Derrick Hiebert had planned to stick it out at FEMA. He was an assistant administrator working on hazard mitigation—he specialized in getting communities prepared for disasters—and like many emergency-management experts I’ve spoken with, he thinks that the American approach to administering disasters needed an overhaul, even a radical one. The systems had gotten “clunky over time,” he said. Something needed to change. So Hiebert was open to seeing how President Donald Trump might change it.
Then the Trump administration canceled a major grant-making program that helped states and towns build infrastructure to weather future storms and fires—a core mission of Hiebert’s department. (Last month, a judge temporarily blocked the administration from reallocating its funds.) Some FEMA leaders had been fired, and contract renewals for a substantial number of his on-the-ground employees were in jeopardy. Doing his job would only get harder, if not impossible, he thought. Hiebert also found out his wife was expecting twins. They already had two children, and suddenly the risk that his own role or perhaps his whole agency could be erased at any time looked more personally threatening. “If something happened and I were fired, with twins we would be destitute,” he told me. He left FEMA in June and took a job in disaster contracting, at AECOM, a main player in the sector.
The AECOM job paid better, Hiebert told me, but more attractive was its security. Whatever FEMA’s exact fate under Trump, disasters will still happen. Since many states lack their own cadre of emergency-management expertise or manpower, they will likely pay private contractors to step in where the federal government has stepped out. And many will be staffed by former federal employees.
Right now, the federal government’s expertise in disasters is essentially transferring to private companies. Hiebert estimates that between one-third and one-half of his colleagues in FEMA hazard-mitigation leadership have taken private-sector jobs, or will soon. Marion McFadden, who oversaw disaster grants at the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Biden administration, told me that many of the HUD executives she worked with are moving to the private sector. She herself is now a vice president at the emergency-management contractor IEM, and knows of multiple contractors who have been preparing for an influx of business by hiring disaster-readiness corps. These would be “the exact same people who formerly worked directly for FEMA,” she said.
The path from government emergency management to disaster consulting is well trod: Former FEMA administrators and state emergency-management heads have gone on to lead consulting firms, and companies such as AECOM and IEM stock their ranks with former government employees. But the disaster managers and experts I spoke with said the current exodus from the public to the private sector is unique in its scope. “It’s a period like I’ve never seen before in the opportunity to hire experienced folks,” Bryan Koon, the CEO of IEM, told me.
The Trump administration says its aim in shrinking or possibly dissolving FEMA is to push more responsibility for disasters onto the states. This strategy is an inversion of what led President Jimmy Carter to create the agency in 1979: Governors, frustrated by the lack of a coordinating agency for disasters, requested it. Having 50 state agencies ready to respond to relatively rare catastrophes is inefficient; a federal disaster agency would have the advantages of standardized protocols, experience, and staff who can be deployed where needed. Now they may be largely on their own again. And most states, lacking their own cadre of expertise or manpower, will need support to fill in the gaps left by the federal government. States might lean on each other more than they already do, but they will surely also turn more to private contractors, many of which will now be staffed by former federal employees.
Private contractors already play a significant role in disaster recovery. A storm victim arriving at a disaster-recovery center might speak with a private consultant working alongside federal, state, or nonprofit personnel. Contractors are regularly hired to clear debris, do welfare checks, and complete damage assessments. Sometimes FEMA hires contractors directly, but states and cities hire them too—often to help make sense of the labyrinthine financial-assistance process for disasters.
This, many experts both in and outside of government agree, is part of the problem that needs fixing. Grants for recovery come from “30 different federal-government agencies that fund 91 different recovery programs,” Brock Long, a former head of FEMA under the first Trump administration, told me. Long works in private disaster contracting now too, as the executive chairman of Hagerty Consulting, and he said that, after getting billions of dollars promised by the federal government, “most local leaders look like deer in a headlights”—they “have no idea what they’re entitled to, how to seek the money, or use it within all of the rules and stipulations.” That’s where firms like his come in. The grant process also often involves lawyers, and years-long fights in which states try to recoup disaster funds from the feds. “Right now it takes a team of lawyers to get a claim through. That’s why I have a job. It’s insane,” Danielle Aymond, a lawyer at the firm Baker Donelson and former executive counsel for Louisiana’s emergency-management office, told me.
Fundamentally, the disaster consultants I spoke with felt that they were helping people at some of their worst moments. They tended to view their private-sector work as akin to the work they did in government: “A lot of us still see ourselves as public servants,” Hiebert said.
Still, for-profit companies can come with their own complications. Horne LLP, a consulting company awarded an $81 million contract this year to work on North Carolina’s Hurricane Helene recovery, was recently barred from receiving government contracts in West Virginia for “wanton indifference” to public interest after prosecutors alleged that the company falsified applicant information and filed fake invoices while working for the federal government. (The company denied wrongdoing and settled.) Federal-government auditors eventually found that, in Texas, after Hurricanes Dolly and Ike, disaster consultants were charging exorbitant rates for their services. In Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, the government spent nearly $9 billion on contracts later understood to be plagued by “waste, fraud, mismanagement, or abuse.”
Already, finding out what governments do with the money they get for disaster response is difficult, Madison Sloan, a lawyer who directs a disaster-recovery project at Texas Appleseed, an advocacy organization, told me; she worries that adding in more contractors would make tracking spending impossible. Plus, unshackled from federal civil-rights obligations, states may not work as hard to distribute assistance equitably, DeeDee Bennett Gayle, the chair of the University at Albany’s emergency-management department, told me. “The challenges that existed before will likely increase.” The Trump administration has done away, for example, with civil rights and fair-housing obligations previously required for recipients of post-disaster housing grants from a major HUD program. In the absence of such restrictions, “some states are going to create rules that unfairly treat certain groups,” Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Urban Institute, told me. And however good their intentions, contractors will be working for the state. “They don’t have a public-good mission. They’re doing the work that they’re contracted for,” he said.
Many emergency-management experts do agree that more of the burden of disaster risk needs to shift back onto states; FEMA, as it stands now, is trying to do too much. How exactly the Trump administration will reform the agency is still unclear: Trump has said he will end FEMA, but his administration also recently announced it is getting the agency “back on track.” Its employees and former administrators beg to differ: Last week, just before the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall, almost 200 FEMA employees signed a letter warning Congress that the agency was at risk of another failure on the same order. Jennifer Forester, a FEMA employee who signed her name to the letter and was, along with her fellow signatories, subsequently put on leave, told me that, although private companies are part of the mix of disaster response, they are no replacement for government, which “is not and should not be motivated by meeting a bottom line,” she said. The president’s FEMA-review council is supposed to make recommendations about the agency’s fate by November. “FEMA’s outsized role created a bloated bureaucracy that disincentivized state investment in their own resilience,” the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in a statement; the review council’s recommendations would help ensure the agency’s work “remains supplemental and appropriate to the scale of disaster.” A FEMA spokesperson said in a statement that the council would “strengthen how assistance is delivered.”
One very real possibility is that the country will simply spend less on disaster preparation and recovery in the years to come. Koon, the IEM executive, is hiring some departing FEMA folks, but told me uncertainty over how or whether the Trump administration will fund states’ disaster recoveries has kept him from hiring more. Disasters will keep getting worse and more frequent, “so there’s plenty of work that will need to be done,” he said. But without FEMA and other federal agencies to step in when their budgets fall short, state and local leaders will ask themselves whether they can afford to or whether they wish to offer the full suite of disaster work that the federal government once did. Financial assistance, housing assistance, and disaster-care management may shrink, Koon said. So his contracts may too.
At present, most states maintain a rainy-day fund, but few have enough saved to manage a disaster. Small states can be overwhelmed by a disaster that leaves a few million dollars’s worth of damage; Eric Forand, the director of Vermont’s division of emergency management, told me that damage from flooding in 2023 ran to $600 million statewide. Floods have pummeled the state every summer since: This year, flooding in Sutton, home to fewer than 1,000 people, ran to 25 times the town’s annual road budget, he said. The state has pre-disaster agreements with some private contractors but, depending on what happens to FEMA, could need to lean on the private sector more. “We can’t increase and decrease the size of our permanent staff” as disasters come and go, Forand said.
As summer floods increase with climate change, Vermont has been working toward altering its budget so it can manage more of its smaller disasters on its own. But private contracting is expensive, and no matter how the state contorts itself, “there will always be a place for FEMA and the federal government for large disasters,” Forand told me. The cost and personnel demands of a major disaster will always far outstrip Vermont’s capacity to pay for and staff one, as they would outstrip the capacity of many states. Disaster recovery in every state is already a long, hard, imperfect road. If FEMA stops stepping in after catastrophic events, Hiebert told me, “I think you’d see a lot of places that would just never recover.” Disaster contractors will undoubtedly step in more, but only as much as a state can pay.
