FEMA Forces Furloughed Following Protest Letter

Distress call from Emergency workers, just in time for the heart of hurricane season.

The emergency response specialists had signed a letter warning about a “Katrina level” disaster if changes were not made in FEMA management.

I’m sure things will be fine.

Washington Post:

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.”

Last month, the administration put nearly 140 EPA employees on leaveafter 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 demanded 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.

ABC News:

Thirty-five signed their names while 141 signed anonymously for fear of retribution. 

The Associated Press has confirmed that at least two of the signatories received notices Tuesday evening informing them they would be placed on leave indefinitely, with pay and that they must still check in every morning confirming their availability. It was unclear what the status was for other signatories.

The notice said the decision “is not a disciplinary action and is not intended to be punitive.” 

FEMA did not respond immediately to questions about how many staff received the notice and whether it was related to the opposition letter. 

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I wrote about this potential disfunction a year ago, anticipating Project 2025 cuts to emergency agencies, which have now come to pass.

Peter Sinclair in the Midland Daily News:

In more recent American history, the worst hurricane disaster was without doubt Hurricane Katrina,  which claimed, by various accounts, up to 1800 lives.

This occurred, of course, in the satellite era – and weather models gave plenty of warning that a major hurricane was about to strike. 

What proved deadly for New Orleans was the bungled and mishandled response to the storm by the Federal Emergency Management Agency – FEMA.

In subsequent investigations, FEMA Director Michael Brown came in for considerable criticism.

Reporters found that, prior to his FEMA service, Brown’s primary professional qualification was as director of an Arabian Horse Association.  He gained his FEMA position not due to qualifications or expertise, but rather because he had been a faithful Republican operative and had a close friend in President George “Dubya” Bush’s White House.

Bush himself came off as inadequate to the challenge with his flyover approach to emergency management, and his congratulatory “Heck of a job, Brownie” assessment of Brown’s performance.

One of the most frightening proposals in Project 2025 is to turbocharge the process that placed “Brownie” in a position to maximize a catastrophe.

The so-called “Schedule F” provision would remove Civil Service protections from hundreds of thousands of government employees – professionals with highly specialized skills and irreplaceable experience. Engineers, scientists, lawyers, researchers, physicians, military and intelligence professionals would no longer be evaluated on the basis of background or merit. 

Instead, at least 50 thousand, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, could be summarily dismissed, and replaced with operatives qualified only for their loyalty, not to the Constitution of the American people, but to one man – Donald Trump.

That means professionals who keep track of the purity of our water and air, the safety of food, the spread of disease, the education of our children, whether a window might blow out of an airliner, even our very security as a nation, would be replaced by political hacks, rather than qualified experts.

The current iteration of the Republican party seems to believe, unfortunately, that there is no such thing as real “expertise” that can’t be gained in an afternoon on Facebook, and that, since, in their estimation, government really doesn’t do anything, why should actual knowledge and experience matter?

Imagine 50,000, or 100,000 “Brownies” in Federal Agencies.