Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is facing accusations that she’s pushing a potentially unlawful plan to gut the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster workforce that could slow lifesaving aid and put Americans at risk.
FEMA officials say Noem, 54, is driving a workforce overhaul that could hollow out the agency’s disaster response operations, The Washington Post reports. Sources told the newspaper the plan “contradicts the law” and goes around Congress.
The Post reported that spreadsheets circulated to senior leadership in late December propose cutting FEMA’s CORE workforce—its Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery—by 41 percent, a reduction of more than 4,300 disaster roles, while slashing “surge” staffing by 85 percent, nearly 6,500 positions.
Noem’s DHS began cutting CORE staff on Dec. 31, with layoffs framed as the leading edge of a broader effort to downsize FEMA—an approach critics have warned could cost lives.
About 65 CORE jobs were eliminated starting on New Year’s Eve, with DHS previously saying that the cuts were “a routine staff adjustment of 50 staff out of 8000.”
FEMA spokesperson Daniel Llargués told the Post the agency has “not issued and is not implementing a percentage-based workforce reduction,” calling the material “a routine, pre-decisional workforce planning exercise” conducted under Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Office of Personnel Management (OPM) guidance.
But the Post cited multiple officials who said the tables showing which roles can be cut reflect Noem’s targets—and warned that sidelining disaster-specialist staff would slow aid when Americans need it most.
Cameron Hamilton, who led FEMA as acting administrator early in President Donald Trump’s second term, told the Post that losing large numbers of disaster workers “would mean greater delays in processing, and survivors not being dealt with as quickly as they had been before.”
The OMB is led by Russell Vought, a key architect of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint to reshape the federal government by expanding presidential control over agencies, staffing, and policy across the executive branch.
The paper also said that legal alarms are being raised under the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which limits the homeland security secretary’s ability to reduce FEMA’s authorities and functions significantly.
One veteran official told the Post: “It’s not just unprecedented—it directly contradicts the law.”
Letting DHS decide which disaster-response jobs survive “strips FEMA leadership of its statutory authority and puts control of the nation’s disaster workforce in the hands of a department that Congress explicitly told to step back after Katrina,” the official added.
Emergency management historian Scott Robinson warned that cuts on this scale would effectively erase an act of Congress without Congress passing any new laws. He said the president is leaning on administrative levers to make changes that would typically require legislation.
A DHS spokesperson told the Daily Beast that CORE staff were hired to work for “a specific, limited period,” with “positions that are designed to fluctuate based on disaster activity, operational need, and available funding,” and insisted there had been “no change to policy.”
