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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.