The Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), the United States’ frontline disaster response coordinator, faces sweeping changes under recommendations released this week by a presidential council that experts fear will further weaken the country’s ability to cope with escalating extreme weather fuelled by the climate crisis.
The 12-member “Fema Review Council”, appointed by Donald Trump and co-headed by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, declared in its final report that “it is time to close the chapter on Fema”. The document, presented publicly on Thursday and promptly sent to the president’s desk, proposes a fundamental shift in the agency’s role, guided by the doctrine that “disaster response should be locally executed, state or tribally managed, and federally supported”. The council framed its 150 recommended actions as essential upgrades to tighten Fema’s sprawling mission and inject efficiency into a chaotic recovery process.
A redesigned role for Fema
Under the proposed overhaul, Fema would be cast into what council member Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida division of emergency management, called “more of a supporting role”. States would have to meet higher thresholds for the disaster declarations that unlock federal support – Guthrie said such requests should only be made for events that have truly “broken the back of local and state government”. Evacuation and emergency shelter would become local responsibilities, and payouts to affected homeowners and renters would be severely capped.
The council also recommended a new funding model for Fema’s public assistance programme, which supports infrastructure repair, debris removal and other recovery costs. Instead of the current reimbursement system, the agency would issue a lump-sum payment within 30 days based on projected damages. Other proposals include fewer federal environmental and historical reviews, audits and inspections, with those tasks potentially handed to local entities. On flood insurance, the report suggests the private market should take a primary role in the National Flood Insurance Programme (NFIP), a federal scheme that is currently carrying more than $20bn in debt. Neptune Flood, an insurer that has pushed for greater private participation, saw its stock surge 22% on Thursday after the recommendations were published.
The council further emphasised personal accountability, writing: “It is the responsibility of every American to embrace their individual responsibility to lessen this burden by being prepared for disasters.”
Critics point to a glaring blind spot
Despite the breadth of the proposals, experts have sharply criticised the report for its near-total silence on the changing nature of the disasters Fema is supposed to address. The word “climate” appears only once in the 74-page document, with no mention of the climate crisis that is supercharging extreme weather events. Shana Udvardy, senior climate resilience policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the council had “completely missed the moment we are in right now”. She noted that the administration had already “done its best to break Fema down”.
The scale of the challenge is underscored by recent data. In the first half of 2025, damage from weather and climate disasters across the United States totalled more than $101bn, according to Dr Adam Smith, who tracked the data for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) until the federal database that catalogued these costs was discontinued by the Trump administration last May. Smith, now senior climate impacts scientist at the non-profit Climate Central, told the Guardian late last year that the figure was “by far the most costly first half of any year on record dating back to 1980”.
Dr Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, warned that the proposed local-first model overlooks the limited capacity of many small governments. “They rely a lot on Fema, and on federal expertise to help them,” he said. “I think that this is going to be really a challenging proposition for them.” Many local authorities do not even have dedicated emergency management departments, he added.
Criticism has also been directed at the composition and transparency of the council’s outreach. The council claimed its recommendations were rooted in an extensive public engagement campaign – including a nationwide survey of local agencies and listening sessions in 13 cities with four tribal nations – but those meetings were held behind closed doors with limited documentation. Few minority voices were included, a notable gap given that such communities disproportionately bear the brunt when catastrophes strike, Udvardy observed. The council itself comprises current and former officials from Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida and Virginia, along with a former chair of the Republican National Committee, a sheriff from Florida’s Miami-Dade county, and the mayor of Tampa, Florida. Robert J. Fenton Jr., a Fema veteran who now heads its Pacific regional office, was also a member and was outspoken about bureaucratic slowdowns.
Impact on an already weakened agency
The report lands at a time when Fema has already been significantly hollowed out. Before Trump took office, a federal analysis created for Congress had advised greater investment in the disaster workforce to shorten deployments, improve support and reduce burnout. Instead, the administration cut hundreds of millions of dollars in national preparedness funding in 2025. Fema lost roughly a third of its full-time staff – including experienced leaders – to firings, retirements and resignations last year. The president has also denied far more disaster declaration requests than his predecessors and taken longer to make those decisions, causing delays in the distribution of urgently needed aid.
Sabotaging Our Safety, an advocacy group of disaster recovery experts and former Fema employees, gave the agency a failing grade ahead of the report’s release, noting that leadership positions remain vacant, the shrunken workforce is overloaded, training exercises are delayed, and there is still no strategic plan in place ahead of what could be a devastating hurricane season. Rafael Lemaitre, a former director of public affairs at Fema who now serves on the group’s advisory council, said in a written statement: “The Trump administration spent over a year dismantling Fema piece by piece, and now their own handpicked council is endorsing the wreckage. You cannot cut your way to a capable disaster response agency.”
Despite the bleak picture, the council’s plans remain just recommendations. According to the council’s own analysis, roughly half would need to be backed by legislation, four require new policies or regulations, and only one – reducing administrative costs – could be completed by executive order. Mullin, who took over the Department of Homeland Security in March after his predecessor Kristi Noem was dismissed, has already changed course on some of her more controversial policies, attempting to re-hire workers and fund lapsed programmes. The administration has generally softened its rhetoric about Fema’s future, walking back calls to fully eliminate it in favour of tightening its mission.
Yet for many, the report’s lack of attention to the root causes of rising disaster costs remains the central failure. Rumbach said he had hoped to hear more about how to make mitigation more effective and build resilience at all levels of government. “A lot of the presentation was focused on post-disaster programmatic implementation versus the big question – how do we make disasters cost less in this country – especially in an era when we know that the hazards themselves are getting worse?”
