'They are scared': Trump admin sidelines FEMA employees after leadership criticism
After signing onto a letter pushing back against the Trump administration’s cuts and management of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, more than a dozen staffers at the agency were placed on leave Tuesday.
The letter received 191 signatures in total, most of them anonymous, and warned that the “decisions made by the current administration” were posing a great risk to the agency’s ability to adequately respond to disasters. Every staffer placed on leave Tuesday had signed onto the letter, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
“The fact that 180 people signed on to the letter, with a supermajority of them still working in the building, and dozens of those people wanted to attach their real names, signifies the severity of the problem,” said Jeremy Edwards, former FEMA press secretary, speaking with The Washington Post.
“They are that scared of us being so inadequately unprepared. It speaks a lot to the situation right now.”
President Donald Trump has said he wanted to phase out FEMA and “bring it down to the state level,” and under his leadership, the agency struggled to respond to emergencies such as the deadly Texas flood in July after new Homeland Security Department policies led to funding lapses.
The latest FEMA staffers to be placed on leave comes just a month after 140 FEMA employees were placed on leave for signing onto a different letter of dissent, and around three weeks after the Trump administration forcibly reassigned a number of FEMA staffers to work for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
Responding to the Washington Post, a FEMA spokesperson did not deny that the staffers were placed on leave over their support for the letter of dissent, and instead, reiterated the Trump administration’s focus on helping “survivors,” and not “protecting broken systems.
“It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform,” the FEMA spokesperson said.
“...Our obligation is to survivors, not to protecting broken systems. Under the leadership of Secretary Noem, FEMA will return to its mission of assisting Americans at their most vulnerable.”