by John Solomon and Steven Richards
On the eve of Hurricane Milton’s impact on disaster-plagued Florida, FEMA, the nation’s disaster relief agency, reported a severe shortage of frontline workers to deploy: Just 8% of the vaunted Federal Emergency Management Agency staff were still available for deployment. application.
The stunning announcement at Wednesday’s Daily Operations Briefing revealed the long-term impact of FEMA’s expansion into unrelated missions such as COVID-related funerals and services for undocumented immigrants, the crisis of labor shortages, workforce morale, and burnout resulting from increasingly violent natural disaster rate.
Just seven months earlier, the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s watchdog, warned that FEMA is increasingly in a weaker position to deal with multiple major crises simultaneously.
“Increasingly complex and severe disasters, coupled with the Covid-19 pandemic and responsibilities at the southern border, have created unprecedented demand for FEMA disaster workers,” he added. The GAO concluded.
“In May 2023, we reported that FEMA had approximately 11,400 disaster response employees at the beginning of fiscal year 2022 with a target workforce of 17,670 employees, creating an overall staffing gap of approximately 6,200 employees (35 percent) across a variety of positions. This means that FEMA disaster response staff were operating at 65% of their capacity during the pandemic,” he added.
Wednesday situation report showed that FEMA had most of its IM (incident management) resources deployed to the region affected by Hurricane Helene two weeks ago or pre-positioned in Florida for Milton. However, 8% of reservists – just 90 personnel – would find themselves in a challenging situation if another disaster, such as an earthquake or fire, struck in the following days.
These meager backup resources underscore the persistent problem of ongoing operations and staffing shortages. In June, well before Hurricanes Helene and Milton, FEMA had most of its frontline teams ready to deploy to any disaster zones across the country. However, even then, only 17% of these response teams were available for deployment, as per daily briefing from June 1.
On virtual press conference On Wednesday, FEMA Director Deanne Criswell said her agency “sent as many resources as we could” to affected areas to aid recovery and prepare for the storm. Criswell, however, alluded to the strain her agency faces, explaining that FEMA uses other staff from across the agency to supplement its disaster response teams.
“We have a multi-layered approach to our staff and when we think about our core staff, our disaster staff, these are people who have been designated as a full-time job, but we also employ our staff from across headquarters in our non-disaster regions. direct disasters on a full-time basis and everyone has been trained to be able to step in and help when we need additional support,” Criswell told reporters.
“I think we have a lot of events planned. We did it before we were prepared for it,” she added.
Several factors are contributing to the growing workload of the nation’s premier disaster relief agency as the agency’s roles and responsibilities expand beyond conventional disaster relief. The GAO report particularly highlighted the impact of employee burnout resulting from increased responsibility for the response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the deployment of employees to the southern border of the United States.
FEMA did not respond to additional questions from the site Only News on the number of FEMA employees or contractors deployed to the southern border or working on other immigration-related programs.
Recently Congress continues to fund FEMA programs to feed and shelter illegal immigrants released into the country awaiting their hearings as the agency runs out of disaster relief funds. The agency has been further scrutinized by Republicans for hiccups in its response to severe flooding in the Southeast last month. Only News reported this week.
White House spokeswoman Karine-Jean Pierre took the lead attempting to suggest that a “conspiracy theory” was the suggestion that FEMA was using its resources to assist illegal aliens. Republicans came back with bills showing that FEMA did it provided grants in the amount of USD 640.9 million nonprofit organizations that assist immigrants, many of whom entered the United States illegally.
The two sides signed a budget agreement earlier this year that increased funding for a up-to-date mission authorized in 2023 for FEMA. The funds were supposed to come up up-to-date program authorized by a Democrat-controlled Congress in 2022 that would “support shelter and related activities provided by non-federal entities, including improvements and construction of facilities, to support alleviating overcrowding in U.S. Customs and Border Protection short-term detention facilities,” according to the Congressional Research Service .
By 2024, the program was well-established at the agency when both Republicans and Democrats voted to fund it with $650 million under the Further Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2024 – the minibus bill passed by the House and Senate in March, both with significant Republican supportand sent to President Joe Biden’s desk.
Last week, a group of Republican senators who did not support the budget deal wrote to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, expressing concern that the organization’s continued “entanglement” in immigration was compromising preparedness.
“FEMA’s continued involvement in DHS’s efforts to respond to the border crisis may impact its emergency preparedness and response mission,” said Republican Senators James Lankford, Josh Hawley, Rand Paul and Ron Jonson he wrote to Biden last week. “Instead of ensuring that FEMA is ready to respond to hurricanes and other emergencies, FEMA has been drawn into a border crisis mission.”
Additionally, FEMA still has a significant amount of outstanding liabilities related to the Covid-19 pandemic and has warned that this could hamper the agency’s future response to disaster events.
“In addition to the 59 Covid-19-related major disaster declarations, as of July 2022, the agency had 494 open, active non-COVID-19 major disaster declarations in various response and recovery states,” the GAO concluded.
“We previously reported that the number of simultaneous requests for the Disaster Relief Fund and the unpredictability of future response needs have raised questions about its availability in the event of a significant number of dynamic disasters in various stages of recovery, including the ongoing recovery in Puerto Rico – one of the largest recovery efforts in history FEMA and other events,” the office wrote.
FEMA’s monthly commitment report shows this agency spent about $14.9 billion regarding obligations related to Covid-19 in September even after five years from the beginning of the pandemic. By comparison, in September, the agency spent only about $1.1 billion on recovery efforts after Hurricane Beryl, which hit Texas this summer in July.
According to the GAO, FEMA’s COVID-19 assistance includes COVID-19 Wage Loss Assistance and Funeral Assistance.
The report noted that the payroll assistance program “resulted in particularly rapid disbursements of the Disaster Relief Fund” – the same fund that DHS Secretary Mayorkas warned earlier this week was at risk of running out of funds as the agency responded to two hurricanes.
“With the money we have, we meet the most urgent needs. We expect another hurricane to hit,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last week. “FEMA does not have the resources to get through the season.”
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John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist, author and digital media entrepreneur who serves as CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Just the News. Before founding Just the News, Solomon played key reporting and leadership roles at some of America’s most significant journalism institutions, including The Associated Press, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast and The Hill. Steven Richards is an investigative reporter at Just the News.
