when president donald trump took office in january of last year, nick shufro was a senior executive at the federal emergency management agency (fema), managing 125 people, 30 programs, and an $800 million annual budget. today, over a year later, nearly half of shufro’s employees are no longer with fema, the majority of his programs were cut, and shufro himself took an early retirement to save a colleague’s position within the agency.

shufro, a former deputy assistant administrator who worked at fema for nine years, left the agency in may 2025. since trump took office for the second time, his administration has cut thousands of employees and eliminated pre-disaster mitigation programs — all changes which, according to shufro, threaten the institutional knowledge that once supported the agency.

when i sat down with shufro, he seemed to be enjoying his semi-retirement from florida — “i peleton, i bike, i swim,” he said — but the warning he left was harrowing: while americans might not feel the impact of the fema cuts today, the impacts could be devastating.

the interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

jacob khabie: tell me about the trump administration’s cuts to fema. what specifically has been cut?

nick shufro: if you think of fema’s mission as helping people before, during, and after disasters, the work that my directorate did was focused on the before. my team had 250 people, and we were scheduled to go up to about 450 people. our budget was about $800 million a year, and i ran approximately 30 programs.

in the second trump administration, the 250 positions that were authorized and not filled, we were not allowed to move on with. in headquarters, i had about 60 people take one of the deferred resignation program packages, or their jobs were cut. of the 30 programs that i had, 28 programs endured significant cuts or were eliminated.

jk: wow.

ns: there is the cutting of programs, the reduction in available funding, and a number of contracts and task orders were not awarded. money that was authorized by congress was not allowed to be spent.

jk: how do all these cuts affect fema’s ability to operate in a crisis?

ns: you may not see a cut today have an impact on people tomorrow, but what you’re seeing is, if
you’re playing on a team that normally has nine or 11 players, and you’ve got four playing, then
you’re just not as effective.

jk: how do these cuts impact the average american?

ns: a couple different ways. i ran a building codes division where we would go and look at homes after a storm to see which homes stood, and which ones came down, and we would figure out why. then, from those lessons learned, we would then try and advocate for stronger building codes. we’re no longer doing that.

because of the threat of not reauthorizing the national flood insurance program (nfip), theoretically, you can’t get a mortgage approved if you’re in a coastal area or in a flood zone, unless you have insurance. if you can’t have an nfip policy issued, it’s going to slow down the residential home market.

a lot of emergency preparedness information that we made available is no longer being made available. you’ll see the repercussions of the cuts over time, and they are going to have an impact on people’s ability to understand where their risk is, and their ability to make risk-informed decisions.

jk: since trump took office in 2025, and subsequent cuts to fema began, about 2,000 employees have left fema, including yourself. to your estimation, how many of these employees left willingly?

ns: i think 2,000 is an undercount, but i’ll give you an example. fema is run by 100 senior executives and politicals [sic]. maybe 20 were political appointees, so figure 80 career senior executives; about 60 had left since the inauguration. those 60 people who’ve left, that’s a tremendous amount of institutional knowledge and experience. that knowledge is gone.

the secretary of the department of homeland security was looking to cut 11,000 reservists out of the staff that, pre-inauguration, was about 29,000. it’s a pretty significant cut.

jk: you still have colleagues at fema. what are they saying about these cuts? how are these cuts impacting their ability to do their job?

ns: they don’t do their jobs anymore. task orders are not going out. people are not getting contracts. senior leadership, instead of leading the organization, are spending their time responding to memos and doing things that are not productive. people are vilified. our employees are being berated. it’s a very demoralizing place to be.

jk: can you tell me more about your decision to leave? was it related to anything you just
described?

ns: it totally was related. i was there for nine years, and i had a wonderful assistant administrator. when the second round of the deferred resignation program came out, i looked at her and said, “i stayed when the first offer was made because i wanted to protect my people and our programs. but i now know that our programs have been cut, and there’s not going to be enough work for both of us.” i’m fortunate that i could take retirement, so i said to my assistant administrator, “i will take retirement, and i will resign, and that way you, who don’t have as much time in service, can stay.”

jk: and is that assistant administrator still at fema?

ns: she is.

jk: is a lot of the stuff that you’ve been hearing about conditions at fema right now from
her?

ns: i won’t source it.

jk: earlier this year, a bipartisan bill was introduced to make fema a cabinet-level agency, streamline access to resources for disaster survivors, and incentivize states to make their own investments in mitigation.

rep. sam graves (r-mo.), who co-introduced the bill, said “we have clearly seen that fema is not working as it should for americans who’ve been impacted by disasters. congress has passed fema reforms over the years, but it simply hasn’t been enough.” do you agree with rep. graves?

ns: no.

three things have happened. first of all, fema focuses on natural disasters. in 2024, on average, there were significant disasters every 10 days. then you add in things like covid, there were about 25 different things that we managed which were not natural disasters, and we have not gotten a corresponding increase in the number of staff to support all of these additional missions.

the second thing is, there’s a lot of misinformation out there. as an example, a number of the governors said that americans were getting $750 for disasters, and migrants were getting thousands and staying in luxury hotels. that is totally erroneous information. the $750 is for immediate needs, and once a damage assessment is done, you’re entitled to additional funding, capped at $41,000. this whole rhetoric about americans only getting $750 and migrants getting thousands is totally disingenuous, and the people who were spouting that knew that.

fema is responsible for balancing being good stewards of taxpayer dollars and an emergency need to get money out as quickly as possible. there were a lot of opportunities to improve the efficiency of fema, because it needs to be reformed. fema was not perfect, and i don’t want to come across as saying it was perfect, there were opportunities to streamline the process.

jk: in your perfect world, what would those opportunities to streamline the process be? is
there a correct way to go about fema reforms?

ns: there’s a japanese process called kaizen, and it means to take apart and put back together. i think fema would have benefitted from a significant amount of kaizen events, supported by accompanying changes in legislation. we could make recommendations to improve the process, but congress has to approve those.