FEMA is losing scores of employees. That could slow disaster response.

Hundreds of Federal Emergency Management Agency employees were fired as part of a wave of terminations of federal workers over the holiday weekend and Tuesday, according to agency officials. The cuts, which come in addition to the firing of more than 200 last week, target probationary and contract employees and could affect people across the country who are struggling to rebuild and prepare for disasters.

The mass firings started over Presidents Day weekend, part of what federal employees in text groups and online forums called the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” which has created chaos across the federal government. Supervisors warned their workers to quickly pull their documents off websites and email them to personal accounts so they’d have copies, messages seen by The Washington Post show. Employees logging into internal systems could no longer see team profiles, which are usually readily accessible.

“Under President (Donald) Trump’s leadership, we are making sweeping cuts and reform across the federal government to eliminate egregious waste and incompetence that has been happening for decades at the expense of the American taxpayer,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, in a statement. “We are actively identifying other wasteful positions and offices that do not fulfill DHS’ mission.”

For FEMA, which operates with about 25,000 people, the cuts will affect disaster victims seeking individual assistance funds, rural and tribal communities trying to bolster their infrastructure, and towns trying to obtain large grants to help them rebuild, according to nine current and former FEMA officials, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.

Critics of FEMA have long called for a better, less complicated disaster response system, pointing out that the agency often is tasked with doing too much, which hinders its ability to respond swiftly and efficiently.

In a letter earlier this month, Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) commended Trump’s efforts to review and reform the agency’s operations. He said that FEMA has too many responsibilities and agencies under its framework and that the federal government’s role should be diminished.

“The federal government’s labyrinthine disaster response and recovery programs have not been subject to the scrutiny needed to assess whether it is achieving its goals or whether its funding would be better spent with limited strings attached at the state and local levels,” he wrote, adding that Trump’s newly established FEMA review council should get feedback from “leaders with substantial knowledge of disaster recovery efforts.”

While the losses have been hard to track given FEMA’s various staffing sources and layers, agency officials have estimated they’ll be short about 1,000 employees because of the terminations and the deferred resignation program put in place by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service.

Agency staff members say it’s been hard to learn why the Trump administration is firing their colleagues. People have been combing LinkedIn and Reddit posts, passing along information in group chats and checking their daily situation reports to determine what their workforce now looks like.

Two current officials said that the Office of Personnel Management, the federal human resources agency, has been heavily involved in making the calls and giving lists to each office with the names of people to terminate.

FEMA is actively responding to more than 100 disasters and emergencies across the United States, including hurricanes Milton and Helene and the historic fires in Los Angeles. Each event requires scores of workers and contractors who coordinate disaster response, oversee debris removal, and instruct local and tribal authorities in the grant application and disbursement process, as well as helping communities understand what FEMA does. With billion-dollar disasters now the norm, more FEMA employees have been responding to disasters for sometimes 60 days at a time.

Nearly every FEMA employee can respond to a disaster if the need is great enough. When hurricanes Helene and Milton hit the Southeast back to back in the fall, FEMA officials said, they had to pull staff from other disasters to support the immediate needs of millions of people in North Carolina, Florida and other states. Few workers were left in the agency’s reserves, and FEMA had to hire more people. As a result, the officials continued, losing hundreds of workers is likely to hinder the agency’s ability to handle multiple simultaneous catastrophes while processing tens of thousands of cases.

Trump officials are planning multiple waves of layoffs, according to two agency officials. The first sweep has focused on hundreds of probationary employees. While those include hundreds of new hires – among them local residents hired to help their own communities – “probationary” workers are often seasoned staffers who are coming off contracts to fill permanent roles in the agency, according to three current officials. The next sweep is expected to target employees who work in climate and diversity, equity and inclusion programs, those officials said.

The terminations are resulting in the loss of leaders who have years of institutional knowledge, the officials said. One of the agency staffers who was fired, Christopher Page, started at the agency in 2010 and recently accepted a new position as a chief for the National Flood Insurance Program. The goal, he wrote on LinkedIn, was “to lead a team of flood insurance experts, with a goal of improving the product for policyholders, for industry, for the nation. That position change made me a probationary employee.” Page declined to provide additional comment.

The cuts also targeted entire teams and contractors. One seven-person unit within the agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program focused solely on helping small, lower-income communities secure grants for large disaster mitigation and prevention projects. FEMA created the initiative a few years ago because it realized that tribal and rural areas were falling through the cracks. The team helped places such as Crisfield, Maryland, by bolstering the small seaside town’s ability to handle increasingly devastating flooding.

“These are mostly rural and tribal communities. They’ll all be notified soon that their projects will essentially have to be done on their own, something not feasible for nearly all of them,” said a FEMA employee working in mitigation.

The agency has multiple layers of staffing for disaster response as well as its other initiatives and projects. The majority of the workforce focuses on disasters and are intermittent or contract workers, according to a person familiar with the agency’s operations. About a third of FEMA’s staff are “reservists,” temporary on-call workers who deploy to disasters. A large number of people are also part of the agency’s CORE program, and they come on for two to four years, depending on the incident. These workers help manage caseloads and oversee public assistance grant programs, where a community applies for federal funds to reimburse it for rebuilding roads, schools and other infrastructure. Then there are the permanent employees, mostly senior officials who often oversee these disaster programs.

If the agency loses a significant portion of its workforce, officials say, it is likely to result in a slower disaster response, longer waits for payouts, and worse customer service – issues that disaster victims have been complaining about for years.

“The disaster recovery system in the United States requires a robust federal emergency management partner,” said Katie Mears, senior specialist in U.S. disaster and climate risk with Episcopal Relief and Development. “If FEMA’s capacity is dramatically cut, as it has been and seems likely to continue to be, coordination and resourcing will fall to states, local governments and nonprofits, which simply can’t provide the resources and certainly not the technical and coordination support that FEMA currently provides.”

Agency staffers point out that FEMA is not just a disaster response agency. It also assists communities with preparing for flooding and other extreme weather events, doling out billions in grants that help pay for things such as drainage works, tornado shelters and elevating flood-prone homes. Other programs focus on land use, planning and codes. The Building Science Disaster Support program, for example, assesses and recommends codes and standards to improve building. Several people who do that work were fired, an official said.

The terminations have created an environment of fear and uncertainty, employees said. On Monday afternoon, people were scrambling to keep track of who was gone. Some probationary employees who had chosen to take Musk’s “deferred resignation program” found out Monday that they were “not eligible” and would be “terminated,” according to a letter seen by The Post.

The shake-up comes after the agency’s new interim administrator lashed out at workers speaking to the media. In a letter obtained by The Post, Cameron Hamilton said that sharing what was going on within the agency was “unacceptable behavior and unbecoming a FEMA employee.” As a result, he changed FEMA’s policy and barred employees from speaking to the press unless they were authorized.

FEMA has proved integral to recent disaster responses across the country. In California, the agency is helping to oversee and fund one of the biggest wildfire recovery responses in U.S. history, after blazes ripped through Los Angeles last month, destroying or damaging more than 18,000 structures.

In coordination with FEMA, Environmental Protection Agency workers are clearing burned homes of toxic materials, and the Army Corps of Engineers is working to remove debris. The organization has also helped with individual assistance to Angelenos who have lost their homes.

As of Tuesday, FEMA has approved more than $74 million under the Individual Assistance Program for almost 29,000 applicants affected by the wildfires. The agency was activated again Sunday, when Trump approved an emergency declaration for Kentucky, where severe flooding from heavy rains has killed at least 14 people.