On Thursday, Department of Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem claimed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “is much more responsive under President Trump to people’s needs than it has been under previous administrations.” Speaking at the public third meeting of the FEMA Review Council, a group appointed by Donald Trump at the beginning of this year to oversee reform of the agency, Noem encouraged those listening to “be vocal” about positive interactions with the Trump administration.
“Tell the story of how different FEMA has been the last seven, eight months under [Trump’s] leadership than it was previous to that,” she said.
It was a notable instruction, as this week has been anything but complimentary for FEMA. On Monday, more than 190 current and former FEMA employees signed onto a public letter criticizing the agency. While most employees signed anonymously, 35 of them signed with their names attached. Many current employees who signed onto the letter with their full names were almost immediately placed on administrative leave following the publication of the letter, The Washington Post reported.
The letter comes after a summer of disastrous flooding across the US, which critics say has been handled poorly as the administration slow-walks responses to requests for aid from certain states. FEMA employees tell WIRED that staff attrition and policies clogging up contract approvals are weakening the agency, which is facing a hard deadline to get contracts out the door by the end of the fiscal year; these policies have already created scrutiny for the agency over its response to flooding in Texas this summer, arguably the most high-profile disaster this year. Now, as the nation heads into the most intense months of the Atlantic hurricane season, employees worry that the agency is not prepared to face another catastrophe.
Jennifer Forester, a FEMA report analyst based in Texas, says that she decided to sign her name to the letter to send a signal to the agency. “Signing it anonymously would not have made the same point—that this is a situation dire enough to warrant risking a career, because human lives are at stake in what can, at first glance, just look like a political scuffle over political appointments and jobs,” she tells WIRED.
Forester says that she checked her email in the evening on Tuesday, half an hour before she was scheduled to leave work, and saw a “terse” memo from the chief of staff of the office of the administrator putting her on paid administrative leave. The memo attached to the email, a copy of which was viewed by WIRED, instructs recipients that access to their emails and FEMA facilities has been suspended and provides no end date for the leave. The memo states that the placement “is not a disciplinary action” and “not intended to be punitive.”
Colette Delawalla, the founder and executive director of Stand Up for Science, the group that organized the letter, told WIRED she had heard from “around 20” of the letter’s signers who had since been placed on administrative leave.