FEMA employees put on leave after criticizing Trump administration in open letter

The Trump administration placed more than a dozen Federal Emergency Management Agency employees on leave Tuesday after they signed an open letter of dissent about the agency’s leadership, according to people familiar with the situation and documents reviewed by the Washington Post.

About 180 current and former FEMA staffers sent a letter on Monday to members of Congress and other officials, arguing the current leaders’ inexperience and approach harm FEMA’s mission and could result in a disaster on the level of Hurricane Katrina.

By Tuesday evening, FEMA’s office of the administrator had sent several people letters informing them that, effective immediately, they were on an administrative leave, operating “in a non-duty status while continuing to receive pay and benefits.”

“It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform. … Our obligation is to survivors, not to protecting broken systems,” a FEMA spokesperson said. “Under the leadership of Secretary Noem, FEMA will return to its mission of assisting Americans at their most vulnerable.”

Last month, the administration put nearly 140 EPA employees on leave after they sent their own letter of dissent.

In their letter, FEMA employees warned that the Trump administration is sending the agency back to a pre-Katrina era, pointing to several concerns including the lack of a Senate-confirmed and qualified emergency manager at FEMA’s helm; the slashing of mitigation, disaster recovery, training and community programs; and restrictive new policies that curb agency officials’ autonomy.

The letter also requested that federal lawmakers defend FEMA from interference by the Department of Homeland Security, protect the agency’s employees from “politically motivated firings,” conduct more oversight, and ultimately take FEMA out of DHS and establish it as an independent Cabinet-level agency in the executive branch.

At least two FEMA staff members who were part of the federal response to July’s flooding disaster in Texas have been placed on leave, according to an agency employee and another person familiar with the situation.

One employee who manages cases for all disasters, including Texas, helped orchestrate the letter. She had spoken to the Post on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution about the difficult decision to sign her full name on the letter. She has now been placed on leave and pulled off her disaster casework.

“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,” Jeremy Edwards, a former press secretary for FEMA who signed the letter, said in an interview. “They are that scared of us being so inadequately unprepared. It speaks a lot to the situation right now.”

The open show of resistance from FEMA employees was the latest example of federal workers speaking out against the Trump administration’s actions and policies, in many cases putting their jobs at risk. Called the “Bethesda Declaration” movement, after the Maryland area where the National Institutes of Health is headquartered, it began in June when NIH employees issued a letter modeled after Director Jay Bhattacharya’s dissent against the government’s coronavirus policies in 2020. Employees at the Environmental Protection Agency, NASA and the National Science Foundation followed suit.