Senate Democrats pull fire alarm over possibility of a FEMA axing by DOGE

First USAID. Then the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Could the Federal Emergency Management Agency be the next federal agency on President Trump’s chopping block?

Democrats are sounding the alarm about FEMA’s future as Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency set their eyes upon the nation’s disaster-response agency as part of an aggressive effort to reshape and downsize the federal government.

Democrats, who have watched Musk try to dismantle other federal agencies, fear FEMA could be next following reports that members of DOGE—who don’t have security clearances—gained access to the agency’s network earlier this week. On Tuesday, Trump repeated his call for the termination of FEMA in a Truth Social post, calling it "SLOW AND TOTALLY INEFFECTIVE.”

Democrats and experts are calling for bipartisan reform efforts instead of gutting the agency. But those calls are being drowned out in part by inflated and misleading claims that FEMA provided millions in disaster aid for luxurious migrant bedding.

In an interview, Sen. Peter Welch, whose home state of Vermont has been struck by catastrophic flooding the past couple of years, told National Journal that FEMA should be reformed, not destroyed.

While the agency’s bureaucracy in some ways has impeded long-term recovery and rebuilding response, this moment is an opportunity for bipartisan problem-solving, said Welch, who described some of the FEMA long-term response in Vermont as “really inefficient.”

“There is a real opportunity for achieving a common goal of more efficiency and more affordability by having us focus on local leadership. The funds do have to come from the federal government. The local communities don't have it in their budget for a once-in-100 year event,” Welch said.

“What we're seeing with the early days of the Trump administration is that their approach is to destroy, not repair,” he said, adding that the dismantling of FEMA would be “catastrophic for red states and blue states.”

FEMA was created in 1979 as a way to federalize emergency response and recovery from disasters that states often were not equipped to manage on their own. Through disaster aid allocations approved by Congress, the agency works with states to prepare communities ahead of and after presidentially declared disasters.

Welch is planning to send a letter this week to FEMA to raise deep concerns about Musk’s involvement in the process and his team’s access to highly sensitive information, he told National Journal.

“DOGE is going into FEMA now and [doing the] kick-the-door-down approach. And it's enormously concerning to me, because they have access to the private information of Americans,” he said.

In particular over the last couple of years, the United States has been bombarded with a series of catastrophic natural disasters, including devastating flooding that tore through rural North Carolina and wildfires that scorched entire neighborhoods in Los Angeles.

Per data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information, there were 27 individual weather and climate disasters with at least $1 billion in damages in 2024.

Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, told National Journal, “You need staff to manage the intake of claims to be able to process them. And in areas like California, like those [in the Southeast] affected by Hurricane Helene and Milton, we're not done [creating] assistance that'll flow through different agencies and ultimately be coordinated, in some degree, by FEMA or through some of the resources that come through FEMA.

“The biggest and most immediate impact would be the impacts to the current and ongoing recoveries, of which there are more than 100, and future disasters, and the ability to respond effectively if this is done in a very hasty and uncoordinated manner,” he said.

Soon after he took office for the second time, Trump signed an executive order and established a commission to review FEMA, including whether it has any political biases, a claim fueled after a FEMA supervisor instructed staff during Hurricane Helene response to avoid houses in North Carolina with Trump campaign signs. The head of FEMA under President Biden fired the supervisor.

In a TruthSocial post on Tuesday, Trump wrote, “FEMA spent tens of millions of dollars in Democrat areas, disobeying orders, but left the people of North Carolina high and dry. It is now under review and investigation. THE BIDEN RUN FEMA HAS BEEN A DISASTER.”

Calls to nix the agency as it currently operates have grown this week, too, following the claim from Musk that money meant for U.S. disaster aid “instead is being spent on high end hotels for illegals!”

Musk is apparently misrepresenting the situation, likely referring to part of a larger pot of funding from the Shelter and Services Program—a joint venture between Customs and Border Patrol and FEMA—that New York was awarded last year. Court battles have now ensued over the funding, and several top officials at the agency were fired.

Schlegelmilch also noted, “FEMA gets criticized for these budget issues, but it's Congress that allocates the budget and it's the president that authorizes the disaster declaration. A lot of times, FEMA gets blamed for things that are actually more squarely with the White House and with Congress in terms of how those resources are” allocated.

Lawmakers replenished FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund in December as part of a $100 billion aid supplemental that included $29 billion for the agency.

Several times last year, FEMA warned it was nearly out of money after tackling back-to-back natural disasters. And the inconsistent funding and budgeting for the agency in the face of natural disasters exacerbated by climate change have stretched it too thin, experts say.

“It’s been a fairly bipartisan issue that there's a need for significant emergency-management reform, and there have been calls in the field—including academia—for quite some time, to reimagine that FEMA has sort of evolved from [an] agency that was originally designed to handle a small number of major disasters to dealing with many times that in a given year, and having to sort of be reinvested through legislation and through various reforms,” Schlegelmilch said.

Republican lawmakers from states particularly impacted by natural disasters, including North Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, largely supported disaster aid legislation in the last Congress to shore up FEMA’s funds.

“We deserve a FEMA that looks like somebody designed it on purpose, and that's not what we have right now,” Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana told National Journal. “I agree with the president that many of the functions of FEMA can be performed cheaper and more efficiently by the states. I think what the president wants to do is get into FEMA, he and his people, and do an analysis of what needs to be improved and how to do that, and that's what they're in the process of.”

While some agree local and state governments can be doing more for disaster response, the sudden disappearance of FEMA would be too large a hole for them to adequately fill, Welch warns.

“In the immediate aftermath, to help families get temporary shelter, to help businesses get along, FEMA was good” following the flooding in Vermont, Welch said. “In a couple of those instances, FEMA would pre-position resources so that in the aftermath, there was some help on the scene. And it took a level of resources that the local communities don't have.

“Where FEMA fell down was in the follow-through,” Welch said, reiterating the possibility of bipartisan reform on the topic.

"If they're saying that the federal government should get out of providing financial assistance to hammered communities, that's wrong because the local property taxpayer, in all of these instances, just doesn't have the capacity or the resources,” he said. “But where there's room for enormous agreement in cooperation is on trying to get more local control in the decision-making and the implementation of the follow-on recovery efforts. That's where local leadership actually is much preferable, in my view, to Washington-based leadership.”

Schlegelmilch said that “appointed FEMA administrators have also expressed frustration that states are not spending more state money to prevent disasters, that they're relying too heavily on the disaster declaration to come and pay 75 percent or more of the cost to clean up rather than preventing these from happening in the first place."

"So this call has been accumulating for a while,” he said.

“I would like to see responsible emergency-management reform. I think we will see emergency-management reform, but I'm not seeing the moves yet for that to be done responsibly,” he said about DOGE’s efforts so far.

Welch said that “one of the things that we share is a common desire to help our neighbors.”

“We're going to have more floods, we're going to have more fires, we're going to have more tornadoes,” he said. “Those still come. So the focus has to be on reforming to make it more efficient, but not abandoning the commitment we have to one another and to our neighbors.”