FEMA says it is ready for hurricane season amid staffing churn

FEMA is telling the country it is ready for hurricane season while still working through a funding squeeze, deep leadership turnover and shutdown fallout that could test the agency at the first major storm. The tension is sharpened by a disaster fund that dropped below the $3 billion threshold, a staffing picture marked by vacancies at the top and the loss of more than 5,000 employees since January 2025.

Bob Fenton, FEMA’s acting administrator, made the readiness case from headquarters in Washington, D.C., while the agency was running a hurricane response exercise called Silent Echo. With the Atlantic hurricane season set to begin June 1, Fenton said, “Oh, we’re ready for hurricane season.” He said he brought more than three decades of emergency management experience and had recently returned from recovery work in Guam and the Mariana Islands after a Category 4-equivalent super typhoon.

But the internal strain is hard to miss. A May 15 report said nearly half of FEMA’s top 38 leadership positions were vacant, including the Region 4 administrator role that covers Florida and much of the Southeastern United States. Fenton is now the fourth acting FEMA chief under President Donald Trump, after Karen Evans was removed in May 2026 and Cameron Hamilton was nominated as the permanent administrator. House Democrats warned in a May 14 letter that the agency had lost more than 5,000 employees since January 2025.

FEMA’s own April 2 and April 29 statements laid out a separate vulnerability: the Department of Homeland Security funding lapse began February 14 and had run more than 70 days by late April. The agency said it started the shutdown with about $9.8 billion in the Disaster Relief Fund, but the balance fell below the $3 billion mark, triggering Immediate Needs Funding. That designation limits FEMA to lifesaving, life-sustaining and critical ongoing disaster obligations.

The shutdown is also slowing training and readiness. FEMA said tens of thousands of students each week normally depend on its training programs, all while the agency is juggling hurricane season, wildfire season, the FIFA World Cup and America 250.

The funding stress extends beyond the federal shutdown. The National Association of Counties said FEMA postponed nearly $11 billion in planned disaster reimbursements to 45 states, pushing the payments from fiscal 2025 into fiscal 2026. In Florida, emergency management director Kevin Guthrie said the state was ready for hurricane season and expected federal recovery money to move faster, even as he argued FEMA policy changes and the shutdown had slowed reimbursements over the past two years.

The warning sign is unmistakable. FEMA entered the 2025 hurricane season with only 12% of its incident management workforce available, according to a Government Accountability Office finding, and it is heading into 2026 with less money, fewer leaders and another storm season about to begin.