WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s team wanted to radically transform the Federal Emergency Management Agency by cutting its workforce in half and relocating personnel across the country, according to a draft report seen by The Post.
The FEMA Review Council, a panel on which Noem served as co-chair, called for shifting the organization of emergency response to the states while having the feds take on a secondary role.
“FEMA needs to be fundamentally transformed from how it exists today, and the core missions must be remade into a new, supportive agency,” read a draft of the council’s report, which remains under review by the White House and hasn’t yet been made public
“‘FEMA’ as a brand and as an agency has been irreparably damaged by the last four years of mission creep and programmatic failures.”
The report also called for converting FEMA’s Public Assistance (PA) program to a block grant system, where the feds would foot the bill for 50% for disaster relief costs and provide up to 75% for states deemed most effective at managing taxpayer money.
Currently, FEMA is required to cover 75% of eligible disaster relief costs, though that figure can jump to 100% in extreme situations.
The shift to block grants was intended to combat issues with administrative costs and bureaucratic snarls.
“In total, almost 25 cents on every dollar can be provided for administrative expenses,” the report said. “Most of these costs are expended during the grant development phase, which hinders the pace of recovery.”
The report also called for privatizing parts of the National Flood Insurance Program, which has a debt load of about $20 billion, as well as expediting payments due to help recovery from disasters that happened years ago — such as 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.
While that action would cost the feds more upfront, the draft report argued it would reduce costs in the long run by allowing FEMA to ditch legacy technology kept in place to help recovery from historical calamities.
To complement those steps, the draft report called for reducing FEMA headcount to 12,000 from just over 24,000 — with 6,500 based out of regional offices and 5,500 working out of the nation’s capital.
Currently, more than 18,000 FEMA employees are based in Washington, with the remainder working in regional offices.
The draft also recommended exploring the possibility of relocating FEMA headquarters outside of Washington, though it did not give suggestions.
“This framework shifts the agency’s focus from bureaucracy to boots-on-the-ground action, better positioning the United States to meet the complex disaster challenges of the future,” the report said.
President Trump had tasked the council with finding ways to improve FEMA back in January 2025. Prior to the report leaking, Noem, the former governor of South Dakota, had publicly laid out a vision of having states take more of a leading role in disaster response.
FEMA has struggled with its response to several high-profile disasters dating back to Katrina, with a backlog of about 500,000 assistance applications recorded in December 2024 after Hurricanes Helene and Milton ravaged the southeastern US.
One version of the draft report briefly acknowledged that FEMA’s struggles with low staffing impacted its effectiveness, noting that in fiscal year 2022, the agency was 35% short of its staffing goal.
The report also noted that FEMA’s watchdog had found that the agency doled out $8.1 billion in “questioned costs and improper payments.”
The agency had also experienced one of the “busiest disaster periods in recent history,” responding to some 509 significant events between 2021 and 2024, the report explained.
Noem co-chaired the FEMA Review Council with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Earlier this year, Trump extended the FEMA Review Council’s existence to March 25.
“Any potential draft reports are deliberative, not finalized, and they should not be portrayed as such,” a White House official stressed to The Post about the report.
“The Council’s draft final report is an iterative process and will be released to the public once it has been approved as final by the Co-Chairs and Council members at a public Council meeting,” a DHS spokesperson added, noting that “drafts are not subject to public disclosure.”
The Post reviewed five different draft versions of the report in preparing this story.
Last week, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) showed off copies of two of the drafts to Noem during a heated House Judiciary Committee hearing.
Moskowitz, who previously served as director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, publicly claimed that Noem had been given a 122-page draft before having most of its vital information removed.
“You cut out all the stuff that was put in by governors who had been through disasters, emergency managers, FEMA experts, national security experts — you cut it all out,” Moskowitz chastized her.
Sources told The Post that one day after receiving the longer draft, Noem whittled it down to 22 pages largely consisting of charts and executive summaries, excising lengthy recommendation breakdowns and feedback sections.
Much of that content was later reinstated to the report that was ultimately sent to the White House.
