President Donald Trump and tech billionaire Elon Musk have caused a mass exodus of experienced staffers at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA — just in time for what could be a brutal hurricane season, CNN's Gabe Cohen told anchor Jake Tapper on Wednesday.
"What are you learning about these cuts to FEMA?" Tapper asked him.
"We're talking about a thousand workers in this," said Cohen. "But what is most alarming here, and most noteworthy, is that we're talking about a ton of FEMA's senior leadership. People with the most institutional knowledge who play critical roles during disasters, who are taking these voluntary DOGE buyouts and choosing to head to the door rather than stay at the agency."
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"Having talked to about a half dozen sources at FEMA about this, the primary reason seems to be that people are just fed up working there, given the attacks that they have faced in recent months," Cohen continued. "It's not a secret President Trump and his allies have been attacking FEMA. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has vowed to eliminate the agency altogether. And so these people we know, lie detector tests have been used on a lot of these FEMA officials. So one FEMA official staffer told me, quote, 'People don't want to work here anymore, and they are worried about what the agency will look like in a year.' Another senior FEMA official said all of these people have seen their work destroyed and denigrated. They started seeing that FEMA might actually be killed."
The upshot, he added, is that "there is a lot of concern about what this is going to mean come hurricane season, just a few weeks away, given that this is just one aspect of the staffing reductions FEMA is facing."
This comes, Cohen noted, at a time when the Trump administration is accused of "prioritizing" FEMA funding to states with Republican governors.
"We learned that top state officials in Missouri, who are Republican, lobbied the Department of Homeland Security, asked them to free up some of their money so that they could pay their state emergency management teams," said Cohen. "That request was forwarded along to FEMA. FEMA's acting administrator, who is a Trump appointee, directed staff to start prioritizing payments to Missouri and get those out the door. And then another directive last week came to those same FEMA staff members saying, this time, prioritize payments to Virginia. To be clear, DHS and the White House deny any preferential treatment to red states."
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