The Trump administration is undertaking the biggest overhaul of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in a generation. President Trump has been a vocal critic of the disaster response agency and, shortly after taking office, he appointed a 12-person review council to propose sweeping changes to FEMA.
Preliminary recommendations by that council would "eliminate FEMA as we know it today," according to a draft of its report obtained by NPR. The 89-page draft dates from December, when the FEMA Review Council was scheduled to adopt final recommendations, but the council's final meeting was abruptly canceled.
The final report is now expected in late March and could differ substantively from the December draft, although there have been no further public meetings of the council in the intervening months.
In the draft report, responsibility for disasters would largely shift to states, which have long relied on the federal government to help survivors when a flood, hurricane or wildfire hits. FEMA's workforce, already hit hard by staff reductions since President Trump took office, would be cut in half, compared to its size at the end of the Biden administration.
Still, some of the suggested reforms have been discussed by emergency managers and disaster policy experts for a decade or more, including ideas that are included in a bipartisan reform bill currently being considered by Congress. Some of the changes proposed by the review council would require congressional action.
The White House referred questions from NPR about the council's proposed reforms to FEMA. FEMA did not respond to questions. An emailed statement from the Department of Homeland Security, which includes FEMA, says that the FEMA Review Council is still working on its final report, and that it is "an iterative process."
NPR asked half a dozen disaster experts, including former FEMA staff, about the proposed reforms and what they believe could help protect communities from disasters that are getting more extreme in a hotter climate.
Proposal 1: Cut FEMA's staff by half
FEMA's staff would significantly shrink under the council's recommendations, halving the agency's numbers by losing more than 12,000 positions. "The majority of this reduction is expected to come from its disaster workforce, which includes temporary, on-call, and permanent personnel deployed to disaster areas," the draft report reads.
FEMA has already lost about 2,000 employees since Trump took office due to layoffs and other departures, including many senior staff. The administration is moving to cut thousands more FEMA workers this year by declining to renew multiyear contracts.
Even before those departures, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that FEMA was already understaffed.
Emergency management experts say losing half the agency could dramatically slow disaster response. FEMA deploys hundreds of employees in the aftermath of a major disaster, processing thousands of aid applications from disaster survivors. FEMA staff process those claims both in-person and through call centers, with the goal of providing immediate assistance with food, clothing and shelter. During Hurricane Helene in 2024, the agency got more than half a million calls in just a week.
"A 50% reduction in staff is going to dramatically cut into the people who take those applications and process that relief," says Tim Manning, a former deputy administrator at FEMA during the Obama administration and current research professor at Georgetown University. "That will do nothing but slow down help to the people."
Having fewer personnel to deploy means FEMA may need to call in employees from other federal agencies, as it's done during other major disasters. It could also put pressure on states to build up their own disaster response staffing, something some experts say would add significant costs to state budgets and wouldn't be as efficient, given that some states don't experience disasters every year.
"It's a lot more cost-effective to do that at the federal level," says Josh Morton, emergency management director for Saluda County, S.C., and president of the International Association of Emergency Managers. "If every state has to have their own individual assistance program and their own public assistance program on the scale that it takes to actually manage the funding post-disaster, you're talking about multiplying the cost by 50 because now every state is going to need just as robust of a team."
Michael Méndez, a former member of FEMA's National Advisory Council and professor at University of California, Irvine, says FEMA employees play a particularly crucial role in immigrant communities and with other hard-to-reach populations, because they build trusting relationships. "If that's not there, then many of these communities are not going to recover in an equitable manner or get the aid that they need because they're afraid."
Proposal 2: Raise the bar for getting federal disaster aid
When a severe disaster hits, billions of dollars can flow to states. Under the proposed changes, states would have a harder time qualifying for federal funds and would receive less when they do.
In order to receive funding under the current system, state governors must ask for a federal disaster declaration, the key first step in the process. Those declarations are made by the president, after getting advice from FEMA. FEMA determines whether the disaster is more than a state government can handle on its own. The agency uses a formula based on the estimated damage and the overall population of the state. Even if a disaster doesn't pass this threshold, the president can still choose to declare one.
The FEMA Review Council is recommending changing that disaster threshold formula, which means states would only qualify for federal help with higher levels of damage. The formula has not kept up with inflation, the council argues. Under the proposed change, the federal government would be responsible for fewer disasters. If it had already been in place, "29% of disasters declared between 2012 and 2025 would not have met the indicator, representing $1.5 billion," the report states.
Many disaster experts agree that the threshold for federal disaster aid should be raised, although there isn't consensus about how much to raise it.
Dominik Lett, a budget analyst at the free-market think tank the Cato Institute, calls the new proposed formula a "promising idea."
"We should be charting a path that shifts financial responsibility back to the states, for disasters," Lett says.
Some state and local emergency managers say they've been expecting an adjustment to the disaster threshold to account for inflation. During Trump's first term, his administration made a similar proposal in 2020 just before leaving office.
Still, those changes would mean the cost of more disasters would fall to state and local governments, potentially adding up to millions of dollars. Morton says while his state is now responsible for disasters with damage under around $10 million, they estimate that would increase to $40 million under the proposed changes. He and other state emergency managers say that takes advanced planning in already tight budgets.
"Local jurisdictions in general don't have a lot of money sitting in a pot ready for emergencies," says Lynn Budd, director of the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security. "I think it's going to take us some time to get to where we can be more independent. Let's have a timeline for where things change, not just tomorrow."
If states take over more disaster response, they'd be responsible for repairing public infrastructure, like roads, hospitals and water systems, something FEMA typically covers 75% of. They'd also be faced with supporting disaster survivors with needs for food and shelter, which otherwise would have come from FEMA.
"While many states could plan for the need to spend additional resources on infrastructure repair, most states don't have any programs that provide direct disaster assistance to individuals," Manning says. "So a lot of individuals and families will be kind of left in the lurch."
Proposal 3: Stop using damage costs to determine federal assistance
Since FEMA was created by Congress nearly 50 years ago, the agency has operated under a simple principle: The more expensive the damage, the more federal money you get.
For example, if a hurricane destroys a school, a courthouse and 50 miles of roads in a city, FEMA will give the local government more money than if that same hurricane damages one building.
But that would no longer be the model under a major recommendation proposed by the FEMA Review Council in a December draft of its report to the president.
The council recommends that federal disaster assistance to local and state governments be determined by the conditions of the disaster itself. For example, whether the hurricane was a Category 1 storm versus a Category 4 storm, what magnitude the earthquake was, or how much rain fell to cause a subsequent flood.
Using such information to automatically trigger assistance is called a "parametric" trigger, because it's based on the objective parameters, such as wind speed or temperature, rather than an estimate of the cost of the damage.
Some insurance policies successfully use such triggers, Méndez explains.
The FEMA report draft suggests that using parametric triggers would be more efficient because it would get money into the hands of local officials more quickly and reduce administrative costs at FEMA.
"The main benefit of a parametric model is the speed and certainty of payouts," the report draft states.
But emergency experts say it's unclear how FEMA could set triggers that would be fair and would cover every type of disaster and every part of the country. "I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done," says Jim Redick, who has worked in emergency management for 20 years and is currently the emergency manager for Austin, Texas.
"Every community is different. One may be more [acclimated] to a heat wave with 105 degree temperatures," Redick explains, using a hypothetical example. Residents of a place where air conditioning is rare could be in profound danger from such temperatures, he points out.
Those differences could lead to unfair situations in which some communities get just a fraction of the money they need to recover after disasters, or could receive no assistance at all, despite large amounts of damage. Poor and rural areas that have historically seen less infrastructure investment could suffer, Méndez points out.
The bipartisan FEMA reform bill introduced in the House takes the opposite approach — it would require FEMA to give extra consideration to poor and rural communities after disasters. The bill seeks to speed up federal assistance by reducing redundant paperwork and creating a faster payment system for small disasters.
The bill has been introduced in the House, and earlier this month a group of 50 lawmakers urged Speaker Mike Johnson to advance the bill by bringing it to the House floor.
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