It’s COVID-19 vaccinations vs. hurricane prep
Staffing at FEMA is at a critical low
Staffing at the Federal Emergency Management Agency is at a critical low as the agency has fought the COVID-19 pandemic, which experts say is setting back preparations for hurricanes.
With about five weeks to prepare for hurricane season, 77% of staff are already deployed, according to a memo released at a short daily briefing Sunday. The United States saw a similar level of depletion of FEMA staff in reserve in 2017, when three Category 4 hurricanes made landfall and wildfires raged.
President Joe Biden assigned the federal government more responsibility than the Trump administration did for ending the pandemic that has killed at least 572,000 Americans. But the vaccination push has run headlong into preparations for natural disasters.
The shortages are especially acute among highly skilled officials. Only three federal coordinating officers, appointed by the president to manage the operations for a disaster, are available to be deployed, with 49 already in the field.
FEMA is responding to 118 major disasters across the country, 59 stemming from COVID-19.
“Usually, at this time in the spring … FEMA is typically coordinating with state partners along the coastline, doing disaster drills. Emergency management staff is doing briefings with counties and parishes … for when hurricane season kicks off on June 1,” said Elizabeth Zimmerman, former associate administrator of FEMA during the Obama administration. “The majority of that is not happening.”
FEMA anticipates dipping below the 2017 record for the fewest people in reserve in early May, according to Zimmerman, now a senior executive adviser at IEM, an emergency management consulting company.
More federal involvement
The agency has been under pressure since Biden deployed FEMA for a nationwide vaccination campaign. In January, he pledged to open 100 FEMA-operated mass vaccination sites. More federal involvement in the vaccination push was a central component of Biden’s COVID-19 plan. That was a departure from the Trump administration’s approach to getting shots in arms.
The Biden administration fell short of the promised 100 sites, but has launched 36 federally operated sites over the past four months, some of which are now temporarily closed, and 40 temporary pop-up sites.
Another 10 mobile vaccination units are deployed to Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and South Dakota.
Meanwhile, FEMA has repeatedly reached out to other federal agencies for volunteers to help with the mass vaccination centers, according to emails shared with CQ Roll Call.
That authority has been available to the Department of Homeland Security since the Obama administration. A so-called DHS surge is not uncommon in disasters, experts said.
But it signals that FEMA lacks the people it needs, especially those qualified to administer shots.
“We’re pulling a warehouse worker to go out and run a vaccine site. That’s what we’re doing,” said Steve Reaves, president of the American Federation of Government Employees National Local 4060, which represents FEMA employees.
Experts are concerned about how burnout could affect the nation’s readiness heading into hurricane season, as FEMA staffers are ushered from one disaster to the next.
Every state is under a national disaster declaration at the same time for the first time in history. The FEMA National Response Coordination Center at the agency’s headquarters, which typically runs 24 hours a day to monitor a crisis, has been activated for more than 400 days. The previous record in 2017 was 70 days, according to former FEMA official Joseph Nimmich.
Juggling priorities
Some experts say the number of permanent FEMA staffers has not increased enough to keep up with increasingly frequent and more severe natural disasters occurring because of climate change.
“The ever-increasing number of declared emergencies and disasters, not to mention nationwide events, such as the pandemic, will continue to put unsustainable pressure on FEMA,” Nimmich told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this month.
The period before hurricane season is also usually a time when many people at FEMA take vacation.
“Many staffers and reservists have been working full bore with no break for the last 16 to 18 months,” said Zimmerman.
But public health departments have said they also needed federal help, according to FEMA’s National Advisory Council member Nicolette Louissaint, executive director of Healthcare Ready, which works on preparedness.
“Public health is in the same position,” said Louissaint. “There is no better entity (than FEMA) to deal with that coordination of various resources and organizing … a response.”