GAO: FEMA Cut Thousands of Staff and Scrapped Strategic Plan, Raising Risks Ahead of 2026 Hurricane Season

A new Government Accountability Office report warns that the Federal Emergency Management Agency cut thousands of staff and scrapped its strategic plan without doing the workforce analysis needed to judge whether it can still meet its disaster-response mission, a gap that comes as the agency faces increasingly complex emergencies and the 2026 hurricane season.

In report GAO-26-108427, published Tuesday, the congressional watchdog said FEMA employed an average of about 25,134 people in fiscal 2025 and recorded 4,321 separations, about a 55% increase from fiscal 2024 and roughly 17% of the fiscal 2025 workforce. From Oct. 1, 2025, through May 16, 2026, FEMA’s average workforce fell to 21,742 personnel, while another 2,545 employees separated.

The losses also hit senior ranks. GAO said 58 members of the Senior Executive Service, the government’s top career leadership corps, left FEMA between Jan. 20, 2025, and Jan. 10, 2026. That included 24 departures through voluntary workforce reduction programs. Over the previous three fiscal years, FEMA had averaged about 13 SES separations annually. GAO also said 1,502 employees left through voluntary workforce reduction programs over that same period, and FEMA terminated 159 probationary employees in fiscal 2025.

Why it matters is straightforward: FEMA is the federal agency responsible for helping people before, during and after disasters, and its ability to respond depends heavily on having enough trained, deployable staff. GAO has been warning for years about strain on that workforce, and in February 2025 added FEMA’s disaster workforce and capacity to its High Risk List, which flags major government operations vulnerable to failure or mismanagement. The new report arrives during hurricane season and as disasters grow more frequent, costly and complex.

GAO’s central finding was not just that FEMA shrank, but that it did so without the planning needed to understand the consequences. “We found that FEMA reduced its workforce without using strategic workforce planning,” the report’s highlights said.

According to GAO, FEMA rescinded its 2022-2026 strategic plan in May 2025 and, as of July 2026, had not issued a replacement. The watchdog said FEMA did not base its 2025 and 2026 workforce reduction decisions, proposed future workforce actions or workforce policy changes on the results of a workforce analysis. As a result, GAO said, the agency had not assessed whether it had the staffing capacity to meet its mission, including statutory requirements.

The report put the risk plainly: “Without a strategic plan that outlines clear goals and objectives, FEMA cannot effectively determine its future workforce needs, potentially putting its mission at risk.”

FEMA officials told GAO that the departures led to a loss of institutional knowledge and experienced personnel and worsened long-standing workforce challenges. A hiring freeze from January 2025 until May 2026 compounded the problem, GAO said. The freeze was only partially lifted on May 18, 2026, for specific priority positions approved by the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA’s parent agency.

The report ties those management failures to recent operational strain. After Hurricanes Helene and Milton in September and October 2024, FEMA deployed 13,500 employees, the highest number in its history, GAO said. By November 2024, only 4% of FEMA’s incident management workforce remained available to deploy. GAO also cited the July 2025 Texas floods, when FEMA had only 15% of that workforce available on July 4 and call-center staffing shortfalls affected survivor support.

Even FEMA’s expected backup is thinner this year. Agency officials told GAO they expected about 240 personnel from the Department of Homeland Security’s Surge Capacity Force for the 2026 hurricane season, down from 600 in 2025.

GAO made three recommendations: FEMA should issue a strategic plan, develop and implement workforce planning that includes workforce analysis, and make sure its annual staffing plan is informed by that planning. The watchdog also raised two matters for Congress to consider, including requiring major FEMA workforce decisions to be informed by workforce planning and requiring reporting to Congress before each hurricane season.

The Department of Homeland Security agreed with the recommendations, GAO said, and indicated FEMA would develop a strategic plan and a workforce analysis process. But GAO said implementation would wait until a FEMA administrator is confirmed.