Overview: The cuts at the Federal Emergency Management Agency could affect people across the country who are struggling to rebuild and prepare for disasters.

The mass firings started over Presidents’ Day weekend, part of what federal employees in text groups and online forums called the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,” which has created chaos across the federal government. Supervisors warned their workers to quickly pull their documents off websites and email them to personal accounts so they’d have copies, messages seen by The Washington Post show. Employees logging into internal systems could no longer see team profiles, which are usually readily accessible.

“Under President [Donald] Trump’s leadership, we are making sweeping cuts and reform across the federal government to eliminate egregious waste and incompetence that has been happening for decades at the expense of the American taxpayer,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, in a statement. “We are actively identifying other wasteful positions and offices that do not fulfill DHS’ mission.”

For FEMA, which operates with about 25,000 people, the cuts will affect disaster victims seeking individual assistance funds, rural and tribal communities trying to bolster their infrastructure, and towns trying to obtain large grants to help them rebuild, according to nine current and former FEMA officials, who like others interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation.

Critics of FEMA have long called for a better, less-complicated disaster response system, pointing out that the agency often is tasked with doing too much, which hinders its ability to respond swiftly and efficiently.

In a letter earlier this month, Sen. James Lankford (R-Oklahoma) commended Trump’s efforts to review and reform the agency’s operations. He said that FEMA has too many responsibilities and agencies under its framework and that the federal government’s role should be diminished.

“The federal government’s labyrinthine disaster response and recovery programs have not been subject to the scrutiny needed to assess whether it is achieving its goals or whether its funding would be better spent with limited strings attached at the state and local levels,” he wrote, adding that Trump’s newly established FEMA review council should get feedback from “leaders with substantial knowledge of disaster recovery efforts.”

While the losses have been hard to track given FEMA’s various staffing sources and layers, agency officials have estimated they’ll be short about 1,000 employees because of the terminations and the deferred resignation program put in place by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service.

Agency staff members say it’s been hard to learn why the Trump administration is firing their colleagues. People have been combing LinkedIn and Reddit posts, passing along information in group chats and checking their daily situation reports to determine what their workforce now looks like.

Two current officials said that the Office of Personnel Management, the federal human resources agency, has been heavily involved in making the calls and giving lists to each office with the names of people to terminate.

FEMA is actively responding to more than 100 disasters and emergencies across the United States, including hurricanes Milton and Helene and the historic fires in Los Angeles. Each event requires scores of workers and contractors who coordinate disaster response, oversee debris removal, and instruct local and tribal authorities in the grant application and disbursement process, as well as helping communities understand what FEMA does. With billion-dollar disasters now the norm, more FEMA employees have been responding to disasters for sometimes 60 days at a time.

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Nearly every FEMA employee can respond to a disaster if the need is great enough. When hurricanes Helene and Milton hit the Southeast back-to-back in the fall, FEMA officials said, they had to pull staff from other disasters to support the immediate needs of millions of people in North Carolina, Florida and other states. Few workers were left in the agency’s reserves, and FEMA had to hire more people. As a result, the officials continued, losing hundreds of workers is likely to hinder the agency’s ability to handle multiple simultaneous catastrophes while processing tens of thousands of cases.

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The cuts also targeted entire teams and contractors. One seven-person unit within the agency’s Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program focused solely on helping small, lower-income communities secure grants for large disaster mitigation and prevention projects. FEMA created the initiative a few years ago because it realized that tribal and rural areas were falling through the cracks. The team helped places such as Crisfield, Maryland, by bolstering the small seaside town’s ability to handle increasingly devastating flooding.

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