The Red Flag Inside FEMA

I was on the ground after Katrina. FEMA staff are warning we could be there again.

This week, more than 180 FEMA employees signed an extraordinary letter to Congress warning that the agency is being gutted from within. Staff and resources are being diverted from its core mission of disaster response and repurposed for immigration enforcement and other political priorities. The employees are blunt: the United States is on the path to a “Katrina-level” failure.

📎 FEMA Warning Letter: The Guardian

They describe a chilling “culture of fear” inside the agency. Warnings are silenced. Expertise is sidelined. Dissent is punished. It’s the exact phrase I used when I resigned from the Trump administration to describe what it’s like to work in these circles. That culture is dangerous because it paralyzes professionals. It stops them from speaking up, even when they know lives are on the line.

I will never forget the days I spent deployed in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I saw the destruction firsthand: homes reduced to splinters, neighborhoods unrecognizable, families displaced for years. But worse than the physical devastation was the human cost of delay. FEMA’s response faltered. Coordination broke down. Critical resources arrived too late. People suffered because politics and bureaucracy hindered action.

The promise that followed was simple: never again would FEMA be stripped of its independence and mission focus. Never again would our disaster readiness take a back seat to politics. Yet here we are. I’ve been sounding this alarm for months. In fact, in my earlier piece The Storm Is Coming, FEMA Isn’t, I laid out how FEMA was already being stretched and politicized. This letter from inside the agency only confirms how deep the rot now runs.

The National Guard as Political Theater

Instead of preparing for hurricanes, wildfires, or floods, Trump is diverting both FEMA and the National Guard into his latest political theater. His order to deploy Guard units into cities like Washington, DC, and soon likely Chicago isn’t about safety; it’s about spectacle. It’s about creating a sensationalized narrative of urban chaos that allows him to rebrand himself as the “law and order” president.

But here’s the hard truth: every Guardsman pulled into Trump’s PR stunts is one less Guardsman available when disaster strikes. And disasters don’t wait for election cycles.

Imagine a Category 4 storm barreling into the Gulf Coast this fall. Imagine wildfires tearing through California. Imagine the Mississippi River overflowing again. In those moments, Americans won’t care about Trump’s photo ops. They’ll care about whether the Guard and FEMA are there to protect their families. And if they aren’t, because they were busy patrolling neighborhoods for Trump’s talking points, then the consequences will be devastating.

There’s also a quieter danger: what I call the readiness debt. On paper, FEMA and Guard units still exist. In practice, they’re less trained, less rested, and less prepared when real crises hit. That debt compounds until an actual emergency exposes it. The result? Slow response, fractured coordination, unnecessary deaths, the very failures we swore we’d never repeat after Katrina.

Immigrant Communities in Crisis

One memory from Katrina has never left me. I spent time translating materials and working to reach immigrant communities, reassuring them that if they came forward for help, they wouldn’t be deported. That they were safe. That the government’s priority was saving lives, not checking papers. Today, I fear that promise would not be made, and if it were, who would believe it? In Trump’s America, hardworking immigrants are being picked up by masked men on the street. Families live in fear of ICE raids and deportation sweeps. In a disaster, what choice would they have?

Drown, or get detained and sent to a country they may not even know.

That’s the moral quandary that would face a young officer like I once was, wanting to save lives, but knowing that if immigrants come forward, they may pay with deportation. It chills me to think about who we have become. 

This is bigger than staffing charts and deployment orders. Trump benefits politically if FEMA fails. He has long thrived on dysfunction, using it as proof that “the system” doesn’t work, except for him. Weakening FEMA creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. When people lose faith that the government can protect them in their darkest hour, Trump gets to play strongman in the vacuum he helped create.

And the damage doesn’t just fall on infrastructure. Katrina taught us that when the government fails, trust is destroyed, especially among poor and minority communities. That mistrust lasts generations. The next time the government says, “We’re here to help,” people may not believe it. That distrust is itself a national security threat, never mind the disinformation era we’re living in, where Trump himself so often lies and politicizes disasters.

All of this is happening as disasters become more frequent and more extreme. Hurricanes are stronger. Wildfires are bigger. Flooding is more common. FEMA and the Guard aren’t just backup, they’re the frontline. Stretching them thin when we know the crisis curve is rising is reckless, bordering on sabotage.

When employees inside FEMA, the very people charged with saving lives in the worst moments, say that this culture of fear has taken hold, we should believe them. 

National security encompasses more than just crime or the military. It’s about whether Americans are safe when disaster hits—whether from storms, wildfires, pandemics, or floods. It’s about whether the Guard is ready to rescue stranded families or whether FEMA can mobilize within hours, not days. Trump wants the optics of being “law and order.” However, the reality is that he is undermining the institutions that keep Americans alive when nature turns deadly. Katrina proved the cost of delay. Frankly, so did the recent horrific floods in Texas.

The question now is whether we have the courage to listen to FEMA’s own employees, to act on the warnings being sounded, and to resist turning America’s disaster readiness into another prop for one man’s political theater. Because if we don’t, the next catastrophe won’t just be a natural disaster. It will be a man-made failure.

FEMA employees did their part. They spoke up, despite the culture of fear. Now, Congress must do its part, with real oversight and accountability. And the public must demand it, because disaster readiness isn’t a partisan issue. It’s survival.

More soon,

Olivia