The Trump administration pledged to shift the Federal Emergency Management Agency away from a “bloated, DC-centric dead weight.” But FEMA’s regions, not its Washington headquarters, bore the brunt of workforce cuts that were done without any strategic planning over the last year, according to a new audit.

In a new report, the Government Accountability Office tallies FEMA’s workforce losses at roughly 4,500 employees since the start of the Trump administration. Most staff left under the administration’s voluntary workforce reduction programs.

GAO found FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security allowed the workforce cuts to take place without assessing its current and future workforce needs. The staff reductions and lack of planning “may impact mission readiness,” the report states.

Chris Currie, director of homeland security and justice at GAO, said every new administration has priorities and makes workforce changes. And he pointed out that FEMA has struggled with workforce shortages dating back to the 2017 hurricane season.

“But it’s the way this was done that I think we have major concerns with,” Currie said in an interview. “Basically, FEMA threw out all of its workforce planning principles that it had been using for years, and these principles were designed to make sure it’s ready to respond to what happens in the country if there are multiple events.”

Last May, David Richardson, who was performing the duties of the FEMA administrator at the time, rescinded the agency’s four-year strategic plan. The agency has yet to issue a new one, leaving officials without any framework to evaluate FEMA’s workforce needs.

“They basically stopped monitoring staff shortages across different cadres of their workforce,” Currie said. “They have over 20 different cadres, lots of different types of people: engineers, social workers, IT [staff]. They need all sorts of different types of people, and they made all these cuts and decisions about deferred resignations and retirements, really without thinking at all about what their critical needs were.”

FEMA’s firing of probationary employees last spring also created challenges “because some of these employees held hard-to-fill positions or had specialized skillsets,” agency officials told GAO.

FEMA officials told GAO that the development and issuance of a new strategic plan “will occur following the direction of a confirmed FEMA administrator.”

The agency could be days away from having a confirmed administrator, as the Senate is expected to take up Cameron Hamilton’s nomination to lead FEMA before leaving town for August recess.

The agency also agreed to conduct a workforce analysis and planning process “once the outlines of the FEMA Strategic Plan are in place.” The final report of the Trump-appointed FEMA Review Council, issued in May, also recommends the agency conduct a workforce needs analysis.

While FEMA officials told GAO they were awaiting further guidance from the council and DHS leaders, the auditor wrote that delaying strategic planning any further “leaves FEMA at risk of being unprepared and under-resourced to effectively respond to future disasters and meet its statutory requirements.”

The voluntary reduction programs hit FEMA’s regions the hardest, GAO’s report shows. Most FEMA regions lost 9% or more of their respective workforces under the programs through January 2026. Meanwhile, FEMA headquarters lost roughly 5% of its staff.

The deeper cuts at the regional levels came as officials under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem frequently claimed she was transforming FEMA “from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens.”

Currie said the workforce reductions happened without any assessment of how they would impact FEMA’s different regions.

“None of this was done with a thought behind the mission need in those regions,” he said. “That’s just how the numbers shook out, and I think that’s the most important thing, is this was done with very little thought. The cuts were made, and then they had to live with them later.”

The workforce departures have also drained FEMA of leaders with experience and institutional knowledge.

Between January 2025 and January 2026, FEMA saw 58 senior executive service (SES) employees – roughly half the agency’s SES staff – walk out the door, according to GAO. In each of the prior three years, FEMA had lost 13 SES employees, on average.

“Officials from one of the 10 regions stated that a lack of experience among the workforce will make responding to large-scale disasters more difficult and less efficient,” GAO wrote. “Officials from other regions reported that they now have a high proportion of leadership serving in an acting capacity, who are less experienced in their new roles. Officials from one region reported that it has not been significantly impacted by a loss of leadership.”

Under Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, DHS has made several policy changes at FEMA, including lifting a hiring freeze and extending terms for Cadre of On-Call Response/Recovery (CORE) staff. In May, the agency detailed plans to make about 300 new hires.

In addition to its recommendations to FEMA, GAO is also recommending Congress require FEMA to report on the results of its workforce planning process prior to the start of each year’s hurricane season.

Currie pointed out that FEMA workforce strains show when the agency has to respond to multiple large-scale disasters across multiple states, such as the 2024 back-to-back landfalls of Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

“Last year was the first year in many years we did not have a large landfall hurricane in the U.S.,” he said. “Luckily, we didn’t have to see what FEMA’s response to that would have been with all these reductions. However, we’re not going to get lucky like that every year, and I think that’s my biggest concern.”

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