Less than two weeks after President Donald Trump said his administration would consider making the Federal Emergency Management Agency “go away,” representatives of Elon Musk’s U.S. Doge Service were at the agency and reviewing the grant programs it uses to help communities prepare for and respond to disasters, according to four current and two former FEMA officials.
The presence of DOGE at FEMA has caused uncertainty and confusion, raising fears that Trump could soon follow through on his pledge to dismantle the agency, as his administration is doing with the U.S. Agency for International Development.
According to the officials, a small team that does not have security clearance has access to FEMA’s network, which contains the private and sensitive information of tens of thousands of disaster victims. For example, FEMA officials said that on Feb. 5, Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old former college student who goes by the moniker “Big Balls” online and now works for Musk, was given a FEMA badge. The officials, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fears of professional retaliation.
FEMA did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The agency spends the majority of its budget on grant programs, which are the main vehicles for helping people recover from disasters and rebuild their communities. Along with the agency’s best known efforts to help people find temporary housing after disasters. FEMA set aside more than $3 billion for grants to state, local and tribal governments for a range of security- and disaster-related activities in the current fiscal year, according to the agency’s budget. The grants are meant to help those governments repair facilities damaged by disasters, protect against terrorism, and assist with firefighter staffing and disaster preparation and mitigation.
[19 states sue to stop DOGE from accessing Americans' personal data]
The program and its management system, called FEMA Go, has significant data on survivors and communities, which officials say can be sensitive and should be protected. Last month, the system provided disaster programs with the ability to waive a required congressional notification before getting funds, as well as supported a grant to assist firefighters. In February and March, enhancements to the system were slated to develop and support a postfire grant program, just as Los Angeles begins cleaning up from devastating blazes, according to internal dashboards seen by The Washington Post.
Agency staff also shared concerns that Trump has not offered an official nominee to lead the agency and that the man leading it on a temporary basis does not meet the legal qualifications for the job.
Cameron Hamilton, serving under the title “senior official performing the duties of FEMA administrator,” is a Navy veteran who served on a SEAL team in Afghanistan and worked as a supervisory emergency management specialist for the State Department and director of emergency medical services for the Department of Homeland Security, according to his LinkedIn profile. Hamilton recently lost a Republican congressional primary race in Virginia.
Since Hurricane Katrina, when FEMA faced major criticism for a delayed and inadequate response, the agency’s administrator must meet certain qualifications under federal law, including at least five years of executive leadership and management experience and “significant experience” in crisis management or a related field. FEMA staff said that should include experience leading the response to a major disaster.
Two other officials expressed concerns that the Trump administration will not only gut the agency but also rewrite the Stafford Act, the federal law that gives the president the ability to declare major disasters or emergencies when states and communities need federal assistance. That law authorizes FEMA to respond to a disaster and open funding and resource channels, including assistance programs and loans from the Small Business Administration.
Proposals to reform FEMA have been debated for years. Changes and improvements to the agency, which has long been understaffed and underfunded, are almost always on the legislative agenda after a major disaster. And reports from the Government Accountability Office often highlight FEMA’s mismanagement of funding or lack of oversight.
In December, at the request of President Joe Biden, the National Infrastructure Advisory Council published an extensive report outlining FEMA’s challenges and how the agency “is being asked to do too much.”
“FEMA is being activated for about one major disaster declaration every three to four days while simultaneously managing hundreds of older open disasters. This pace is taking its toll both in funding and on the workforce,” the report said. “FEMA is not able to successfully carry out all the duties expected of it given current funding levels. Either additional funding should be provided, or its mission set should be refined.”
In January, Trump issued an executive order to establish a 20-member Federal Emergency Management Agency Review Council, stating that it’s crucial to evaluate “whether FEMA’s bureaucracy in disaster response ultimately harms the agency’s ability to successfully respond.”
Trump also said there were “serious concerns of political bias” and said he wanted the council to review the agency and recommend “structural changes.” However, a current official and former executive said there has been no information about who is on the council and what it is doing.
Gutting FEMA could have serious financial consequences to dozens of communities that have begun massive, costly projects that the agency has promised to reimburse, said a former senior official. And losing more staffers at an already stretched-thin agency could also greatly hinder people’s ability to recover from disasters.
“These are public servants and many could have gone to work in the private sector, but because they want to serve they took these harder, lower-paying jobs to do work they could be proud of,” the former senior official said. “There is a great misunderstanding of the work they do and the role that they play.”