FEMA's Elimination Push Has Stalled, Former Acting Head Says
David Richardson, who ran FEMA as acting administrator for most of 2025 before resigning in November, says the Trump administration has dropped its goal of eliminating the agency and settled into what he called a "go-along-to-get-along kind of mode" with little change expected.
Richardson's assessment, reported by NPR on September 3, 2026, marks a shift from the posture Trump took at the start of his second term. In his first week back in office, Trump said "I think, frankly, FEMA is not good" and argued the agency should be eliminated.
At the time, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem controlled FEMA's budget, and a council studying the agency's future was expected to finish its work by May 2026, according to NPR reporting from June 2025. The direction pointed toward elimination or a major restructuring.
Richardson, who replaced previous acting head Cameron Hamilton, writes about his efforts to sharply reduce FEMA's size in a new book. In it, he says: "I quickly realized that I would not be the one to transform FEMA or shut it down." He submitted a resignation letter to the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, giving two weeks' notice. He left on November 17, 2025, after about six months in the role. His resignation followed an internal review finding the agency was "not ready" for the 2025 hurricane season as of mid-May.
In May 2026, Trump chose a former FEMA director to lead the agency again, signaling a shift away from abolition toward conventional leadership.
Several current FEMA employees told NPR that the fear of wholesale agency elimination or mass layoffs has faded within the agency. A FEMA spokesperson said the agency "remains fully operational and focused on its core mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters."
But the attempted downsizing left marks. FEMA employees told NPR that efforts to shrink the agency worsened longstanding problems, including understaffing and delays in getting disaster recovery money to survivors. A Government Accountability Office report raised concerns about whether FEMA has enough staff.
Andrew Rumbach of the Urban Institute said the attempt to reduce FEMA's size was "an ill-advised attempt" that did not fully understand what the agency does.
The broader context here is a federal disaster agency that absorbed months of uncertainty about its own existence. The Trump administration's opening stance, stated by the president himself and reinforced through Noem's budget control, was that FEMA should be dismantled. Richardson was installed to carry out a dramatic reduction. He concluded he could not, and the administration has since moved to install a permanent director rather than pursue elimination.
What remains is an agency whose workforce reports reduced anxiety about its survival but whose operational challenges, including understaffing, predated and were worsened by the turbulence of 2025. The GAO's staffing concerns are not new; they reflect structural pressures that the abolition debate did nothing to address and likely worsened, according to the current employees who spoke to NPR.
Richardson's book provides the first on-the-record confirmation from a senior insider that the administration's FEMA elimination effort has effectively stalled. His description of a "go-along-to-get-along" posture suggests the political will to dismantle the agency has given way to institutional inertia, though neither the White House nor DHS has formally disavowed the earlier elimination rhetoric.
For emergency management professionals, the practical signal is that FEMA will continue in something close to its current form. The question is whether the agency can rebuild staffing and operational capacity before future disaster seasons, and whether the GAO's concerns will lead to congressional or administrative action. The abolition threat appears to have receded. The capacity problem has not.
