Fired DHS head Kristi Noem pushed to cut FEMA staff by 50%, give states bigger disaster role: docs

WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s team wanted to radically transform the Federal Emergency Management Agency by cutting its workforce in half and relocating personnel across the country, according to a draft report seen by The Post.The FEMA Review Council, a panel on which Noem served as co-chair, called for shifting the organization of emergency response to the states while having the feds take on a secondary role.“FEMA needs to be fundamentally transformed from how it exists today, and the core missions must be remade into a new, supportive agency,” read a draft of the council’s report, which remains under review by the White House and hasn’t yet been made public“‘FEMA’ as a brand and as an agency has been irreparably damaged by the last four years of mission creep and programmatic failures.”The report also called for converting FEMA’s Public Assistance (PA) program to a block grant system, where the feds would foot the bill for 50% for disaster relief costs and provide up to 75% for states deemed most effective at managing taxpayer money.Currently, FEMA is required to cover 75% of eligible disaster relief costs, though that figure can jump to 100% in extreme situations.The shift to block grants was intended to combat issues with administrative costs and bureaucratic snarls.“In total, almost 25 cents on every dollar can be provided for administrative expenses,” the report said.

“Most of these costs are expended during the grant development phase, which hinders the pace of recovery.”The report also called for privatizing parts of the National Flood Insurance Program, which has a debt load of about $20 billion, as well as expediting payments due to help recovery from disasters that happened years ago — such as 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.While that action would cost the feds more upfront, the draft report argued it would reduce costs in the long run by allowing FEMA to ditch legacy technology kept in pla...