A Trump-appointed council has released a plan to fundamentally rework the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), proposing to shift disaster response responsibilities onto states and local governments while the climate crisis continues making extreme weather events more frequent and severe. The 12-member "Fema Review Council" - co-headed by Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth - declared it's "time to close the chapter on Fema," recommending the agency take a "more of a supporting role" under the doctrine that disaster response should be "locally executed, state or tribally managed, and federally supported."
Critics note the 74-page report uses the word "climate" exactly once, with zero references to the crisis supercharging the very disasters the system is meant to handle. Shana Udvardy, senior climate resilience policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the council "completely missed the moment we are in right now." The recommendations include requiring states to meet higher thresholds for disaster declarations, leaving evacuation and shelter to locals, capping payouts to homeowners, replacing FEMA's public assistance program with lump-sum payments within 30 days, reducing federal environmental reviews and audits, and pushing the private market to take over the National Flood Insurance Program - which is already carrying over $20bn in debt.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has already cut hundreds of millions in preparedness funding, FEMA lost roughly a third of its full-time staff last year, and the president has denied far more disaster declarations than his predecessors. Damage from weather and climate disasters in the first half of 2025 exceeded $101bn - "by far the most costly first half of any year on record dating back to 1980," according to Dr. Adam Smith, now at Climate Central after the Trump administration discontinued the federal database tracking these costs. Dr. Andrew Rumbach of the Urban Institute noted many small governments don't even have dedicated emergency management departments and "rely a lot on Fema." Rafael Lemaitre, a former FEMA public affairs director now with Sabotaging Our Safety, summed it up: "You cannot cut your way to a capable disaster response agency."