Double-barreled hurricane crisis exposes FEMA’s chronic leadership, staffing problems

On the eve of Hurricane Milton’s landfall on a disaster-weary Florida, FEMA, the nation’s disaster relief agency reported a stark shortage of frontline workers available to be deployed: just 8% of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s vaunted Incident Management personnel were still available for deployment.

The stunning declaration in Wednesday’s Daily Operations Briefing exposed the longtime impact of FEMA’s expanding work on unrelated missions like COVID funerals and illegal immigrant services, a crisis created by a worker shortage, a workforce morale issue and the reality of burnout from a increasingly frenetic natural disaster pace.

Just seven months earlier, the Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress, warned that FEMA was in an increasingly weak position to handle multiple major crises at once.

“Increasingly complex and severe natural disasters coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic and responsibilities at the southern border have created an unprecedented demand for FEMA’s disaster workforce,” the GAO concluded.

“In May 2023, we reported that as of the beginning of fiscal year 2022, FEMA had approximately 11,400 disaster employees on board and a staffing goal of 17,670, creating an overall staffing gap of approximately 6,200 staff (35 percent) across different positions. This means that FEMA’s disaster workforce was operating at 65 percent force capacity during the pandemic,” it added.

You can read the GAO report below:

Wednesday’s situation report showed FEMA had most of its IM (incident management) resources deployed in the region struck by Hurricane Helene two weeks ago or pre-positioned in Florida for Milton. But the 8% in reserves – only 90 workers – would be be hard pressed if another disaster like an earthquake or wildfire broke out in the ensuing days.

You can read the situation report below: 

These meager backup resources highlight the enduring problem with continually functioning with a staffing shortage. In June, long before Hurricane Helene and Milton, FEMA had a larger portion of its frontline teams available to deploy to any disaster zones across the country. But, even then only 17% of those response teams were available for deployment, according to a daily briefing from June 1. 

At virtual press conference Wednesday, FEMA Director Deanne Criswell said her agency was has “sent as many resources as we can” to disaster areas to support recovery and prepare for the storm. But, Criswell alluded to the strain her agency is facing, explaining FEMA drawing on other staff from across the agency to supplement disaster response teams. 

“We have a layered approach to our staffing, and when we think about our primary staff, our disaster staff, those are the folks that are designated that this is their full time job, but we are also bringing in our staff from across headquarters in our regions that don't do disaster work directly, full time, and they have all been trained to be able to pitch in and help out when we need additional support,” Criswell told reporters. 

“I think we plan for multiple events. We've done this before we are prepared for this,” she added. 

Several factors contribute to the increasing strain on the workforce of the nation’s premier disaster relief agency related to the agency’s expanding roles and responsibilities outside of traditional disaster relief. The GAO report specifically highlighted the impacts of workforce burnout from increased responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic response and deployments to the U.S. southern border. 

FEMA did not respond to additional questions from Just the News about the number of FEMA employees or contractors deployed to the southern border or handling other immigration-related programs. 

Recently, Congress has continued to fund FEMA programs for feeding and sheltering illegal immigrants released into the country awaiting court dates at a time when the agency is running short of disaster relief funds. The agency has come under additional scrutiny by Republicans for hiccups in its response to severe flooding in the southeast last month, Just the News reported this week. 

White House spokeswoman Karine-Jean Pierre took the lead in trying to suggest it was a "conspiracy theory" to suggest that FEMA was using its resources to aid illegal aliens. Republicans came back with receipts, showing that FEMA had routed $640.9 million in grants to nonprofits aiding immigrants, many of whom have crossed into the U.S. illegally.

Both parties signed off on a budget deal earlier this year that increased funding for the new mission authorized in 2023 for FEMA. The funding was to stand up a new program for authorized by a Democrat-controlled Congress in 2022 which would “support sheltering and related activities provided by non-Federal entities, including facility improvements and construction, in support of relieving overcrowding in short-term holding facilities of U.S. Customs and Border Protection,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

By 2024, the program was well established at the agency when Republicans and Democrats alike voted to fund it to the tune of $650 million with the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2024—a minibus bill passed by the House and Senate in March, both with significant Republican support, and sent to President Joe Biden’s desk. 

Last week, a group of Republican Senators who did not support the budget deal wrote to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, expressing concern that its continued “entanglement” with immigration threatens readiness. 

“FEMA’s continued entanglement in DHS’s efforts to respond to the border crisis could impact its readiness and emergency response mission,” GOP Senators James Lankford, Josh Hawley, Rand Paul, and Ron Jonson wrote to Biden last week. “Rather than ensuring FEMA is ready to respond to hurricanes and other emergencies, FEMA has been pulled into a border crisis mission.” 

Additionally, FEMA still has a significant number of outstanding obligations related to the COVID-19 pandemic and warned that this may inhibit the agency’s future response to disaster events. 

“In addition to the 59 major disaster declarations for COVID-19, as of July 2022, the agency had 494 open non-COVID-19 active major disaster declarations in various states of response and recovery,” GAO concluded. 

“We previously reported that the number of concurrent demands on the Disaster Relief Fund and the unpredictability of future response needs raised questions about its availability for the significant number of active disasters in different stages of recovery, including the ongoing recovery in Puerto Rico—one of the largest recovery efforts in FEMA history and other events,” the office wrote. 

FEMA’s monthly obligations report shows the agency spent about $14.9 billion on COVID-19 obligations in the month of September even more than five years after the start of the pandemic. By comparison, the agency only spent about $1.1 billion in September for recovery efforts after Hurricane Beryl impacted Texas earlier this summer in July. 

You can read the September expenditures below: 

According to GAO, FEMA’s assistance related to COVID-19 includes Lost Wages Assistance and COVID-19 funeral assistance. 

The report noted the wage assistance program “resulted in particularly rapid expenditures from the Disaster Relief Fund,” the same fund that DHS Secretary Mayorkas warned earlier this week is in danger of running out of money as the agency responds to the two hurricane crises. 

“We are meeting the immediate needs with the money that we have. We are expecting another hurricane hitting,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last week. “FEMA does not have the funds to make it through the season.”