On Thursday, Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem claimed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “is much more responsive under President Trump to people’s needs than it has been under previous administrations.” Speaking at the public third meeting of the FEMA Review Council, a group appointed by Donald Trump at the beginning of this year to oversee reform of the agency, Noem encouraged those listening to “be vocal” about positive interactions with the Trump administration.
“Tell the story of how different FEMA has been the last seven, eight months under [Trump’s] leadership than it was previous to that,” she said.
It was a notable instruction, as this week has been anything but complimentary for FEMA. On Monday, more than 190 current and former FEMA employees signed onto a public letter criticizing the agency. While most employees signed anonymously, 35 of them signed with their names attached. Many current employees who signed onto the letter with their full names were almost immediately placed on administrative leave following the publication of the letter, The Washington Post reported.
The letter comes after a summer of disastrous flooding across the US, which critics say has been handled poorly as the administration slow-walks responses to requests for aid from certain states. FEMA employees tell WIRED that staff attrition and policies clogging up contract approvals are weakening the agency, which is facing a hard deadline to get contracts out the door by the end of the fiscal year; these policies have already created scrutiny for the agency over its response to flooding in Texas this summer, arguably the most high-profile disaster this year. Now, as the nation heads into the most intense months of the Atlantic hurricane season, employees worry that the agency is not prepared to face another catastrophe.
Jennifer Forester, a FEMA report analyst based in Texas, says that she decided to sign her name to the letter to send a signal to the agency. “Signing it anonymously would not have made the same point—that this is a situation dire enough to warrant risking a career, because human lives are at stake in what can, at first glance, just look like a political scuffle over political appointments and jobs,” she tells WIRED.
Forester says that she checked her email in the evening on Tuesday, half an hour after she left work, and saw a “terse” memo from the chief of staff of the office of the administrator putting her on paid administrative leave. The memo attached to the email, a copy of which was viewed by WIRED, instructs recipients that access to their emails and FEMA facilities has been suspended, and provides no end date for the leave. The memo states that the placement “is not a disciplinary action” and “not intended to be punitive.”
Colette Delawalla, the founder and executive director of Stand Up for Science, the group that organized the letter, told WIRED she had heard from “around 20” of the letter’s signers who had since been placed on administrative leave.
FEMA did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.
“It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform,” the agency told The Guardian, which reported on the retaliation against the employees who signed the letter. “Change is always hard. It is especially for those invested in the status quo, who have forgotten that their duty is to the American people not entrenched bureaucracy.”
The targeting of letter signers at FEMA echoes an earlier move at the Environmental Protection Agency in July, when that agency suspended about 140 employees who signed onto a similar public letter.
A FEMA employee who signed this week’s letter expressed concern to WIRED that the agency may try to seek out those who did not include their names on the letter—especially given how DHS reportedly administered polygraphs in April attempting to identify employees who leaked to the press. “I'm concerned they may use similar tactics to identify anonymous signers,” they say. This employee spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to speak to the press.
On Tuesday morning, a day after the employees’ letter was published, former FEMA acting administrator Cameron Hamilton, who was fired from his position a day after testifying in defense of the agency to Congress in May, posted a criticism publicly on LinkedIn.
“Stating that @fema is operating more efficiently, and cutting red tape is either: uninformed about managing disasters; misled by public officials; or lying to the American the public [sic] to prop up talking points,” he wrote. “President Trump and the American people deserve better than this…FEMA is saving money which is good due to the astronomical U.S. Debt from Congress. Despite this, FEMA staff are responding to entirely new forms of bureaucracy now that is lengthening wait times for claim recipients, and delaying the deployment of time sensitive resources.”
“I made my post to clarify statements made by some at DHS that I believe are mischaracterizing problems with FEMA,” Hamilton tells WIRED. “I have been frustrated at how FEMA has been scapegoated and firmly believe that the role of FEMA should be one of excellence, and success for the government.”
Both Hamilton’s post and the open letter call out a new rule, instituted in June, mandating that any spending over $100,000 needs to be personally vetted by Noem. That cap, FEMA employees allege in Monday’s letter, “reduces FEMA’s authorities and capabilities to swiftly deliver our mission.” The policy came under fire in July after various outlets reported that it had caused a delay in the agency’s response following the flooding in Texas that killed at least 135 people. The agency’s chief of urban search and rescue operations resigned in late July, in part due to frustrations with how the DHS spending-approval process delayed aid during the disaster, CNN reported.
Screenshots of contract data seen by WIRED show that as of August 7, the agency still had more than $700 million left to allocate in non-disaster spending before the end of the fiscal year on September 30, with more than 1,000 open contract actions. The agency seems to be feeling the pressure to speed up contract proposals. In early August, several FEMA staff were asked to volunteer to work over a weekend to help review contracts to prepare them for Noem’s sign-off, according to emails reviewed by WIRED. (“Lots of work over the weekend,” read the notes from one meeting.)
“Disaster money is just sitting,” one FEMA employee tells WIRED. “Every single day applicants are asking their FEMA contact ‘where’s my money?’ And we are ordered to just say nothing and redirect.”
As the employees’ open letter states, roughly a third of FEMA’s full-time staff had already departed by May, “leading to the loss of irreplaceable institutional knowledge and long-built relationships.” These staff departures may further hamper efforts from the agency to implement financial efficiency measures like the contract reviews. A former FEMA employee tells WIRED that while the agency began the year with nine lawyers on the procurement team that helps review financial contracts during a disaster, almost the entire team has either left or been reassigned, leaving a dearth of experience just as hurricane season ramps up.
“I have no idea what happens,” the former employee tells WIRED, when a hurricane hits “and we need a contract attorney on shift 24/7.”
Update: 8/29/2025, 2:30 PM EDT: This story has been updated with comment from Cameron Hamilton.
