GAO - Government Accountability Office
09/17/2025 | News release | Distributed by Public on 09/17/2025 06:14
FEMA Staffing Shortages Could Mean Disaster for Future Response EffortsImage
FEMA plays a crucial role in responding to natural disasters. But back-to-back disasters nearly exhausted the agency's staffing capabilities last fall.
Workforce issues have long raised concerns about FEMA's ability to respond to more frequent and severe disasters-not just hurricanes, but wildfires, flash flooding, earthquakes, and more.
What's going on at FEMA and what impact could it have on the federal response? Today's WatchBlog post looks at our first in a series of reports on FEMA's response challenges.
When disasters hit home, people turn to the government for help
Natural disaster responses are high-cost and labor intensive. And when they happen back-to-back, FEMA has struggled to keep up.
For example, a series of catastrophic wildfires devasted communities in Los Angeles, last January-killing more than two dozen people. The fires also destroyed more than 15,000 homes and businesses and created unhealthy air quality for millions. FEMA's response came shortly after deploying thousands of staff to back-to-back hurricanes with catastrophic inland flooding, storm surge, and tornadoes-killing over 290 people.
Workforce Challenges. This strain on FEMA staff is not a new problem. Long-standing staffing shortages-due to attrition and employee burnout from concurrent disasters-are taxing FEMA's response efforts.
The agency started the 2025 hurricane season with just 12% of its incident management workforce available. At the same time, staff were already in the field supporting more than 91 major disaster and emergency declarations across the country.
The recent federal workforce reduction programs have added to FEMA's staffing woes. For example, 20 senior executives with valuable experience and expertise recently left the agency under a workforce reduction program-leading to significant skills gaps within FEMA leadership.
Workforce Changes at FEMA Between January 1 and June 1, 2025
Training gaps. In addition, FEMA has reassigned personnel working on ongoing disaster recovery to cover new disasters and deployed some staff to perform jobs they weren't fully trained to do.
During Hurricane Helene, for example, FEMA sent employees from other parts of the agency to help survivors apply for assistance. But these staff did not normally do that work. And agency officials said staff with lower levels of training and expertise were more likely to have problems processing survivors' assistance applications.
That lack of training contributed to frustration among survivors trying to navigate both life after the hurricane and applying for help. As a result, many of those applications had to be escalated to more-experienced staff-further delaying assistance. As of December 2024, FEMA officials said the agency had a backlog of nearly 500,000 applications that had to be escalated.
Percentage of FEMA Incident Management Workforce Available and Major Disaster and Emergency Declarations with Field Support, January 1, 2024 to August 1, 2025
What are the future implications of FEMA's workforce challenges?
While no one can predict precisely when the next disasters will arise, recent history shows them to be more frequent and more severe than in the past.
At the start of this year's hurricane season in June, there were still 710 open disasters receiving federal support. And the recent reductions in the federal workforce combined with FEMA's long-standing challenges may affect the federal government's ability to respond to future disasters.
In February, we added Improving the Delivery of Federal Disaster Assistance to our High Risk List -partly due to challenges with FEMA's workforce capacity. In the video below, GAO's Chris Currie, an expert in disaster assistance, discusses this work and our ongoing efforts to monitor the federal response.
Both Congress and the administration have signaled an interest in broader reforms to FEMA's scope and mission, including transitioning roles to state and local governments. But, to date, these efforts have not changed FEMA's disaster response role. Later this fall, GAO will publish a second report in this disaster response series looking closely at state and local capabilities.
For more on FEMA's workforce challenges, check out our full report.
- GAO's fact-based, nonpartisan information helps Congress and federal agencies improve government. The WatchBlog lets us contextualize GAO's work a little more for the public. Check out more of our posts at GAO.gov/blog.
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