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Staffers within the Federal Emergency Management Agency say the nation’s natural-disaster-response division is a manmade disaster.

As of May, a third of FEMA’s full-time staff had been pushed out or left because of hostility from the Trump administration; Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem has said she wants to eliminate the agency. Noem, who oversees FEMA as part of DHS, has been micromanaging it, requiring her personal review of any contract more than $100,000 — a time-sucking exercise that staffers say causes significant delays. The current acting FEMA administrator, David Richardson, has no experience in disaster response and told staffers earlier this year he did not even know there was a hurricane season. He also told them he would “run right over you” if they interfered with the administration’s plan for FEMA.

In response to these pressures from above, around 180 current and former FEMA staffers sent a public letter to Congress warning that mismanagement of the agency could lead to significant problems when the next major hurricane, wildfire, or tornado strikes the U.S. “Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office, and our mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration,” the letter states.

It was published on the 20th anniversary of Katrina, the Category 3 hurricane that leveled New Orleans and contributed to the tanking of George W. Bush’s second term after FEMA botched the response to the storm, which killed more than 1,800 people. Katrina was a reckoning for the agency: In 2006, Congress passed a law providing it with more resources and requiring the administrator, a political appointee, to have disaster-management experience. But under the inexperienced leadership of Richardson, FEMA staffers warn that the progress made since Katrina has been undone.

“We are in a situation now where we’re at the height of hurricane season and we could have another Katrina,” says Colette Delawalla, the founder of Stand Up for Science, the nonprofit that published the letter. Stand Up for Science was founded at the beginning of the year to bring attention to the dismantling of government scientific agencies under Trump and has published similar letters from career staffers at the EPA and NASA. As with those letters, reaction from the administration was swift. The day after it was published, more than 30 of the signatories were put on leave.

“Two of the employees flew home yesterday from working on recovery efforts in Kerr County, Texas,” says Delawalla. “They were recovering bodies in Kerr County, and they were pulled off of that because they stood up, saying that people were going to die.”

In a statement, a FEMA spokesperson said “it is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform.” But former FEMA acting head Cameron Hamilton disagreed, writing on LinkedIn that the Trump administration is “lying to the American public to prop up talking points.” In May, Hamilton was fired after he testified before the House Appropriations Subcommittee, where he pushed back against Noem’s statement that FEMA should be eliminated.

As of September 1, the nation has faced only a few natural disasters this year. But FEMA insiders warn that the response to the flooding in Kerr County is an indicator of the agency’s degradation. The New York Times reported that FEMA did not respond to thousands of calls from survivors because the agency did not renew its call-center contracts just days before the flood. Noem reportedly waited 72 hours to send search-and-rescue crews because of the policy requiring her to approve $100,000-plus expenditures. FEMA administrator Richardson did not arrive in Kerr County until nine days after the flood.

“What happened in Texas is a tragedy, and no one should minimize the severity of it. But compared with a hurricane, it’s a relatively small event,” says Jeremy Edwards, a former FEMA press secretary who signed the letter. “So if FEMA is running into those kinds of problems when you have an event that is effectively only impacting one county versus a hurricane, multiple hurricanes, or a wildfire breakout just after that — it’s very concerning when you think about a multistate-level event.”

Although massive Hurricane Erin veered off into the Atlantic without striking North America, there is still a lot of time left for a storm to hit this year. “We’re just on the ramp-up to the peak of hurricane season,” says Rick Luettich, the director of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of North Carolina. “We’ve certainly got the full month of September as an active storm month ahead of us,” he says, noting that warm water in the Gulf of Mexico often creates the conditions for late-season storms. “Then it’s almost like a pinball game just exactly where the track takes them.”

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