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Deanne Criswell, Administrator of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency, during a tour of the damage caused by Hurricane Milton on October 13, 2024 in St Pete Beach, Florida.
“People are going to fall through the cracks," former FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell told The Advocate.
As President Donald Trump advances plans to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency after the 2025 hurricane season, former FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell, who led the agency under President Joe Biden, warns that dismantling the agency would leave the United States dangerously unprepared for large-scale disasters, both natural and manufactured.
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Criswell told The Advocate in an interview that the Trump administration’s plan would strip away not only FEMA’s high-profile disaster response efforts but also the underlying infrastructure that helps local and state governments prepare for, survive, and recover from catastrophic events.
“It’s important to remember the mission statement of FEMA—to help people before, during, and after disasters,” she said. While state and local emergency managers already carry significant responsibility, they rely heavily on FEMA funding to maintain preparedness. “They get funding through training, through exercises, through preparedness grants that help them buy equipment,” she explained, citing programs such as fire department grants and the Emergency Management Performance Grant.
Related: Meet the gay man helping FEMA fight misinformation during natural disasters
“Many of those small emergency management departments depend on those grants to help maintain their staffing.” Eliminating FEMA, she argued, would not only gut recovery operations but also eliminate resources essential to preparedness and mitigation—such as the Urban Search and Rescue teams and the National Flood Insurance Program. “Flooding is the number one hazard that communities experience,” she said. “I’ve heard conversations about privatizing [NFIP], and I think privatizing it would be great—but the problem is the private sector didn’t want it, which is why the federal government came in and took it over.” Criswell warned against the “tendency to oversimplify the complex nature of the emergency management enterprise,” adding that while administrative improvements are needed, cutting FEMA does nothing to reduce the legal requirements that states and municipalities must still meet—such as procurement, environmental compliance, and other statutory regulations.
“Without thoughtful conversations with the state and locals, I think you’re just creating an opportunity for communities to be even more vulnerable than they have in the past,” she said.
On June 10, Trump said in the Oval Office that his administration intends to “wean off of FEMA” by the end of the hurricane season, transferring responsibilities to governors, mutual-aid pacts among states, or even the Department of Homeland Security. Trump offered no specifics, saying funding could be managed “from the president’s office.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has echoed the president’s goal, telling a FEMA reform panel last month, “No, FEMA should no longer exist as it is.” She and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth co-chair a FEMA review council, which is expected to release its recommendations soon, according to the Associated Press.
But Criswell, who led FEMA during President Joe Biden’s term, said the agency plays an irreplaceable role. “If you were to outright eliminate FEMA, you’re not just eliminating the recovery part,” she said. “You’re eliminating access to resources to come in and support a community for response.” She pointed to FEMA’s work funding urban search-and-rescue teams, training local emergency managers, underwriting flood insurance, and coordinating federal support during mass-casualty events.
Justin Ángel Knighten, a gay communications professional who served as Associate Administrator for External Affairs under Criswell, warned in a separate interview with The Advocate that the move reflects not only ignorance but “purposeful sabotage.” He said FEMA’s continuity-of-government responsibilities are not widely known—but essential. “FEMA has a job of keeping government going—during the Olympics, the Super Bowl, a war, or an attack on the homeland,” he said. “This isn’t just about hurricanes. This is national security.”
One area both Criswell and Knighten emphasized as especially vulnerable is earthquake response in the central U.S.—an area many Americans don’t associate with seismic risk. The New Madrid Seismic Zone spans seven Midwestern states, where infrastructure is often older, and building codes are not always designed to withstand earthquakes.
“FEMA works with the states that are in the New Madrid Seismic Zone to help with catastrophic planning,” Criswell said. “They provide training, help identify infrastructure risks, fund exercises like the Great ShakeOut, and stand ready to deploy search-and-rescue teams, medical assets, and federal engineers in the event of a disaster.” In such a scenario, FEMA would activate contracts to deliver food, water, and shelter and coordinate with the Army Corps of Engineers, the Department of Defense, the Red Cross, and other partners to stabilize the region. “It’s a massive federal operation,” she said. “And FEMA is the checkbook that unlocks it.”
Knighten said the need for federal coordination becomes even more critical when supply chains and infrastructure stretch across multiple states. “Those states aren’t built up for that kind of shock,” he said. “If the grid goes down, if transportation routes fail, you need a partner who can operate across jurisdictions. States won’t be able to do that alone.”
The potential loss of FEMA’s capabilities comes as the agency faces internal upheaval. More than 2,000 full-time FEMA employees—about one-third of its workforce—have left or been terminated since January, and the National Response Coordination Center lost its director, Jeremy Greenberg, who resigned last week. The agency is now led by Acting Administrator David Richardson, a political appointee with no background in emergency management, according to NPR.
Criswell said the workforce is demoralized. “FEMA has some of the best, if not the best, public servants in all of the federal government,” she said. “They spend long hours away from their families… and it’s unfortunate they aren’t given the credit they deserve.”
Knighten agreed, warning that the erosion of FEMA’s institutional knowledge is accelerating just as hurricane season begins.
Both Criswell and Knighten said misinformation and political attacks have fueled the narrative that FEMA is inefficient or unnecessary. During Hurricane Helene in 2024, online falsehoods about FEMA’s response spread rapidly—reports of FEMA being missing or taking the land of those affected spread. Reports of receiving only a few hundred dollars of disaster relief per household, also false, spread. That misinformation—driven by both foreign and domestic actors—“hurt disaster survivors, delayed recovery efforts, and in some cases, fueled political violence,” Knighten said.
Criswell added that FEMA has long been the subject of conspiracy theories, but the current climate is more dangerous. “FEMA’s not new to misinformation,” she said, adding that the misunderstanding of the agency’s role—what it actually does—has become a justification for dismantling it.
Part of that misunderstanding, both said, stems from conflating FEMA’s role with that of local emergency responders. “FEMA is not sending in firefighters,” she explained. “FEMA is going to reimburse jurisdictions for their overtime costs.” She said FEMA repays jurisdictions for their costs, coordinates federal agencies, and moves national resources.
Independent analysts are raising further concerns about FEMA cuts. According to a May analysis by the Urban Institute, changes to FEMA’s disaster declaration policies would have denied public assistance for 71 percent of major disasters between 2008 and 2024. That includes eliminating aid for all snowstorms and raising the per-capita damage threshold for qualifying events by a factor of four.
Researchers also found that the Trump administration’s proposal to cap the federal cost share at 75 percent would have shifted roughly $27 billion in public assistance costs to states and localities over a 16-year period. Combined with tighter declaration rules, that number jumps to $41 billion.
States like Florida, New York, California, and Texas would lose the most in absolute dollars, but smaller states like Iowa and Hawaii would face the most significant per-capita losses, according to the analysis. In Pennsylvania and Ohio, every single disaster from 2008 to 2024 would have been ineligible for federal support.
“Disasters don’t discriminate,” Criswell said. “They don’t care if it’s a red state or a blue state. They don’t care if it’s rural or urban. They don’t care if you’re rich or you’re poor. They don’t care.”
More than 75 percent of FEMA’s disaster recovery dollars, she noted, have historically gone to Republican-led states.
Knighten emphasized the risks of removing those systems. If FEMA were to go away, people would feel it immediately, he said. States would struggle to preposition resources. There would be delays in federal support. Survivors would have nowhere to go.
Another casualty of FEMA’s rollback, they said, is the agency’s equity-focused communication strategy. Under Criswell and Knighten, FEMA launched targeted outreach to marginalized groups, including LGBTQ+ communities, tribal nations, older adults, and disabled people. After Trump returned to office, his administration stopped all diversity and inclusion efforts. “Information is a lifeline,” Knighten said. “And information that isn’t tailored and accessible doesn’t work.”
Criswell recalled how FEMA field staff were deployed door-to-door in rural Appalachian communities after flooding in Kentucky, assisting residents who lacked broadband access or were unable to complete online disaster relief applications.
That’s why Criswell made equity the foundation of her strategic plan. “You can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach,” she said. “People are going to fall through the cracks.”
