WASHINGTON — Nearly a year after President Donald Trump threatened to abolish the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a review council he appointed released a final report on Thursday to overhaul the agency by reducing administrative costs and shifting responsibility for disaster response to states.
The review council was created in January 2025 through Executive Order 14180. According to the order, the council, led by Homeland Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, was tasked with evaluating and improving the agency's efficacy and disaster response.
Last year, Trump described FEMA as “not a very successful experiment” and “extremely expensive.” He originally called to abolish FEMA outright, but later hedged.
“We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it back to the state level,” the president said in the Oval Office in June.
However, the council approved a report on May 7 that would preserve the agency but ask Congress to downsize personnel and raise the threshold for disaster aid. The report heads to Trump for review. Many recommendations would need congressional approval.
“We need to refocus FEMA and get it back on its mission that it originally was,” Mullin said. Mullin assumed the role of co-chair after former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was fired.
FEMA, part of the Department of Homeland Security, coordinates federal response efforts before, during, and after natural disasters. It aims to reduce risks and support communities before, during, and after these disasters, including providing financial assistance for response efforts such as debris removal and infrastructure repairs.
The report advised reducing administrative costs and transferring responsibility for disaster response to states and local territories, with FEMA taking on a supporting role.
It recommends, for example, that FEMA abandon efforts to help survivors secure long-term housing, saying the agency should instead help temporarily house people whose homes are uninhabitable.
FEMA’s support should “only be reserved for truly significant events,” said Kevin Guthrie, the director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management and a member of the review council.
Florida, along with Louisiana and Texas, has received the largest share of FEMA assistance since 2015, according to Axios. In the meantime, states like Illinois and California say FEMA isn’t delivering aid efficiently.
Thousands of survivors of the 2024 Los Angeles Fires, for example, still await more than $30 billion in federal aid for rebuilding homes and infrastructure.
In the 1990s, it took less than two weeks, on average, for a governor’s request for a major disaster declaration to be approved by the president. It now takes more than a month under the Trump administration, according to analysis from the Associated Press.
This new recommendation to overhaul FEMA under the Trump administration raised concerns for activist groups, which say FEMA is critical for disaster assistance. An advocacy organization called Sabotaging Our Safety, composed of disaster experts and former FEMA employees, criticized the president for deep cuts to the workforce.
“The agency Americans rely on when disaster strikes is measurably less prepared than at any point in recent memory,” the organization said in a report.
The group opposed the council's recommendations.
“Slashing the workforce in half and putting the burden of disaster recovery on the states would not save money. It would cost lives,” according to the report.
The Trump administration implemented, early on, a policy requiring top-level approval for FEMA contracts over $100,000. This policy, aimed at rooting out “waste, fraud and abuse,” delayed $17 million in federal disaster funds in January, according to The New York Times.
When Mullin took over as DHS secretary, he lifted the policy to speed up FEMA grants and reimbursements. Following this decision, more than $1 billion in backlogged funding was released.
FEMA under the partial government shutdown
During the 76-day partial government shutdown, FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund was reduced from nearly $10 billion to roughly $3 billion, forcing the agency to prioritize lifesaving and immediate relief, according to a press release from FEMA.
Non-essential activities, like rebuilding projects and funding for mitigation, were halted. Roughly 4,000 FEMA employees were furloughed, and another 1,600 worked without pay, according to the same press release.
Funding for the Disaster Relief Fund was reinstated on April 30, when the shutdown ended, but the agency faces a backlog of delayed projects.
Samantha Freeman is a graduate of politics, policy, and foreign affairs journalism student at Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism.
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