Hurricane Season Starts Today. Trump Gutted FEMA First.

June 1, 2026

Hurricane season officially begins today, June 1, and the federal government's disaster response agency is shorthanded, leaderless in key positions, and backlogged with hundreds of unresolved disasters from last year. Donald Trump spent the last 17 months gutting FEMA. The bill comes due every time a storm makes landfall.

The Gutting, by the Numbers

FEMA has lost more than 5,000 employees since Trump took office in January 2025, nearly 20 percent of its total workforce. The top echelon of career emergency managers is down 35 percent. As of this week, roughly half of the agency's top 38 leadership positions are listed as vacant on its own website.

The agency enters hurricane season with the smallest disaster workforce since 2021. A backlog of more than 650 unresolved disaster declarations from prior storms is tying up staff and money that should be available for new emergencies.

"Hurricane season begins June 1, and by every available measure FEMA is less prepared to respond than it has been in a generation." — Senior House Democrats on the Homeland Security Committee

Acting FEMA Administrator Bob Fenton admitted to reporters this week: "We are playing catch-up." That same week, he told CBS News: "We're ready for hurricane season." Those two statements cannot both be true.

Noem's Year of Damage

Kristi Noem ran FEMA for the better part of a year and left it worse than she found it. She held up thousands of grants and contracts across the country while disaster funds for North Carolina, still recovering from Hurricane Helene, sat frozen for months. Republican senators from North Carolina publicly condemned her. They blocked DHS nominees in protest.

In March, Noem was called before Congress and told she "failed at FEMA." She was fired two days later.

The damage outlasted her. Fenton, who replaced her, has moved to reverse some of the worst cuts, bringing back roughly 200 disaster response workers who had been fired and lifting some hiring freezes. But former FEMA employees who publicly raised alarms about preparedness spent 8 months on the sidelines before being reinstated. Eight months of institutional knowledge not in the room.

What "Playing Catch-Up" Looks Like

Fenton told reporters that "a little bit over 30 percent" of FEMA's disaster workforce is currently available. Thirty percent is deployed. Another 30 percent is in training, on leave, or in the credentialing pipeline. Those numbers do not add up to a ready agency.

FEMA also skipped the National Hurricane Conference in March, a major annual gathering where emergency managers coordinate with state and local partners. That coordination matters when a Category 4 storm is 48 hours from landfall and officials need to know who to call.

The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season forecast calls for 8 to 14 named storms. Slightly below the historical average of 14, but the forecast did not look threatening the last time a major storm overwhelmed federal response capacity either.

Trump ran on the idea that the federal government was too slow, too bloated, too bureaucratic to help ordinary Americans. FEMA needed reform. His solution was to fire the people who do the work, install a secretary who froze aid to disaster survivors, and leave half the leadership chairs empty. When the first major hurricane of 2026 makes landfall, millions of Americans will find out what that reform costs.

Sources

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