According to The Washington Post, “More than 180 Federal Emergency Management Agency employees sent a letter Monday [August 25] to members of Congress and other officials, arguing that the agency’s direction and current leaders’ inexperience harm the agency’s mission and could result in a disaster on the level of Hurricane Katrina. The letter warns that the Trump administration is sending the agency and the country back to a pre-Katrina era by not having a Senate-confirmed and qualified emergency manger at FEMA’s helm; by slashing mitigation, disaster recovery, training and community programs; and by thwarting officials’ ability to make decisions because of a restrictive new expense policy.”

Both CNN and MSNBC covered the FEMA letter extensively in their Hurricane Katrina anniversary coverage. Between August 22 and 29, CNN mentioned the letter in at least 24 segments and MSNBC in at least 14. Fox seems to have ignored the August 25 letter for nearly a week before mentioning it in a correspondent segment — which mainly supported the idea that the federal government should play a limited role in extreme weather disasters — on the August 30 edition of Fox Report with Jon Scott. 

The segment noted: “This week a group of current and former FEMA employees sent a scathing letter to Congress warning the agency is now putting uninformed cost-cutting above serving the American people.”

Fox’s latest omission is seemingly part of an ongoing effort to shield viewers from Trump administration actions that undermine federal disaster preparedness and response.

In May, just weeks before the start of the Atlantic hurricane season and peak extreme weather, CNN obtained an internal memo warning that FEMA was “not ready” for hurricane season. According to the internal assessment, preparations for hurricane season had been “derailed” and issues abounded at the agency, “including a general uncertainty around its mission, lack of coordination with states and other federal agencies, low morale and new red tape that will likely slow responses.” Fox ignored reporting on the agency's lack of preparation for this year’s extreme weather season. The network was also quiet about multiple states that expressed frustration over delayed or denied disaster relief from the Trump administration.

On June 2, acting FEMA Administrator David Richardson made headlines, first in Reuters, for telling staff in a daily briefing that he had been unaware the U.S. has a hurricane season (the Department of Homeland Security later claimed his comment was a joke). Legacy news outlets, including cable networks CNN and MSNBC, covered Richardson’s controversial remarks and the wider concerns about FEMA’s hurricane preparedness while Fox News seemingly ignored them.

After the deadly flooding in Central Texas in early July, Fox News personalities attacked the media and prominent Democrats for linking the flooding to climate change and for raising concerns about Trump administration cuts to agencies and services that predict and respond to extreme weather events. When reporting showed that the Trump administration’s response had been delayed, Fox ran defense for Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

In the past two decades, a number of reforms were put in place at federal agencies to improve systems and processes in an effort to ensure that a tragedy like Katrina is not repeated. 

• Legislation was passed in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to address agency coordination, leadership, and responsiveness including making FEMA a distinct entity within the Department of Homeland Security with clearer authority and creating “10 regional FEMA offices, each with a regional administrator”; setting eligibility criteria for the FEMA administrator; and prohibiting discrimination in disaster aid based on disability and English proficiency. [Columbia Climate School, National Center for Disaster Preparedness, 8/22/24; Congress.gov, accessed 9/2/25]

• Over the past several years, FEMA has sought to address climate risks and invested in disaster risk reduction including incorporating sea-level rise in the nation’s flood risk standards; requiring state disaster risk reduction plans to consider climate change; and requiring climate-informed flood standards for federally funded projects. (While flood maps consider some climate impacts, they are outdated and don’t accurately consider flash flooding and other risks associated with our current climate.) In 2020, FEMA launched its hazard mitigation program, Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities. The bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed in 2021 directed about $1 billion to pay for climate-resilient projects “designed to help them prepare for natural disasters like flooding and fires.” [Axios, 7/10/24; NPR, 5/19/15; National Resources Defense Council, 3/13/15; Gizmodo, 8/13/25; AP News, 4/4/25, 9/1/22; DHS.gov, 2/3/23]

• The federal government’s ability to accurately assess extreme weather threats had reportedly vastly improved through post-Katrina investments in satellites and modeling at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, with better forecasting saving “the country billions every time a storm makes landfall.” According to NPR, “In 2005, Katrina, and other damaging storms from that era, like Rita and Wilma, spurred a concerted push to get better at forecasting hurricanes. That energy was harnessed into a federally supported research effort, called the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, that gathered together the best scientists from across agencies, private universities and national laboratories in an effort that has continued through today.” [NPR, 8/21/25]

Not only has the Trump administration drastically cut staff and resources at FEMA but, as Yale Climate Communications reported, “the cuts come at a time of mounting vulnerability as climate change makes hurricanes more dangerous and deadly for growing coastal populations. And when disaster survivors get angry at FEMA, it’s usually because they want more support from the agency, not less.” 

• The Trump administration has crippled national disaster preparedness by cutting staff and installing inexperienced leaders. Reports suggest that FEMA has lost about a quarter of its full-time staff, including senior leadership like the head of FEMA’s storm response center, who submitted his resignation June 11. FEMA’s acting administrator was fired after testifying that the agency shouldn’t be abolished. The new acting administrator, David Richardson, has no emergency management experience. In early June, Reuters reported that Richardson had told staff he didn’t know that the United States has a hurricane season. Staff said they were unsure whether Richardson was joking. [The New York Times, 6/12/25; CBS News, 6/13/25; Politico, 5/8/25; CNBC, 6/2/25]

• Program and staff reductions along with public statements from Kristi Noem suggesting that FEMA would be eliminated have reportedly left the agency ill-prepared for the extreme weather season. In May, just weeks before the start of the Atlantic hurricane season and peak extreme weather, CNN obtained an internal memo warning that FEMA was “not ready” for hurricane season. According to the internal assessment, preparations for hurricane season have been “derailed” and issues abounded at the agency, “including a general uncertainty around its mission, lack of coordination with states and other federal agencies, low morale and new red tape that will likely slow responses.” [CNN, 5/15/25]

• Further crippling the agency, the Department of Homeland Security has involuntarily reassigned dozens of FEMA staff to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation efforts. A letter to Congress arguing that FEMA’s leadership has hindered its ability to effectively manage emergencies signed by about 180 agency employees “points to the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which states that transfers are prohibited ‘except for details or assignments that do not reduce the capability of the Agency to perform its missions.’ The reassignments to help ICE, employees say, do just that.” [The Washington Post, 8/6/25; 8/25/25]

• There have already been real-world consequences: The 2025 Texas flood disaster response was reportedly delayed by FEMA’s diminished capacity and a new budget rule imposed by Kristi Noem. According to The New Republic, “Texas’s request for aerial imagery to help with search and rescue efforts was also ‘delayed as it awaited Noem’s approval for the necessary contract,’ and, at a FEMA-manned disaster call center, ‘callers have faced longer wait times as the agency awaited Noem’s approval for a contract to bring in additional support staff.’” According to The New York Times, “the Federal Emergency Management Agency did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line … because the agency had fired hundreds of contractors at call centers.”  [The New Republic, 7/10/25; The New York Times, 7/11/25]

• Rollbacks on flood risk standards and canceled preparedness programs are putting communities at greater risk. On his first day in office, Trump revoked federal flood protections which require federally funded infrastructure projects that are vulnerable to flooding and sea level rise to include design requirements that harden them against those risks. “The goal of the standards were not only to protect human lives and homes, but also to save taxpayer money, preventing a never-ending cycle of destroy-rebuild-repeat,” Truthout reported. In April, Trump canceled billions of dollars in disaster preparedness grants to “help local, state and tribal governments protect residents from future disasters such as floods, wildfires, tornadoes and hurricanes,” NPR explained. Even some Republicans like Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) are asking Trump to reconsider the cuts because, as Cassidy said, the program providing the grants “protects families and saves taxpayer dollars in the long-run. That’s efficient in my book.” [Truthout, 7/12/25; NPR, 6/1/25; Cassidy.Senate.gov, 4/10/25]

• Disaster management expert: “States cannot handle large disasters on their own.” Samantha Montano, the author of Disasterology and an assistant professor of emergency management at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, told Yale Climate Communications that states cannot handle large disasters on their own: “The second you talk about needing to do rescues into the thousands, they cannot do that on their own,” she said. “When you start talking about any kind of large-scale evacuation, they’re not doing that on their own. Even mass sheltering operations – Florida and Texas, are in the best position to do that – but even then, I don’t think that that is happening on their own. They are absolutely reliant on federal resources during response and recovery, and I don’t know how the narrative has gotten out that they are not.” [Yale Climate Connections, 6/20/25]

• Experts say the Trump administration is increasing emergency management risk at the same time as it’s speeding up climate change. Samantha Montano told YCC: “They are breaking the emergency management system that we have as that last resort in response and recovery, and at the same time, are actively increasing our risk and speeding up the climate change process by taking us out of [the] Paris [Agreement] and their energy policy.” The FEMA employee letter also warned about the administration’s denial of climate science: “This administration’s decision to ignore and disregard the facts pertaining to climate science in disasters shows a blatant disregard for the safety and security of our Nation’s people and all American communities regardless of their geographic, economic or ethnic diversity.”  [Yale Climate Connections, 6/20/25; The Washington Post, 8/25/25]