GAO says FEMA staffing cuts may weaken disaster readiness

The Federal Emergency Management Agency lost 4,321 employees during fiscal year 2025, while making major workforce decisions without a documented analysis of the staffing needed for its disaster-response mission, according to a Government Accountability Office report released August 4, 2026.

GAO said the reductions may affect FEMA’s mission readiness as disasters become more frequent, costly and complex. The report does not say FEMA is unable to respond to disasters. Instead, it raises concerns about whether the agency has enough experienced personnel, specialized skills and surge capacity when emergencies overlap.

FEMA lost about 17 percent of its average workforce

GAO found that FEMA averaged about 25,134 employees in fiscal year 2025. The 4,321 separations represented about 17 percent of that average workforce and marked a 55 percent increase from the 2,791 separations recorded in fiscal year 2024.

The departures came through a combination of voluntary workforce-reduction programs, termination of probationary employees and nonrenewal of some temporary CORE appointments. FEMA reported that 1,502 employees separated through voluntary reduction programs between January 20, 2025, and January 10, 2026. The report does not characterize all separations as involuntary.

FEMA officials told GAO that the reductions contributed to the loss of institutional knowledge and experienced personnel. Officials also said a hiring freeze that began in January 2025 remained in place until May 2026.

GAO separately reported that 2,545 employees separated between October 1, 2025, and May 16, 2026. During that period, FEMA averaged 21,742 employees. Those figures are separate from the fiscal year 2025 totals and are not directly interchangeable with them.

GAO found a planning gap

GAO’s central concern was not only the number of departures, but how the decisions were made. FEMA rescinded its 2022-2026 strategic plan in May 2025. As of July 2026, the agency had not released a replacement, leaving it without an overall strategic direction on which to base workforce planning.

The watchdog found that FEMA did not base its 2025 or 2026 workforce-reduction decisions, proposed future actions or related policy changes on a workforce analysis assessing mission requirements, staffing levels, skills and future needs.

Workforce planning is especially important for FEMA because the agency must expand and contract its response operation as disasters develop. Its incident-management workforce is organized into specialized cadres, and the agency uses employees’ qualifications and skills to assign personnel to response and recovery missions.

Overlapping disasters have tested FEMA’s capacity

The report cited Hurricanes Helene and Milton, which affected the Southeast less than two weeks apart in September and October 2024. FEMA officials told GAO that the agency deployed 13,500 employees, the largest deployment in its history.

The concurrent disasters required FEMA to deploy recovery staff from outside the affected region, officials said. Some employees were sent to response and recovery assignments without full training for those duties.

After the hurricanes, only 4 percent of FEMA’s incident-management workforce was available to deploy in November 2024, according to the report. FEMA officials also told GAO that they expected about 240 employees to be available through the Department of Homeland Security’s Surge Capacity Force for the 2026 hurricane season, down from about 600 in 2025.

Those figures do not establish that a future disaster response will fail. They show why staffing levels, specialized experience and the ability to move personnel quickly across regions matter when multiple emergencies occur at the same time.

Recommendations remain pending

GAO recommended that Congress consider requiring significant FEMA workforce decisions to be informed by the agency’s workforce-planning process. It also recommended that Congress consider requiring FEMA to report on that planning before each year’s hurricane season.

The watchdog recommended that FEMA issue a new strategic plan, create a formal workforce-analysis process and ensure that its annual staffing plan is informed by that process. The Department of Homeland Security agreed with the recommendations.

But the recommendations are not enacted law or completed reforms. DHS told GAO that FEMA would develop a strategic plan and workforce-analysis process, but indicated that implementation of two recommendations would wait until a FEMA administrator was confirmed. GAO said that delay could leave the agency unprepared or under-resourced for future disasters.

For residents, businesses and local governments that rely on federal coordination after major emergencies, the immediate issue is not a change in eligibility rules. It is whether FEMA can maintain enough trained staff to coordinate assistance, field operations, grants and recovery support during large or simultaneous disasters.

The next developments to watch are FEMA’s response to the recommendations, any congressional requirement for pre-season workforce reporting, the agency’s strategic-planning timeline and updated staffing information released during the 2026 hurricane season.

Sources

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