Latest news with #DeanneCriswell
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Climate
- Yahoo
Is Florida ready for hurricane season after potential FEMA cuts? Fmr. FEMA administrator weighs in
NOAA predicted an above average hurricane season with at least 3 major hurricanes. This as DHS Secretary Kristi Noem approved a request to keep over 2,000 FEMA employees who were set to leave after President Trump said he could do away with the department. Former FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell joins Alex Witt to share her thoughts on these developments.
CBS News
21-05-2025
- Politics
- CBS News
FEMA rescinds strategic plan less than 2 weeks before hurricane season
Less than two weeks until the official start of the Atlantic hurricane season, Federal Emergency Management Agency acting Administrator David Richardson has rescinded the agency's strategic plan, a comprehensive policy document that outlines the disaster relief agency's priorities. In a short memo sent to FEMA employees on Wednesday and obtained by CBS News, Richardson wrote, "The 2022-2026 FEMA Strategic Plan is hereby rescinded. The Strategic Plan contains goals and objectives that bear no connection to FEMA accomplishing its mission. This summer, a new 2026-2030 strategy will be developed. The strategy will tie directly to FEMA executing its Mission Essential Tasks." The memo authored by Richardson was brief — the new agency head now requires that all FEMA memos to, from or for his office be no longer than one page in length, according to multiple current FEMA employees. FEMA did not immediately respond to a CBS News request for comment. Wired was the first to report that the plan had been rescinded. One FEMA official described the strategic plan to CBS News as the agency's "organizational backbone." "Without it, there are just a bunch of offices doing whatever they feel like doing," the official said. The strategic plan, which was published in December 2021 under former administrator Deanne Criswell, was set to expire in 2026. The plan no longer appears on FEMA's website. Criswell, in a news release at the time the plan was published, laid out three main goals for the agency: "Instill Equity as a Foundation of Emergency Management," "Lead Whole of Community in Climate Resilience" and "Promote and Sustain a Ready FEMA and Prepared Nation." The official told CBS News Richardson is now trying to figure out how to operate FEMA so that it does nothing more or less than what the law requires. Part of that includes nixing the agency's Office of Resilience Strategy. "That office exists to figure out how to maximize efficacy of publicly spent money on projects that build a resilient infrastructure that can withstand disaster events," the official said. "Without that guiding star, FEMA will operate as triage instead of actually trying to mitigate future damage before it happens." The official compared the removal of the ORS to people relying solely on emergency rooms for health care rather than also getting preventative care. "A primary care physician would've been able to tell you that you have a disease that makes your blood not clot properly. Pulling the Office of Resilience Strategy out of the equation means that you'll bleed out and die from a paper cut because nobody was around to tell you that your life was at risk in the first place," the said. The move to rescind the strategic plan comes a little over a week after an internal agency presentation featured a slide that noted, "As FEMA transforms to a smaller footprint, the intent for this hurricane season is not well understood, thus FEMA is not ready." A Department of Homeland Security official told CBS News in response that FEMA is "fully activated in preparation for Hurricane Season," and described the assessment as "one line in a nineteen-page slide deck and the unsubstantiated opinion of one official inside the agency." The presentation also cited "culture issues," staffing shortages and problems coordinating with other federal agencies among the issues it was contending with. President Trump, who has been critical of how the agency responded to past disasters, has suggested transforming it into a "support agency" that largely defers to the states or scrapping FEMA entirely. Richardson has been FEMA's acting administrator for less than two weeks, replacing the agency's former acting head, Cameron Hamilton, who was fired by the Trump administration after he told lawmakers he doesn't believe eliminating FEMA is in the country's "best interests." Nicole Sganga Nicole Sganga is CBS News' homeland security and justice correspondent. She is based in Washington, D.C. and reports for all shows and platforms. contributed to this report.
WIRED
21-05-2025
- Politics
- WIRED
FEMA Has Canceled Its Four-Year Strategic Plan Ahead of Hurricane Season
Molly Taft Vittoria Elliott May 21, 2025 3:44 PM Multiple FEMA employees tell WIRED that they did not know of another time when a strategic plan was rescinded without another in place. Photograph:Less than two weeks before the start of hurricane season, the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) rescinded the agency's strategic plan, which includes a document that guides agency priorities when responding to disasters, WIRED has learned. A new plan has yet to be put into place. In a memo sent to FEMA employees on Wednesday, acting FEMA administrator David Richardson wrote, 'The 2022-2026 FEMA Strategic Plan is hereby rescinded. The Strategic Plan contains goals and objectives that bear no connection to FEMA accomplishing its mission. This summer, a new 2026-2030 strategy will be developed. The strategy will tie directly to FEMA executing its Mission Essential Tasks.' The four-year plan, which was issued in 2022 under then-Administrator Deanne Criswell, is not a procedural plan for specific disasters, but rather a guiding document for the agency's objectives and priorities. A link to the plan on FEMA's website returned an error message on Wednesday, and has not been live since January 2025, according to Wayback Machine. Multiple FEMA employees say that they did not know of another time when a strategic plan had been rescinded without another in place. 'We are huge planners,' one employee said. 'Things like the strategic plan have big downstream effects, even if it's not immediate operationally.' FEMA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The plan lists goals and objectives for the agency: to 'instill equity as a foundation of emergency management,' to 'lead whole of community in climate resilience,' and to 'promote and sustain a ready FEMA and prepared nation.' Two FEMA employees, who spoke anonymously to WIRED because they had not been granted permission to speak to the press, expressed surprise that the document had not been rescinded earlier due to its emphasis on equity. For some staff, rescinding this memo is a small step in the large-scale assault on the last administration's priorities. The strategic plan is 'primarily symbolic,' says one employee. 'There are very real changes that have been made that touch on [equity and climate change] that are more important than the document itself." But others worry about the overall direction of the agency without these guiding principles. 'It's our guiding star,' says another worker. 'We use this to decide agency priorities and pathways to achieve them. Without it, we're adrift. It's clear that the person steering the agency, Richardson, is here to take it apart, one piece at a time.' One FEMA employee who asked to remain anonymous as they are not authorized to speak to the press worries that rescinding the strategic plan would 'make the agency so inept that the states or tribes have no option but to assume operations and responsibilities' themselves. 'The lack of a [strategic] plan has much bigger implications for preparedness, training, exercises, and capacity building for state and local government,' says another FEMA employee. 'The move to rescind the plan is 'especially dire since the administration wants to push more onto the states.' The Trump administration has already sought to push more responsibility for disaster response to states and local communities. 'I say you don't need FEMA, you need a good state government," President Donald Trump said at a press conference in Los Angeles following the city's fires in January. FEMA employees are also concerned that the agency is not prepared for the upcoming disaster agency has made several moves to hamper mitigation strategies and downplay the impacts of climate change, including halting a program that pulled as much as $3.6 billion in funding for communities to build resilience against future disasters. FEMA has also made changes as to how it plans to respond to disasters on the ground, including ending its longstanding practice of door-to-door canvassing of survivors, WIRED reported earlier this month. The rescinding of the agency's strategic plan comes under a broader FEMA shakeup under Richardson, who abruptly took over after former acting administrator Cameron Hamilton was fired following his testimony before lawmakers earlier this month where he advocated for preserving the agency. Richardson, a former Marine who previously served as the Assistant Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security's Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, has no emergency management experience. 'Voldemort claimed in his initial town hall meeting that he will have a plan by May 30,' says a FEMA employee. 'Voldemort,' workers say, is one of several nicknames for Richardson among agency staff. In the weeks since he joined the agency, Richardson has held two all-staff town halls where he has shared plans for upcoming changes to FEMA. In his first town hall, Richardson emphasized the need for the agency to make sure 'that we are only doing the things that are within the law' and to 'carry out President Trump's intent' for the agency. 'Doing things outside of our mission can be very tragic,' he said, according to audio reviewed by WIRED. 'I have friends who are either dead physically or very damaged emotionally because they ran into trouble doing things that were not within their mission during combat.'
Fast Company
12-05-2025
- Politics
- Fast Company
FEMA reduces emergency training before a brutal hurricane season
The U.S. federal disaster agency FEMA has sharply reduced training for state and local emergency managers ahead of the start of the hurricane season on June 1, according to current and former officials, memos seen by Reuters, and three sources familiar with the situation. The training cutbacks could leave storm-prone communities less prepared to handle the often devastating aftermath of hurricanes, the sources and some of the current and former officials warned. Leading forecasters predict a busier-than-average Atlantic hurricane season this year, with 17 named tropical storms, including nine hurricanes. If state directors and local emergency managers are not briefed on the federal government's latest tools and resources, it will impact their ability to prepare for and warn communities of impending storms, said Deanne Criswell, who headed FEMA during President Joe Biden's administration. Some 2,000 FEMA employees – or about a third of full-time staff – have been fired or accepted incentives to quit since President Donald Trump took office in January and declared that the agency should be abolished and its functions handed over to the states. Last week, Trump fired FEMA's acting chief, Cameron Hamilton, a day after Hamilton told lawmakers that the agency should be preserved. Hamilton's successor, David Richardson, told FEMA employees on Friday that he would 'run right over' any staff opposed to his implementation of Trump's vision for a smaller agency. Online training FEMA's National Hurricane Program and the National Hurricane Center typically conduct in-person workshops and presentations for state and local emergency officials each spring to help them prepare for hurricane season. These training sessions are used to share the latest data on hurricane modeling, build relationships between local, state and FEMA officials to improve coordination on disaster preparedness and relief, and review evacuation routes and other planning measures. Relationship building is critical for coordination in the event of a storm, according to three emergency managers and experts. Some planned hurricane training sessions and workshops have been moved online. FEMA, which is overseen by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, confirmed the training cutbacks in a statement to Reuters. 'At the direction of President Trump and Secretary Noem, we're done offering duplicate trainings that promote waste, fraud and abuse and that are not a good use of American taxpayers,' the statement said. 'The National Hurricane Program continues to deliver readiness trainings ahead of the 2025 Hurricane Season to emergency managers nationwide with virtual trainings.' Steve Still, the emergency manager for New Hanover County, a hurricane hotspot on North Carolina's Atlantic Coast, said online training, while useful, was less effective than in-person events. 'If there's any practical applications or exercises, you need in-person training,' Still said. Despite the reduced training, emergency management officials in North Carolina and Louisiana – states regularly battered by hurricanes – told Reuters they have FEMA-certified trainers on staff who can lead in-person disaster training. 'FEMA courses have continued as planned in the state without issue,' said Justin J. Graney, a spokesman for North Carolina Emergency Management. Travel restrictions Since February 5, FEMA staff have been barred from travel unrelated to disaster deployment and other limited purposes. Since early March, staff must have their speaking engagements and presentation materials approved by the Office of External Affairs and Office of Chief Counsel, according to two internal memos seen by Reuters. Few speaking requests have been approved, leading the National Hurricane Program to cancel some trainings for emergency managers in storm-prone areas or move them online, according to a source familiar with the situation. Organizers of April's National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans canceled several FEMA-led sessions – including one aimed at helping emergency managers make evacuation decisions during hurricanes – after FEMA staff dropped out due to the travel restrictions, said John Wilson, chairman of the conference. Wilson said the director of the National Hurricane Center usually speaks at the conference about lessons learned from past hurricane season and shares forecasting model updates, but did not this year. 'It was kind of bizarre to have a National Hurricane Conference without the National Hurricane Center director opening it up,' Wilson said. NHC Director Michael Brennan said in a statement that he did not attend the conference due to travel restrictions but noted that the center recently organized a virtual course with 500 participants. He said the NHC's 'dialogue with partners continues and remains unchanged.' Concerns Lynn Budd, president of the National Emergency Management Association, an organization of state emergency managers, and director of the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security, said states need more time and resources if they are expected to make up for cuts to FEMA staff and activities. 'There is room to reduce the footprint of FEMA in their regular deployment activities, but there is also expertise provided by FEMA for state and local jurisdictions that the states simply don't have at this time,' Budd said. NEMA would not comment specifically on the reduced trainings. The lack of training sessions at disaster preparedness conferences leaves state and local emergency managers more vulnerable to inaccurate or inadequate advice ahead of the storm season, said Bryan Koon, the former head of Florida's Division of Emergency Management who now heads a disaster preparedness consultancy. 'These conferences are really important, because lots of FEMA trainings are normally done at them,' Koon said. 'That's one of the critical things – new information is released to state and local emergency managers.' If local emergency managers are not trained in new forecasting models, for example, then there might be critical information the public won't get ahead of a hurricane, Koon said.
Yahoo
11-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Exclusive-FEMA cuts emergency training as hurricane season looms
By Leah Douglas, Tim Reid, Nichola Groom, Nathan Layne WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. federal disaster agency FEMA has sharply reduced training for state and local emergency managers ahead of the start of the hurricane season on June 1, according to current and former officials, memos seen by Reuters, and three sources familiar with the situation. The training cutbacks could leave storm-prone communities less prepared to handle the often devastating aftermath of hurricanes, the sources and some of the current and former officials warned. Leading forecasters predict a busier-than-average Atlantic hurricane season this year, with 17 named tropical storms, including nine hurricanes. If state directors and local emergency managers are not briefed on the federal government's latest tools and resources, it will impact their ability to prepare for and warn communities of impending storms, said Deanne Criswell, who headed FEMA during President Joe Biden's administration. Some 2,000 FEMA employees - or about a third of full-time staff - have been fired or accepted incentives to quit since President Donald Trump took office in January and declared that the agency should be abolished and its functions handed over to the states. Last week, Trump fired FEMA's acting chief, Cameron Hamilton, a day after Hamilton told lawmakers that the agency should be preserved. Hamilton's successor, David Richardson, told FEMA employees on Friday that he would "run right over" any staff opposed to his implementation of Trump's vision for a smaller agency. ONLINE TRAINING FEMA's National Hurricane Program and the National Hurricane Center typically conduct in-person workshops and presentations for state and local emergency officials each spring to help them prepare for hurricane season. These training sessions are used to share the latest data on hurricane modeling, build relationships between local, state and FEMA officials to improve coordination on disaster preparedness and relief, and review evacuation routes and other planning measures. Relationship building is critical for coordination in the event of a storm, according to three emergency managers and experts. Some planned hurricane training sessions and workshops have been moved online. FEMA, which is overseen by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, confirmed the training cutbacks in a statement to Reuters. "At the direction of President Trump and Secretary Noem, we're done offering duplicate trainings that promote waste, fraud and abuse and that are not a good use of American taxpayers," the statement said. "The National Hurricane Program continues to deliver readiness trainings ahead of the 2025 Hurricane Season to emergency managers nationwide with virtual trainings." Steve Still, the emergency manager for New Hanover County, a hurricane hotspot on North Carolina's Atlantic Coast, said online training, while useful, was less effective than in-person events. "If there's any practical applications or exercises, you need in-person training," Still said. Despite the reduced training, emergency management officials in North Carolina and Louisiana - states regularly battered by hurricanes - told Reuters they have FEMA-certified trainers on staff who can lead in-person disaster training. "FEMA courses have continued as planned in the state without issue," said Justin J. Graney, a spokesman for North Carolina Emergency Management. TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS Since February 5, FEMA staff have been barred from travel unrelated to disaster deployment and other limited purposes. Since early March, staff must have their speaking engagements and presentation materials approved by the Office of External Affairs and Office of Chief Counsel, according to two internal memos seen by Reuters. Few speaking requests have been approved, leading the National Hurricane Program to cancel some trainings for emergency managers in storm-prone areas or move them online, according to a source familiar with the situation. Organizers of April's National Hurricane Conference in New Orleans canceled several FEMA-led sessions - including one aimed at helping emergency managers make evacuation decisions during hurricanes - after FEMA staff dropped out due to the travel restrictions, said John Wilson, chairman of the conference. Wilson said the director of the National Hurricane Center usually speaks at the conference about lessons learned from past hurricane season and shares forecasting model updates, but did not this year. "It was kind of bizarre to have a National Hurricane Conference without the National Hurricane Center director opening it up," Wilson said. NHC Director Michael Brennan said in a statement that he did not attend the conference due to travel restrictions but noted that the center recently organized a virtual course with 500 participants. He said the NHC's "dialogue with partners continues and remains unchanged." CONCERNS Lynn Budd, president of the National Emergency Management Association, an organization of state emergency managers, and director of the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security, said states need more time and resources if they are expected to make up for cuts to FEMA staff and activities. "There is room to reduce the footprint of FEMA in their regular deployment activities, but there is also expertise provided by FEMA for state and local jurisdictions that the states simply don't have at this time," Budd said. NEMA would not comment specifically on the reduced trainings. The lack of training sessions at disaster preparedness conferences leaves state and local emergency managers more vulnerable to inaccurate or inadequate advice ahead of the storm season, said Bryan Koon, the former head of Florida's Division of Emergency Management who now heads a disaster preparedness consultancy. "These conferences are really important, because lots of FEMA trainings are normally done at them," Koon said. "That's one of the critical things – new information is released to state and local emergency managers." If local emergency managers are not trained in new forecasting models, for example, then there might be critical information the public won't get ahead of a hurricane, Koon said.
