, ‘We’re going to try to do it so every office is impacted equally.’”
“You could get into situations where an entire field office is basically gone overnight,” Edwards added.”
