The White House’s reactionary policy choices are leaving our society ill-equipped to plan for, withstand, and bounce back from worsening extreme weather, including hurricanes.
As greater climate chaos is locked in due primarily to the activities of Donald Trump’s allies in the oil and gas industry, the White House’s reactionary policy choices—slashing agency staff, replacing experienced leaders with unqualified right-wing ideologues, and curtailing the flow of congressionally appropriated funds—are leaving our society ill-equipped to plan for, withstand, and bounce back from worsening extreme weather, including hurricanes.
Below, we explore how the Trump administration has undermined hurricane readiness across three dimensions: 1) hampering storm predictions and warnings; 2) hindering disaster preparedness, response, and recovery; and 3) impeding disaster prevention and mitigation.
Hampering Storm Predictions and Warnings
Trump and his cronies have compromised the ability of climate scientists and meteorologists to predict and effectively communicate severe weather risks. They have done this by:
Pushing out thousands of NOAA workers, including hundreds of NWS employees.
From Inauguration Day through the end of April 2025, the Trump administration (including its DOGE vandals) slashed NOAA’s workforce by approximately 2,300 out of 13,000 (a nearly 20% cut), including about 600 NWS employees from a 4,300-person staff (a roughly 13% cut). The cuts affected hurricane scientists as well as workers who maintain and repair the weather observation equipment that forecasters need to do their jobs.
At the beginning of the 2025 Atlantic hurricane season, 15 NWS forecast offices located around the hurricane-prone Gulf of Mexico were understaffed. Nationwide, 55 of the agency’s 122 offices faced “critical” staffing shortages, meaning they had vacancy rates above 20%. At least 30 offices were missing a meteorologist-in-charge. Although the Trump-battered NWS provided accurate forecasts ahead of last summer’s deadly floods in central Texas, the lack of a chief meteorologist and other key NWS officials in nearby offices likely impaired swift communication between forecasters and local emergency managers.
Soon after the mass firings and buyouts, NOAA scrambled to redistribute staff, and it has tried to hire several hundred NWS employees to fill gaps created by Musk, Vought, and Trump. But that hasn’t fixed the generational harm they inflicted by terminating so many eager young scientists and incentivizing highly experienced ones to accept deferred resignations amid DOGE meddling. A government agency isn’t something you can simply turn off and on again with the flick of a switch.
Even after hiring more than 200 hydrologists and meteorologists (positions that require months of training) since late 2025, NWS still has 300 fewer than it did in late 2024. Several NWS offices remain understaffed, the agency’s existing workers are being stretched thin, and crucial institutional knowledge is missing. “People are burning out,” NWS Director Ken Graham told The New York Times in May 2026.
Scaling back lifesaving operations in response to self-imposed staffing and funding constraints.
Due to the Trump regime’s draconian staffing cuts, the NWS has been forced to offer “degraded” services. This has shown up in a variety of ways. For example, as of May 2025, eight NWS offices had either ceased or planned to cease overnight operations, eroding the agency’s ability to monitor and warn about severe weather around the clock.
The NWS has also reduced the frequency of weather balloon launches, which are used to collect important meteorological data, at multiple locations. This has already had negative impacts on forecast quality—preventing earlier detection of tornadoes in the spring of 2025, delaying warnings ahead of the western Alaska floods in the fall of 2025 (cuts to public radio stations likely made things worse), and leaving communities across the Midwest surprised by tornadoes in the spring of 2026. If helium shortages are now involved, that’s also Trump’s fault considering that his war on Iran has disrupted global supply of the gas.
In addition, experts warned last year that NOAA staffing cuts would likely prevent the agency’s “hurricane hunters” from carrying out 24/7 flight operations, jeopardizing accurate forecasts and timely evacuation warnings. Remarkably, it took NOAA retirees working on a volunteer basis to ensure the continuation of hurricane reconnaissance missions in 2025.
Hurricane forecasts “have improved dramatically in recent decades, but the improvements can’t be taken for granted,” atmospheric scientist Brian Tang wrote recently. Failing to invest in the requisite resources “risks stagnation or even reversing the hard-fought progress the U.S. has made in advancing weather prediction.”
Unfortunately, the Trump administration is still putting those types of lifesaving investments on the chopping block. The White House’s attacks are wide-ranging, from its attempt to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to its proposed 26% cut to NOAA’s annual budget—which would shutter world-class meteorological, oceanographic, and climate labs across the country—and beyond.
Even though Congress last year rejected Vought’s request to slash NOAA’s budget by roughly a quarter, the White House still found ways to withhold funding, especially for earth system science and climate research. In May 2025, E&E News reported that due to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s insistence on personally reviewing any expenditure over $100,000, more than 200 NOAA contracts remained unsigned, causing the agency’s work to “ground to a halt.” As Science reported last August: “Some $1 billion in spending for the current year may still be sitting on Lutnick’s desk. And the spending plan makes it clear the agency has no plans to spend all of that money by the fiscal year’s end on 30 September—if ever.”
The bottom line is that Trump 2.0 is trying to muzzle the scientific institutions that produce the data, models, and foundational research underlying our understanding of changing climate dynamics and weather patterns. As presaged in Project 2025, the White House seeks to stifle research that isn’t aligned with Trump and Vought’s pro-oligarch agenda. OMB’s new proposed rule changes around federal research funding—which would give the administration carte blanche to defund disfavored work and bring about “the end of science”—make this clear. The administration has frequently targeted work on climate, public health, and other issue areas where proposed solutions pose real or perceived threats to unfettered profit-maximization.
Hindering Disaster Preparedness, Response, and Recovery
The Trump regime’s subversion of efforts to track and sound the alarm about extreme weather has already left communities flat-footed in the face of tornadoes and flooding; that doesn’t bode well for hurricane season. Once more powerful storms arrive, towns and cities are likely to be overwhelmed because Trump 2.0 has sabotaged every phase of disaster management.
After calling repeatedly for the abolition of FEMA (occasionally adding qualifiers like “as it exists today”), Noem effectively demolished the agency in practice. The Trump administration has devastated our country’s disaster preparedness and response apparatus (and made long-term recovery more challenging) by:
Gutting FEMA’s staff, namely pushing out thousands of rank-and-file workers and dozens of veteran leaders.
According to a recent letter from a pair of Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee, the Trump administration (including DOGE) has overseen the departure of more than 5,000 FEMA workers since January 2025, about 20% of the agency’s prior total workforce. Coordinating officers tasked with leading large-scale disaster responses were among those who were pushed out.
At the start of 2026, Noem declined to renew the contracts for dozens of employees from FEMA’s Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) teams. Historically, CORE staffers’ two-to-four-year contracts have almost always been renewed. In 2025, however, DHS limited FEMA to six-month renewals and eventually rescinded the agency’s authority to independently renew the positions, giving Noem control. It was feared that FEMA would lose around 1,000 CORE workers with expiring contracts in January, and then thousands more in the following months. Fortunately, a winter storm, a lawsuit against DHS, and Noem’s downfall prevented that from happening. Still, about 200 on-the-ground disaster response workers needlessly lost their jobs, only for FEMA to ask them to return in recent weeks.
There has been a major loss of veteran leadership at FEMA. By the end of May 2025, two dozen senior executives had departed the agency rather than suffer through more Trumpian chaos. When last year’s Atlantic hurricane season began, DHS personnel with little to no disaster management expertise held all of FEMA’s most senior positions. Since then, additional key figures have headed for the exits, including Jeremy Greenberg, a career staffer who coordinated the agency’s responses to major disasters; former FEMA search and rescue chief Ken Pagurek, who resigned in the wake of Noem’s abysmal response to the Texas floods; and deputy associate administrator Keith Turi, who left on the first day of the 2026 hurricane season. As one official lamented recently, FEMA has endured “a massive brain drain in a field where experience really matters.”
Leaving key leadership positions unfilled and/or empowering pro-Trump loyalists who have obstructed planning and training activities.
More than sixteen months into his second term, Trump has yet to appoint a permanent FEMA administrator. Instead, he has cycled through a trio of acting administrators—Cameron Hamilton, David Richardson, and Karen Evans—none of whom had emergency management experience. Tapping a series of acting chiefs has allowed the White House to bypass the post-Katrina legal requirement that FEMA’s leader have significant relevant experience. Trump recently nominated Hamilton, fired over a year ago by Noem, to be permanent administrator.
As of June 1, half of FEMA’s leadership positions were vacant, the agency’s website indicated. Nobody was in charge of the offices tasked with policy analysis and disaster resilience. What’s more, six of FEMA’s 10 regional offices were missing permanent administrators. Notably, the region covering Louisiana and Texas doesn’t have an administrator or a deputy administrator. Since December, the Office of Response and Recovery has been headed by Gregg Phillps, a self-described “opponent of FEMA.” Phillips, an election-denying conspiracy theorist who claims to have teleported to Waffle House, has a tenuous grasp on reality.
Richardson’s tenure atop FEMA, which overlapped with last year’s hurricane season, was especially destructive. Soon after he took over last May, an internal review warned that the agency was “not prepared” for the start of the season. Days later, Richardson scrapped the agency’s 2022-2026 strategic plan, and it has yet to be replaced.
His successor, Evans, was no better. At the end of March, she nearly allowed Hurrevac, a web-based hurricane evacuation planning tool used by thousands of state and local emergency managers around the country, to go offline due to a lapsed contract. In the fall of 2025, FEMA extended Hurrevac’s contract for roughly six months but declined to fully renew it, The Washington Post reported. Despite months of almost daily pleas from FEMA officials, Evans “held off on fully renewing the Hurrevac system,” the newspaper noted. Post reporter Brianna Sacks told me via email that the Trump administration signed a last-minute emergency contract right before Hurrevac was set to expire, but that only keeps the tool functioning until July. This debacle can be attributed to Noem’s infamous rule requiring her personal approval of all DHS expenditures over $100,000 and the callousness-cum-incompetence of Evans, who was largely “in charge of overseeing contracts before sending them up to Noem,” according to the Post.
Last week, Bob Fenton, a longtime FEMA administrator who’s serving as acting chief of the agency while Hamilton awaits confirmation, insisted that “we’re ready for hurricane season.” That doesn’t square with the available evidence. As Sabotaging Our Safety, a collection of emergency management experts and former FEMA leaders, declared recently, “The agency Americans rely on when disaster strikes is measurably less ready than at any point in recent memory.”
Sabotaging Our Safety gave FEMA an “F” in its latest readiness scorecard. According to the group: “The National Hurricane Conference came and went without FEMA. The agency had headlined or led sessions every year from 2021 through 2025. About 1,800 state and local emergency managers attend.” There are “no Rehearsal of Concept drills scheduled or
Documented,” the group added. “These annual simulations with [the] U.S. Army North at Fort Sam Houston have happened every year since at least 2021.”
Disrupting the flow of billions of dollars in federal funding that state and local governments need to prepare for and respond to extreme weather events.
As the Hurrevac saga makes clear, Noem’s de facto veto power over FEMA spending was a critical source of problems. In March 2025, she made the disbursement of federal funds to state and local governments contingent on cooperation with Trump’s inhumane immigration policies. In June 2025, she implemented her onerous $100,000 contract review policy, a move that affected a large chunk of FEMA outlays.
A congressional report found that the latter policy held up more than 1,000 funding awards, collectively worth billions of dollars, in just the first three months it was active. Given that the directive remained in force for more than six additional months, the full extent of its havoc is still coming into view.
We know that Noem’s moves interrupted the flow of money used to train and pay state and local emergency management workers. We also know that Noem hobbled multiple disaster responses. In the wake of last July’s deadly Texas flooding, her contract review policy caused a 72-hour delay in the deployment of Urban Search and Rescue Teams, slowed down delivery of aerial imagery to support rescue operations, and led to thousands of calls for assistance going unanswered. In March 2026, search-and-rescue crews in the Midwest were forced to work without the benefit of a tornado-tracking tool that pinpoints the hardest-hit areas because Noem let a $200,000 contract lapse.
In the wake of new disasters, Trump has been slow and stingy with relief, especially if requests come from Democratic-led states. In addition, communities that are recovering from past disasters have been forced to wait for the delivery of already-approved funds, as Noem’s contract review shenanigans led to a $17 billion backlog.
Trump’s hand-picked FEMA Review Council recently proposed making it harder for communities to qualify for federal disaster assistance. In many ways, it appears that the council is trying to codify harmful practices that are already being implemented and were foreshadowed in Project 2025. The bottom line is that the Trump administration is vacating the federal government’s disaster management responsibilities, effectively outsourcing the soaring costs of climate change to ill-equipped states, profit-maximizing insurers, and ultimately, individual households. This is precisely the opposite of what needs to happen in an era of escalating climate threats.
Impeding Disaster Prevention and Mitigation
As detailed in the previous section, the Trump regime’s indifference to disaster preparedness, response, and recovery has already caused major problems, even in the absence of a direct hurricane hit.
Making matters worse, Trump 2.0 has obstructed efforts to avert disasters and to minimize their scope and unequal impacts (when they can’t be completely avoided). The administration has weakened disaster prevention and mitigation by:
Thwarting investments in disaster risk reduction, from slashing emissions to pursuing just and sustainable urban development.
The Trump administration’s hostility to climate action includes climate change mitigation (i.e., reducing greenhouse gas emissions to curb global warming). It also includes adaptation and resilience (i.e., upgrading physical and social infrastructure to help communities endure and rebound from extreme weather). Put differently, Trump 2.0 has done its best not only to obstruct decarbonization and prop up fossil fuels, but to crush anything that resembles climate policy.
Under Noem’s leadership, FEMA in April 2025 canceled the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program, which aims to attenuate the impacts of extreme weather. The agency clawed back more than $3 billion for projects, such as constructing new levees and elevating homes and hospitals, that had been greenlit but not finished. It also refused to make funding available through the Flood Mitigation Assistance grant program. In March 2026, the agency restored the BRIC program in response to a court order, but it plans to award only $1 billion for fiscal years 2024 and 2025, a fraction of what was available before.
In addition, the allocation of money from FEMA’s Hazard Mitigation program came to a screeching halt starting in the summer of 2025 as a result of Noem’s $100,000 contract review policy. When the West Coast was inundated in December 2025, Noem was sitting on tens of millions of dollars in flood prevention grants that may have reduced damage. A few months before the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk was flooded last October, the Environmental Protection Agency canceled a $20 million grant aimed at protecting the community from precisely that scenario. Research shows that every $1 invested in disaster risk reduction and preparedness saves $6 to $13. Postponing projects like restoring and protecting wetlands or ruggedizing the built environment will only make hurricane outcomes worse.
Eliminating efforts to reduce disaster-related inequities.
In the spring of 2025, the Trump administration removed mentions of equity, income, social vulnerability, and climate change from FEMA’s Local Mitigation Planning Policy Guide and its State Mitigation Planning Policy Guide. This makes it more likely that poor and marginalized communities will be neglected when disasters strike as well as when municipalities develop their next five-year mitigation plans. According to a memo Hamilton issued last May, FEMA also ended door-to-door canvassing in disaster areas, gravely endangering vulnerable populations.
The above photo of President Donald Trump, taken on September 1, 2019 by U.S. Army National Guard Sgt. 1st Class Jim Greenhill, is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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