Nearly 200 current and former FEMA employees are warning Congress about recent changes to the agency.
In a letter called the “Katrina Declaration,” workers accused the administration of eroding FEMA’s response capabilities and appointing unqualified leadership. They warned of the possibility of failures similar to those during Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The group wants FEMA to become a Cabinet-level independent agency protected from political interference.
"Hurricane Katrina was not just a natural disaster, but a man-made one: the inexperience of senior leaders and the profound failure by the federal government to deliver timely, unified, and effective aid to those in need left survivors to fend for themselves for days, and highlighted how Black, Indigenous, and low-income communities are disproportionally affected by disasters," the letter reads. "These failures prompted Congress to pass the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 (PKEMRA), which introduced safeguards to ensure such shortcomings of disaster preparation and response would not be repeated. However, two decades later, FEMA is enacting processes and leadership structures that echo the conditions PKEMRA was designed to prevent."
The warning comes as Trump announced plans to phase out FEMA after hurricane season. The president suggested the federal government could give money directly to states so they could respond to disasters on their own.
"We're going to give out less money. We're going to give it out directly. It'll be from the president's office. We'll have somebody here; could be Homeland Security, but we're going to give it out through a method," President Trump said.
He added that if a state's governor cannot handle a disaster, "Maybe they shouldn't be governor."
Democrats in Congress are attempting to maintain a federal response to disasters. Sen. Peter Welch introduced the Disaster Assistance Improvement and Decentralization (AID) Act, which he says would "cut red tape and empower state and local governments to access recovery assistance when it is needed."
“We cannot stop climate disasters—the only thing we can control is how ready we are to respond and how quickly we help communities rebuild. Brave FEMA employees are sounding the alarm, and the leadership of FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House need to be all in on fixing the problem,” said Welch. “These post-Katrina reforms were enacted because of a deadly failure to respond to an unthinkable disaster."
