As the United States enters the height of hurricane season, a storm of controversy is brewing over the future of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). In a rare show of public dissent, dozens of current and former FEMA officials—some with decades of experience, including a former chief of staff who served under two presidents—have signed an open letter warning that recent policies under President Donald Trump are leaving the nation dangerously exposed to disaster.
The letter, titled the "Katrina Declaration," was released on August 24, 2025, and its timing is no coincidence. It comes just weeks after catastrophic flooding in central Texas killed at least 135 people, including dozens of children, and as communities in Wisconsin continue to recover from their own deluge. The officials' message is blunt: the Trump administration’s deep cuts to emergency response, and the president’s repeated calls to eliminate FEMA altogether, risk another catastrophe on the scale of Hurricane Katrina.
For many Americans, memories of Katrina remain raw. The 2005 Category 3 hurricane claimed more than 1,800 lives, left millions homeless, and caused over $100 billion in damage—most devastatingly in New Orleans. The disaster also triggered national outrage over what was widely seen as a disorganized and incoherent response at all levels of government. The fallout led to the resignation of then-FEMA head Michael Brown and prompted Congress to pass the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act (PKEMRA) in 2006, aiming to ensure such failures would never happen again.
Yet, according to the signatories of the Katrina Declaration, history may be repeating itself. The letter charges that FEMA is now "enacting processes and leadership structures that echo the conditions PKEMRA was designed to prevent." The officials specifically call out Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for hindering the agency’s mission and dismissing experienced staff whose "institutional knowledge and relationships are vital to ensure effective emergency management."
One of the most damning criticisms centers on FEMA’s response to the deadly Texas floods this July. The letter states that "FEMA’s mission to provide critical support was obstructed by leadership who not only question the agency’s existence but place uninformed cost-cutting above serving the American people and the communities our oath compels us to serve." The agency’s urban search and rescue chief resigned after a 72-hour delay in deploying teams—reportedly due to new policies requiring financial oversight approval for contracts over $100,000. The administration, for its part, dismissed his resignation as a refusal to comply with basic fiscal oversight, with DHS spokesperson Tricia McGlaughlin stating, "our refusal to hastily approve a six-figure deployment contract without basic financial oversight."
Since President Trump’s return to office, FEMA staffing has been slashed by a third, resulting in what the letter calls "the loss of irreplaceable institutional knowledge and long-built relationships." Some staff have even been reassigned to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as part of the administration’s push for mass arrests and deportations of immigrants. The letter laments that "current agency leadership and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem hinder the swift execution of our mission, and dismiss experienced staff whose institutional knowledge and relationships are vital to ensure effective emergency management."
The agency’s leadership vacuum is another major concern. FEMA has lacked a permanent administrator since May, when President Trump’s previous nominee, Cameron Hamilton—a Navy veteran and longtime emergency response official—was ousted after contradicting the president's position that FEMA should be eliminated. The acting chief, David Richardson, is also juggling his original duties overseeing the nation’s defense from weapons of mass destruction. In June, Richardson reportedly told FEMA employees he was unaware the U.S. had a hurricane season—a remark the administration later brushed off as a joke. The Katrina Declaration warns, "Hurricane season has begun, yet FEMA continues to lack an appointed Administrator with the mandated qualifications to fulfill this role," recalling the "dangers of unqualified leadership" that Katrina so painfully exposed.
The letter also highlights the Trump administration’s decision to terminate FEMA’s main disaster mitigation program, despite Congress having already allocated funding. This program, established during Trump’s first term, provided grants for communities to upgrade infrastructure, improve drainage, and prepare for droughts. A 2019 report commissioned by the administration itself found that every $1 spent on mitigation returned $6 in savings, with nearly $160 billion in total benefits and a reduction in fatalities and injuries over 23 years. Now, with the program shuttered as "wasteful and ineffective," twenty Democratic-led states are suing FEMA to restore the funding.
At the same time, FEMA announced in July a $608 million fund for states to build new immigrant detention centers, including Florida’s so-called "Alligator Alcatraz," built on an old airfield in the Everglades. According to a petition published on August 25, 2025, these facilities hold people indefinitely without due process, often in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions lacking adequate medical care. The petition denounces the expansion of these detention centers, especially as it comes alongside a $1 billion cut from first responders, disaster preparedness, and cybersecurity. It urges the public to demand an end to FEMA’s "detention Support grant program," arguing, "We cannot allow FEMA, an agency meant to save lives, to be weaponized this way."
The Katrina Declaration urges Congress to take four immediate steps: make FEMA a Cabinet-level independent agency, protect its funding from being diverted to other priorities, safeguard workers from politically motivated firings, and demand transparency from the White House and FEMA leadership on staffing decisions. The officials warn, "We find ourselves—on the 20th anniversary of a disaster that reshaped the nature of emergency management—only two months removed from a mass casualty flooding event in Kerrville, Texas, which proved the inefficiencies, ineffectiveness, and dangers of the processes and decisions put forth by the current administration."
Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, has defended Secretary Noem’s leadership. In an unsigned statement, DHS claimed Noem is moving the agency past years of "red tape, inefficiency, and outdated processes that failed to get disaster dollars into survivors’ hands," and asserted that "the agency was outperforming the slow, inadequate disaster responses of the past." The statement added, "It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform. Change is always hard. It is especially for those invested in the status quo. But our obligation is to survivors, not to protecting broken systems."
Former FEMA head Michael Brown, who resigned after Katrina, weighed in with a USA Today op-ed, reflecting on the failures of 2005 and urging today’s leaders not to repeat the same mistakes. "History demands more honesty than scapegoating provides," Brown wrote. "The lesson from Katrina is the need for an objective, clear-eyed assessment of why all of us failed—me, mayors, governors, Cabinet secretaries and, yes, presidents—to lead us to contemporary reforms worthy of those who suffered and lost. We owe that to future disaster victims who continue to suffer from the same systemic failures 20 years later."
As hurricane season intensifies, the debate over FEMA’s future is no longer just about policy—it’s about the nation’s ability to respond when disaster strikes, and whether the hard-won lessons of Katrina are being remembered or forgotten.
