By Jose Navarro, MBA
On August 4, the Government Accountability Office published a blunt verdict on the state of America’s disaster response agency: FEMA reduced its workforce in 2025 and 2026 without conducting the strategic planning or workforce analysis that would tell anyone whether the agency could still do its job. Two weeks later, a separate watchdog report landed showing exactly what happens when training, documentation, and oversight break down inside that same agency during an actual disaster. Together, they describe a federal government that hollowed out its emergency-response capacity at precisely the moment disasters kept coming.
The numbers behind the cuts
FEMA employed an average of about 25,134 people during fiscal year 2025. More than 4,300 of them left the agency that year — a 55% jump in departures compared to fiscal year 2024. The losses hit hardest at the senior level: FEMA had averaged 95 to 100 Senior Executive Service employees between 2023 and 2025, but by January 10, 2026, 58 of them had separated. Most FEMA regions lost 9% or more of their workforce through voluntary reduction programs; headquarters lost roughly 5%. By April, agency-wide staffing had fallen to nearly 21,000. The agency also submitted a plan to the Department of Homeland Security proposing to cut its workforce in half.
None of this happened in a vacuum. GAO first added FEMA’s disaster workforce and capacity to its High Risk List in February 2025, citing more than a decade of documented staffing challenges. The 2025-26 reductions didn’t fix that longstanding problem — they compounded it, while FEMA simultaneously rescinded its own strategic plan in May 2025 and, as of the GAO report’s publication, still hadn’t replaced it. “Without a strategic plan that outlines clear goals and objectives, FEMA continues to operate without the strategic direction on which to base its analysis of future workforce needs to ensure it can meet its mission,” investigators wrote.
The disasters didn’t wait
This staffing collapse arrived during a period of sustained, high-volume disaster activity. FEMA started the 2025 hurricane season with just 12% of its incident management workforce available, while staff already in the field were supporting more than 91 major disaster and emergency declarations nationwide. As of June 2026, 710 open disasters were still receiving federal support. FEMA’s own backup plan — the Surge Capacity Force meant to fill staffing gaps during emergencies — was itself hit by workforce reductions; the agency told GAO it had only 240 employees available for surge support heading into the 2026 hurricane season, down from 600 the year before.
The practical effect shows up in how the remaining staff are deployed. GAO found FEMA has reassigned personnel working on ongoing disaster recovery to cover newly declared disasters, and has deployed some employees into jobs they weren’t fully trained to perform. During Hurricane Helene, the agency sent staff from unrelated parts of the organization to help survivors apply for assistance — a stopgap, not a staffing plan.
What happens when oversight breaks down
The consequences of thin training and weak oversight surfaced in stark terms this week. A Department of Homeland Security inspector general report, released August 18 and covered widely on August 25, confirmed that a FEMA Disaster Survivor Assistance crew responding to Hurricane Milton in 2024 skipped at least 11 Florida homes displaying signs supporting then-candidate Donald Trump — a violation of both FEMA policy and the Hatch Act. The crew leader was fired, and the U.S. Office of Special Counsel filed a Hatch Act complaint against her. But the inspector general’s underlying finding was structural, not just personal: FEMA’s Disaster Survivor Assistance crews received no ethics or Hatch Act training before deploying, agency policy didn’t require crews to document why they skipped any home, and crew leaders weren’t required to conduct quality-control reviews of survivor interactions at all. The inspector general also found it couldn’t determine whether similar political targeting occurred in earlier disasters, because DHS let a records-access contract lapse and the contractor shut down the system that would have preserved that history.
Two problems, one root cause
A workforce gutted without a staffing analysis and a field crew operating without basic ethics training and documentation requirements are not unrelated stories. Both describe an agency where the systems meant to catch a problem before it compounds — workforce planning in one case, quality-control review in the other — were absent or dismantled. GAO’s recommendation in the workforce report was straightforward: develop a strategic plan, conduct a workforce analysis before any further staffing changes, and require FEMA to report its staffing levels to Congress before each hurricane season. DHS concurred with the recommendations but said implementation depends on FEMA getting a permanent, Senate-confirmed leader — itself an open question, since the agency’s most recent head has already resigned.
Every American living in a hurricane, wildfire, or flood zone — San Diego County included — depends on FEMA functioning as a coordinated, adequately staffed, properly trained agency when the next disaster hits. The GAO and the inspector general have now both documented, in the same month, exactly how far that agency currently sits from that standard.
The accountability question that remains open
FEMA’s official response to the inspector general accepted the recommendations and pointed to strengthened training already underway. DHS’s response to the workforce report was more conditional, tying real reform to a leadership appointment that hasn’t happened yet. That gap matters, because the next major disaster isn’t waiting for either process to finish. This region’s own wildfire and earthquake risk means a thinly staffed, under-trained FEMA isn’t a distant federal problem — residents deserve confirmation the agency arriving after the next disaster will have the people and training in place to do the job right.
Jose Navarro, MBA, is a financial controller and public affairs analyst based in San Diego with more than two decades of experience in public finance, nonprofit management, and government contract compliance.