Overview
- House Homeland Security Committee Democrats, in a letter delivered Thursday, warned FEMA is "less prepared than it has been in a generation" ahead of the June 1 hurricane season.
- The letter says officials pushed out more than 5,000 employees since January 2025 and that about half of top leadership roles are vacant.
- Trump nominated Cameron Hamilton on Monday to lead FEMA after ousting him in 2025 for saying the agency should not be eliminated.
- A White House task force report released last week proposes raising by 50 percent the threshold for states to qualify for federal disaster assistance, which it says would have excluded 29 percent of declarations since 2012.
- The lawmakers also cited reporting that Trump approved 23% of disaster funding requests from Democratic-led states compared with 89% for Republican ones.