Lower than two weeks earlier than the beginning of hurricane season, the top of the Federal Emergency Administration Company rescinded the company’s strategic plan, which features a doc that guides company priorities when responding to disasters, WIRED has realized. A brand new plan has but to be put into place.
In a memo despatched to FEMA workers on Wednesday, appearing FEMA administrator David Richardson wrote, “The 2022-2026 FEMA Strategic Plan is hereby rescinded. The Strategic Plan incorporates objectives and targets that bear no connection to FEMA undertaking its mission. This summer time, a brand new 2026-2030 technique shall be developed. The technique will tie on to FEMA executing its Mission Important Duties.”
The four-year plan, which was issued in 2022 beneath then-administrator Deanne Criswell, just isn’t a procedural plan for particular disasters, however somewhat a guiding doc for the company’s targets and priorities. A hyperlink to the plan on FEMA’s web site returned an error message on Wednesday and has not been dwell since January 2025, in response to the Wayback Machine.
A number of FEMA workers say that they didn’t know of one other time when a strategic plan had been rescinded with out one other in place. “We’re large planners,” one worker mentioned. “Issues just like the strategic plan have large downstream results, even when it’s not speedy operationally.”
FEMA didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
The plan lists objectives and targets for the company: to “instill fairness as a basis of emergency administration,” to “lead complete of neighborhood in local weather resilience,” and to “promote and maintain a prepared FEMA and ready nation.” Two FEMA workers, who spoke anonymously to WIRED as a result of they’d not been granted permission to talk to the press, expressed shock that the doc had not been rescinded earlier as a consequence of its emphasis on fairness.
For some employees, rescinding this memo is a small step within the large-scale assault on the final administration’s priorities. The strategic plan is “primarily symbolic,” says one worker. “There are very actual modifications which were made that contact on [equity and climate change] which are extra necessary than the doc itself.”
However others fear in regards to the total path of the company with out these guiding ideas.
“It’s our guiding star,” says one other employee. “We use this to determine company priorities and pathways to attain them. With out it, we’re adrift. It’s clear that the individual steering the company, Richardson, is right here to take it aside, one piece at a time.”
One FEMA worker who requested to stay nameless as they don’t seem to be licensed to talk to the press worries that rescinding the strategic plan would “make the company so inept that the states or tribes don’t have any possibility however to imagine operations and tasks” themselves.
“The dearth of a [strategic] plan has a lot greater implications for preparedness, coaching, workouts, and capability constructing for state and native authorities,” says one other FEMA worker. “The transfer to rescind the plan is “particularly dire for the reason that administration needs to push extra onto the states.”
Trump administration has already sought to push extra accountability for catastrophe response to states and native communities. “I say you do not want FEMA, you want a superb state authorities,” President Donald Trump mentioned at a press convention in Los Angeles following town’s fires in January. FEMA workers are additionally involved that the company just isn’t ready for the upcoming catastrophe season.The company has made a number of strikes to hamper mitigation methods and downplay the impacts of local weather change, together with halting a program that pulled as a lot as $3.6 billion in funding for communities to construct resilience in opposition to future disasters. FEMA has additionally made modifications as to the way it plans to answer disasters on the bottom, together with ending its longstanding observe of door-to-door canvassing of survivors, WIRED reported earlier this month.
