Double-Barreled Hurricane Crisis Exposes FEMA’s Chronic Leadership, Staffing Problems

On the eve of Hurricane Milton’s landfall on a disaster-weary Florida, FEMA, the nation’s disaster relief agency reported a stark shortage of frontline workers available to be deployed: just 8% of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s vaunted Incident Management personnel were still available for deployment.

The stunning declaration in Wednesday’s Daily Operations Briefing exposed the longtime impact of FEMA’s expanding work on unrelated missions like COVID funerals and illegal immigrant services, a crisis created by a worker shortage, a workforce morale issue and the reality of burnout from a increasingly frenetic natural disaster pace.

Just seven months earlier, the Government Accountability Office, the auditing arm of Congress, warned that FEMA was in an increasingly weak position to handle multiple major crises at once.

“Increasingly complex and severe natural disasters coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic and responsibilities at the southern border have created an unprecedented demand for FEMA’s disaster workforce,” the GAO concluded.