Disasters Leading to FEMA Staffing Shortages, Hinders Mission Success
Last week, government oversight and former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) officials testified before a congressional panel regarding agency bandwidth and inadequate workforce training, despite significant hiring efforts. As apprehensions continue regarding the agency’s increasing responsibilities and the volume of natural disasters, officials site a high turnover rate and lack of benefits as a source of operation failures.
Craig Fugate, Former FEMA Administrator; Chris Currie, Director of the Homeland Security and Justice Team at the Government Accountability Office (GAO); and Carra Sims, Senior Behavioral and Social Scientist at The RAND Corporation testified before the House Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response, and the Subcommittee on Recovery and Oversight, Management, & Accountability.
Within the last five years, FEMA has grown its overall workforce by around 5,000 employees, an increase of almost 30 percent. This increase accounts mostly for crisis-activated reservists, temporary and non-career staff; the agency's permanent, full-time workforce, however, has remained stable. Witnesses at the hearing reported FEMA has added more non-career staffers to its ranks, but they are undertrained and face challenging deployments.
“They are not incentivized when they’re not deployed. That model doesn’t scale up with the frequency of disasters, nor does it work very well when the economy is strong because of the shortfall of employees,” Fugate concurred.
As Currie pointed out, each disaster FEMA responds to only adds to the agency's backlog of work, as FEMA is currently managing more than 1,000 incidents.
“The workforce is suffering from an increase in burnout and in recent years significantly more employees have left the agency than usual. The workforce structure has not been transformed and evolved to fit what we’re asking them to do right now. It is absolutely critical that FEMA address these rising attrition rates, and prioritize the needs of its people,” stated Currie.
FEMA employees have previously raised the issue about insufficient respite between deployments pushing the agency to relieve employees from pandemic-related assignments before hurricane season. This recovery period was short-lived, however, as President Biden deployed FEMA employees to assist states with the surge in COVID-19 cases.
As the frequency and costs of natural disasters have increased, and FEMA supports numerous efforts outside of its normal responsibilities, Currie is concerned that FEMA personnel may not be prepared to handle future natural disasters.
