Current and former staff at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) expressed outraged over reports that the agency has drafted plans to eliminate thousands of staff in 2026 – part of a broader restructuring effort being overseen by the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.
“The Trump administration seems determined to continue weakening the agency’s efforts to help people before, during and after disasters,” said Jeremy Edwards, former spokesperson for Fema and the White House during Joe Biden’s presidency.
Fema has already seen a mass exodus of staff since Trump re-entered the White House in January. Further cuts would be “an affront to not only the law, but also to common sense when we are in a situation where states and local communities have been vocal about the fact they do not have the ability or the capacity to replicate what Fema does for them”, one longtime Fema official, who requested anonymity, said.
The response came after dozens of senior agency employees on 23 December reportedly received notice about the launch of a workforce planning exercise, asking them to identify which Fema positions are critically necessary for the agency’s operations and which could be slashed. It also included a spreadsheet outlining a goal to cut Fema staff by more than 50% by the next fiscal year’s start in October, though it reportedly no said decisions about workforce reductions have not been finalized.
Reached for comment, a Fema spokesperson said the agency “has not issued and is not implementing a percentage-based workforce reduction”.
“There is no directive to reduce the agency’s workforce by 50%, and no such target has been approved by [the Department of Homeland Security] or the White House. The materials referenced from the leaked documentation stem from a routine, pre-decisional workforce planning exercise,” the spokesperson said. “An accompanying spreadsheet was an internal working tool used to collect planning inputs. Any numerical assumptions reflected in that draft were not approved, were not adopted, and do not represent Fema policy or leadership direction.”
But the 50% target echoes recommendations from the the taskforce that Donald Trump set up last year to help overhaul the agency. A draft of that group’s final report, which was leaked to CNN last month, also called for cutting the agency’s workforce in half and shifting many full-time staff out of Washington DC to nationwide regional offices.
“Political leadership at Fema can pretend that this is just a training exercise, but anyone with eyes knows that Kristi Noem has been hellbent on such workforce reductions and they have already successfully fired or laid off literally thousands of full time staff,” said Edwards, the former spokesperson for Fema.
“It seems like an oddly specific exercise to do if it’s not something you are actively preparing for.”
Edwards said he participated in training exercises while at Fema, “but never something like this”.
“They are usually situation-based and related to specific emergency events, in my experience,” he said. “So it’s very strange to just randomly say: ‘What if we cut the staff by 50%?’ It’s less strange when you remember that this type of staff reduction is something this administration has had its eye on.”
Nearly 2,450 employees of Fema are estimated to have exited the agency since the second Trump administration began. On 31 December 2025, some employees also reportedly received emails saying their positions would not be renewed once their contracts expire in the first days of January.
Those recent cuts specifically target the agency’s cadre of on-call response and recovery teams, its term-limited workforce that provides crucial support in disaster response and recovery efforts. These recent changes could be a major blow to disaster recovery, the longtime Fema official said.
“Imagine if we had to tackle a Helene or Milton or Maria or Irma without the backbone of our forward-deploying force,” the person said. “These decisions are made by people at the top of Fema and at [the Department of Homeland Security] who have no idea how anything works, don’t care about the agency or its people, or the American people. Their only goal is to prove who can show the most fealty to the administration no matter how damaging or cruel those actions end up being.”
Edwards said changes under Noem are pushing the agency in the wrong direction.
“The agency should be focused on preparing communities for inevitable disasters, not its own demise,” he said.
