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After Delaying FEMA Response for Three Days, Noem Calls to 'Eliminate' Agency Due to Slow Texas Response
Congressional Democrats want investigations "at every level of government of what went wrong" and to "stop the dismantling of federal agencies."
Jul 10, 2025
U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem renewed her call Wednesday to "eliminate" the Federal Emergency Management Agency calling it "slow to respond" to the deadly floods that have killed more than 120 people in Texas over the past week.
But that "slow" response was the direct result of a policy put in place by Noem herself, according to four FEMA officials who spoke to CNN.
Last month, the network reported on a new policy introduced by Noem that required any contract or grant above $100,000 to cross her desk for approval.
The administration billed the move as a way of "rooting out waste, fraud, [and] abuse." But multiple anonymous officials, including ones from FEMA, warned at the time that it could cause "massive delays" in cases of emergency, especially as hurricane season began to ramp up.
That appears to be what happened in Texas. According to the four officials who spoke to CNN, "FEMA ran into bureaucratic obstacles" as a result of this requirement. Compared to the billions that are typically required to respond to disasters, officials said $100,000 is essentially "pennies."
FEMA officials said they were left to ask for Noem's direct approval on virtually every action they took in response to the catastrophic flood, which created massive delays in deploying Urban Search and Rescue Teams.
The sources told CNN that "in the past, FEMA would have swiftly staged these teams, which are specifically trained for situations including catastrophic floods, closer to a disaster zone in anticipation of urgent requests."
Multiple sources said Noem waited until Monday to authorize the deployment of these search and rescue teams, more than 72 hours after the flooding began. Aerial imagery to aid in the search was also delayed waiting for Noem's approval.
On Wednesday, Noem used these very delays to justify her calls to disband FEMA entirely.
"Federal emergency management should be state and locally led, rather than how it has operated for decades," she said. "It has been slow to respond at the federal level. It's even been slower to get the resources to Americans in crisis, and that is why this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today, and remade into a responsive agency."
President Donald Trump said last month he is in the process of beginning to "phase out" FEMA and that it would begin to "give out less money" to states and be directed out of the White House.
He first took a hatchet to FEMA back in February using the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which eliminated 2,000 permanent employees, one-third of its total staff.
Noem has also boasted about using FEMA funds to carry out Trump's mass deportation crusade, including allocating hundreds of millions from the agency to build the so-called "Alligator Alcatraz" immigrant internment camp in Florida, as well as other detention facilities.
Before a House panel last month, former FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell noted that the administration's cuts have made it harder for FEMA to respond in disaster areas.
"It just slows down the entire response and delays the recovery process from starting," Criswell said. "If the state director asks for a resource, then FEMA needs to be able to quickly respond and mobilize that resource to come support whatever that is. They still need the staff that are going in there. And so when you have less people, you're going to have less ability to actually fill those senior roles."
The revelation that Noem's policy may have contributed to the slowdown has only amplified calls by congressional Democrats to investigate how Trump administration cuts to FEMA and other services like the National Weather Service may have contributed to the devastation.
"During disasters, every second matters," said Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas). "Noem must answer for this delay."
Congressman Greg Casar (D-Texas) said this disaster in his home state highlighted the need for federal agencies like FEMA.
"Year after year, Texans face deadlier fires, freezes, and floods." Casar said. "As we continue to support first responders and grieving families after the terrible flooding, we will need investigations at every level of government of what went wrong and what could save lives in future."
"We must stop the dismantling of federal agencies that are supposed to keep us safe from the next disaster," he added.
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Dems Call for Investigation Into Trump NWS-FEMA Cuts After Texas Flood
"There are some serious questions about the impact of President Trump's assault on NOAA, the National Weather Service, and FEMA, and whether it made these floods more deadly," said Sen. Chris Murphy.
Jul 09, 2025
With at least 111 people confirmed dead and more than 150 still missing in Texas' catastrophic flooding as of Wednesday, Democrats in Congress are demanding answers about whether the Trump administration's cuts to federal weather monitoring and emergency management agencies may have hampered the response.
Since President Donald Trump retook office, his administration has unilaterally introduced cuts that have substantially reduced the number of employees at the National Weather Service (NWS) and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which forecast weather and collect environmental data. It has done the same to the Federal Emergency Management System (FEMA), which coordinates responses to natural disasters.
And following the passage of the GOP budget reconciliation package last week, further cuts to these agencies are in the works.
As the death count has climbed, Democrats in both the House and Senate have issued calls to investigate whether these cuts may have played a role in making the horrific situation in Texas worse.
"There are some serious questions about the impact of President Trump's assault on NOAA, the National Weather Service, and FEMA, and whether it made these floods more deadly," said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in a video posted to X Tuesday night. "We aren't doing our job if we aren't seeking answers to these questions."
Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut NOAA staff by 11% through a combination of terminations and buyouts. According to The Associated Press, this included "hundreds of jobs at NWS, with staffing down by at least 20% at nearly half of the 122 NWS field offices nationally and at least a half dozen no longer staffed 24 hours a day."
FEMA, meanwhile has shed around 2,000 permanent employees, around a third of its permanent workforce.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson dismissed what she called "false claims" that Trump's cuts affected Texas' disaster response. Jackson said the National Weather Service "did their job, even issuing a flood watch more than 12 hours in advance." Jason Runyen, a meteorologist with the NWS, also told the AP that the NWS handling Austin and San Antonio had more forecasters on duty than normal.
However, questions still remain about how cuts may have affected other parts of the emergency response.
According to former NOAA Administrator Rick Spinrad, who spoke to CNN on Tuesday, the problem was not the NWS forecasting, but the failure to disseminate warnings about the floods to the public.
"We need to understand why that last mile is where the problem was in terms of getting alerts out," Spinrad said.
According to the AP, the NWS office for Austin-San Antonio had six vacancies, including "a key manager responsible for issuing warnings and coordinating with local emergency management officials." That official, who'd held the position for 17 years, left in April after one of DOGE's mass emails urging federal workers to take early retirements.
In a Monday letter to Roderick Anderson, the Commerce Department's acting inspector general, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) noted reporting from The New York Times Saturday, which quoted several former NWS officials who said the response suffered from "the loss of experienced people who would typically have helped communicate with local authorities in the hours after flash flood warnings were issued overnight."
"The roles left unfilled are not marginal, they're critical," Schumer said. "These are the experts responsible for modeling storm impacts, monitoring rising water levels, issuing flood warnings, and coordinating directly with local emergency managers about when to warn the public and issue evacuation orders."
Schumer called on the inspector general to begin investigating why these positions were vacant and whether it affected the emergency response or forecasting.
In an interview with CNN's Dana Bash, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) urged against jumping to hasty conclusions with the search for victims still on, but agreed there should be an investigation.
"When you have flash flooding, there's a risk that you won't have the personnel to make that—do that analysis, do the predictions in the best way," Castro said. "And it could lead to tragedy. So, I don’t want to sit here and say conclusively that that was the case, but I do think that it should be investigated."
Other Democrats have raised the possibility that cuts to FEMA may have played a role. Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Committee, which has jurisdiction over FEMA, called for hearings on the agency's capacity to respond.
He noted that Trump has said he wants to eliminate FEMA altogether and "bring it down to the state level," a decision Thompson said is more dangerous than ever as climate change makes extreme weather more frequent.
DOGE also canceled $880 million worth of funding for FEMA's BRIC program, which focused on pre-disaster planning. In Kerr County, one of the hardest hit by the storm, the flood system has been described as "antiquated," lacking "basic components like sirens and river gauges." The county applied for pre-disaster mitigation funding from FEMA to upgrade their system in 2017 and 2018, during the first Trump administration, but was denied.
"This administration cannot pretend that disasters like this are happening in a vacuum. They cannot ignore the fact that natural disasters are becoming more severe and more frequent due to climate change," Thompson said.
On the storm response, he added: "The federal government—as well as state and local governments—all have a role to play. We must also determine if any budget cuts or staffing shortages at the federal level—of any kind—made matters worse."
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What the Texas Floods Can Teach Us About Disaster Readiness in a Changing Climate
What happened in Kerr County may not have been preventable. What happens next—and what happens in every county like it—absolutely is.
Jul 09, 2025
Earlier this year, the federal government dismantled what had quietly become one of its most significant tools for climate resilience.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, better known as BRIC, was stripped of funding and effectively ended without ceremony. Grant agreements already signed were canceled. Award letters were rescinded. Applications in final stages were thrown out. Billions of dollars that states and localities had spent years planning to use for infrastructure upgrades—stormwater systems in North Carolina, wildfire protections in California, flood control in Louisiana—were withdrawn or rerouted with a stroke of the pen.
FEMA officials called the program wasteful. They argued that BRIC had wandered from the agency’s core mission. And then, in June, U.S. President Donald Trump made the subtext unmistakable. “We want to wean” states and local governments off of FEMA altogether, he declared, as if disaster mitigation were a drug, and as if the desire to protect communities before they break were a dependency worth shaking.
If we truly care about making this country great, we could start by making sure our towns aren’t wiped off the map every time it rains.
Just weeks after that statement, and with the cancellation of BRIC still fresh, one of the deadliest floods in recent Texas history began to unfold. Over the July 4 weekend, a stalled storm system released sheets of rain across the Hill Country, turning rivers into wrecking currents in a matter of hours. The Guadalupe River rose more than 30 feet overnight, devouring homes and roads and everything in between. At Camp Mystic near Kerrville, dozens of girls and counselors were caught in the dark without warning. Some clung to trees. Others were rescued by helicopter. Many did not make it out. As of this writing, the death toll exceeds 100, and continues to climb. Entire neighborhoods are gone. The water has not fully receded, and the long-term impact has barely begun to register.
To be clear, BRIC would not have prevented this flood. The program funds large-scale infrastructure improvements—new drainage networks, elevated housing, reinforced power systems—that take years to design and construct. It is not meant to stop water in its tracks. It is meant to give communities a fighting chance in the long run. But that distinction has been repeatedly twisted to justify doing nothing. What happened in Kerr County may not have been preventable. What happens next—and what happens in every county like it—absolutely is.
The truth is, disasters are not just acts of nature. They are shaped by policy. They are made worse by delay and neglect and political convenience. And they are made deadlier when communities are forced to face them without the resources they need. We now live in a country where a young girl at summer camp must wonder if the river beside her bunk will rise in the night, where families face flood insurance premiums that exceed their mortgage payments, and where nursing homes sit one transformer away from catastrophe every time the grid fails. These are not flukes. They are the foreseeable consequences of systems we refuse to maintain. They are the result of a government that pulls back precisely when it should step in.
Mitigation funding is not glamorous. It does not come with ribbon cuttings or breaking news alerts. But it works. According to FEMA’s own analysis, every dollar invested in hazard mitigation saves $6-13 in future recovery costs. BRIC was designed to scale that logic. It offered grants of up to $50 million for large, shovel-ready projects and prioritized funding for communities that lacked the tax base or political influence to go it alone. In just a few years, it helped fund floodplain relocations in Pennsylvania, stormwater upgrades in the Midwest, grid hardening in hurricane zones, and wildfire protections across the West. It was one of the few programs in government structured to respond not just to what happened yesterday, but to what is coming tomorrow.
And what is coming is already here. The United States now experiences a billion-dollar disaster every three weeks. In 2023, insurers lost more than $15 billion covering home and property damage. That same year, multiple major insurance carriers stopped issuing new policies in California, Florida, and Louisiana. The National Flood Insurance Program is tens of billions in debt. And updated federal risk-rating formulas, designed to more accurately reflect the true cost of insuring high-risk properties, have caused premiums to surge in low-lying and coastal areas. Many Americans now live in homes that are technically insured but functionally vulnerable. Others have dropped their coverage altogether, forced to take the gamble because they cannot afford not to.
This is not just a crisis of cost. It is a crisis of coverage. In entire regions of the country—wildfire-prone communities, floodplain towns, rural counties without backup systems—insurance is becoming either unavailable or unsustainable. State-run insurers of last resort, like California’s FAIR Plan or Florida’s Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, have become overloaded safety valves in systems that were never meant to carry this much pressure. What used to be a hedge against risk has become a red flag to investors, lenders, and residents alike. The market is signaling what policymakers still refuse to say out loud. Our infrastructure is failing to keep up with the pace of the climate, and private institutions know it.
It was into this vacuum that BRIC had begun to build. Slowly, imperfectly, but with seriousness. It was a signal to local governments that the federal government still believed in shared risk and coordinated investment. It was one of the few mitigation tools scaled to meet the reality we now inhabit. And its elimination—during a year already marred by extreme heat, flash flooding, and billion-dollar storms—is less a cost-saving measure than a declaration of surrender.
FEMA says its mission is response. But helicopters cannot rebuild communities. Tarps cannot fix levees. Emergency declarations do not replace the decades of infrastructure degradation they are called in to cover. Without preparation, response is triage. Without mitigation, disaster becomes the default.
We are still governing like the greatest risk we face is a storm every few years. But the climate no longer operates on that timetable. The weather is more severe, less predictable, and more frequent than any period in modern history. And yet we continue to treat resilience as a luxury, rather than what it is: the only way forward.
Some on the political right argue that states should be able to stand on their own, that a lean federal government is the mark of strength. But there is nothing strong about leaving small towns to beg for help after the water hits. There is nothing efficient about spending 10 times more to rebuild what could have been protected. And there is nothing admirable about calling communities dependent simply because they cannot manufacture levees or redesign drainage systems overnight.
The political left, for its part, too often clings to the moral high ground of having predicted all of this. But accuracy is not strategy. The point is not who said it first. The point is what we do now, while we still have the chance to act.
This is no longer about climate as abstraction or partisanship. It is about infrastructure. It is about capacity. It is about whether or not a town like Kerrville, or Stillwater, or Mount Pleasant, will have the tools it needs not just to survive a storm but to recover from it, to stay rooted after the headlines fade.
If we truly care about making this country great, we could start by making sure our towns aren’t wiped off the map every time it rains. We could start by investing in the systems that let people stay in place, rather than flee after loss. We could recognize that greatness is not measured by how quickly we clean up after tragedy, but by how many tragedies we prevent from becoming fatal.
We cannot prevent every disaster. But we can choose how many we meet with foresight, and how many we force communities to weather alone. The cost of cutting BRIC will not appear on a balance sheet. It will show up in washed-out roads, closed hospitals, homes that never reopen, neighborhoods that never recover. And in the obituaries of those who lived in places we decided were no longer worth preparing for.
That is not resilience. That is abdication.
And we should stop pretending otherwise.
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