A FEMA response team member in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina in 2024. (Sean Rayford/Getty Images)
Across the country, hundreds of Federal Emergency Management Agency responders have been grounded -- unable to work on ongoing recoveries, move to and from disaster sites or fly home for personal emergencies -- amid the Department of Homeland Security's partial shutdown. The restrictions have already stymied relief efforts in remote villages in Alaska and rural Tennessee, even as DHS has allowed some FEMA staffers to deploy for immigration-related work, according to four agency officials and documents seen by The Washington Post.
Nearly 20 current and former FEMA officials, along with an emergency management expert, called the travel restrictions imposed in response to the Trump administration's budget stalemate with Democrats over Immigration and Custom Enforcement's operations highly unusual, especially because FEMA has a separate bucket of money, known as the Disaster Relief Fund, to use even if DHS does not have a budget in place.
As of last Thursday, FEMA reported to Congress that the fund has nearly $10 billion allotted, according to a person familiar with the matter. FEMA is still paying staff to work on ongoing recovery projects, but dozens of employees have been benched and hundreds cannot travel home after their deployments have ended, according to interviews with 11 officials stationed at headquarters and across the country.
Some staff have also been unable to travel home from their deployments or for other urgent situations, including the birth of a grandchild or because a family member is in the hospital -- stuck in hotels paid for by the government.
Officials from DHS and FEMA did not immediately respond to a list of questions sent Thursday about why officials have restricted work paid for by the fund, and about how they are determining what travel to approve.
Many mitigation and public infrastructure rebuilding projects are now frozen. Recovery teams across the country have been told not to talk to the state and local departments they help with complex building repairs and environmental reviews unless Secretary Kristi L. Noem and other department leaders decide the work is urgent and mission critical.
The current and former officials interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution and because they were not authorized to share information about the new policies.
"This level of directed work stoppage is unprecedented," a senior official said. "This has never happened in prior shutdowns" even when the disaster fund has run low, "we've never come to a full stop like this."
The disaster relief fund is FEMA's primary source of funding for disaster response and recovery operations, and it covers a wide range of expenses: employees' salaries, travel costs, emergency contracts and direct assistance to survivors. The fund is structured to ensure disaster operations can continue during shutdowns -- though it still depends on congressional appropriations to remain solvent over time.
The guidance for how to navigate DHS's restrictive and sweeping policies during the shutdown has been confusing, inconsistent and can change by the day, eight agency officials said, leading to frustration as different parts of the FEMA scramble to navigate who can work on what, or who can travel to and from disaster sites. Hardly any of the guidance is in writing, the officials added.
Team leaders within the agency now have to write up memos justifying every employee's travel and then wait for DHS to approve it -- and the department is not signing off on many of those, according to an official with knowledge of the situation. Nearly two dozen of those requests are for urgent reasons, prompting top officials to send requests to Karen Evans, FEMA's interim leader, so she can get them in front of Noem.
That includes ongoing recovery efforts in towns in Indiana, New Hampshire, Michigan and Alaska that sustained severe damage from floods last spring and fall, as well as for past disasters such as hurricanes Helene and Milton.
Take the remnants of a typhoon that walloped parts of Alaska last October: FEMA disaster response teams are still there, shuttling back and forth most days between the remote city of Bethel, where they have been staying, to even more off-the-grid indigenous and Native American villages to assess whether residents are eligible for federal aid, and to help them get back online. The group has been stuck in Bethel since Friday, an agency official said, unable to continue reviewing survivors' needs because they don't have approval to move.
"To what end are we doing this?" the official asked. "You are ultimately hurting the communities, the disaster survivors. The assistance they are eligible for, they can't get it as fast now."
In Tennessee, teams have been waiting for a week for an employee from the regional office to arrive for Helene recovery efforts, but the worker still hasn't made it. Instead, the government is paying that staffer "hundreds of dollars a day to sit on their hands and make work," one official in that region said, adding that "there are more employees who are supposed to help with winter storm recovery that still aren't here for the same reason."
At another disaster site in the Midwest, one staffer needed to suddenly fly home for an urgent family medical situation and couldn't without Noem's approval. They eventually purchased their own ticket, which DHS approved a few hours later; an official with knowledge of the situation said some people are afraid DHS will fire them if they do travel "home on their own dime for an urgent emergency."
DHS did approve FEMA to send about 50 employees to Mississippi after the state experienced a devastating ice storm last month, the official with knowledge of the situation said.
At the same time, some employees assigned by DHS for immigration tasks, such as recruitment, processing new hires and overseeing Department of Defense civilians who are volunteering for Immigration and Customs and Border Patrol, are still allowed to work remotely and travel for their deployments, according to documents reviewed by The Post and two people familiar with the situation. Those immigration missions have been deemed as essential, life saving and "excepted which means hiring and enforcement operations can continue," according to an agency official; details corroborated by documents reviewed by The Post.
Over the weekend, DHS signed off within 24 hours on several deployments for FEMA employees who have been working on immigration efforts, such as helping to coordinate a volunteer force of Department of Defense civilians who are training to join ICE. Other staffers who have been doing administrative immigration tasks are still working remotely during the shutdown.
DHS approved those requests "real quick," that official said, so people assigned to "ICE and CBP locations can keep doing that work."
Disaster recovery work can span years, costing millions of dollars and requiring substantial coordination between FEMA and state/local leaders. Stopping that ongoing work has ripple effects; prolongs people's ability to have their homes inspected keeping families who are still living in temporary housing displaced for even longer several current officials said.
As the confusion continues, one agency official warned that if what is called a "no-notice" catastrophe -- such as the Texas floods last July -- were to occur and quickly become devastating, FEMA would have to do an "insanely bureaucratic paperwork drill" and ask DHS to approve all that travel. To get ahead of that, some response and recovery leaders asked Evans to intervene and request that Noem pass a policy that would enable FEMA to move without limitations if some kind of earthquake, flood or wildfire were to erupt somewhere, the official said.
"No dice," they sighed. "This means there will absolutely be a delay if or when disaster strikes."