FEMA Review Council Gets Third Deadline Extension as Final Report Remains Suppressed

EO 14397 is, at its surface, an administrative housekeeping measure: it uses the Federal Advisory Committee Act (5 U.S.C. ch. 10) to extend the FEMA Review Council's charter from March 25 through May 29, 2026. But its procedural plainness masks a deeply troubled process. The Council was created in January 2025, held three public meetings through August 2025, and was required by EO 14180 to deliver its final report within 180 days of its first meeting—a deadline of November 2025. It missed that deadline. A December 11, 2025 vote on the report was cancelled minutes before it was to occur, after CNN reported that Secretary Noem had condensed the 160-page draft report to 20 pages, stripping out much of the Council's substantive work.

Meanwhile, the administration has not waited for the Council's findings to begin dismantling FEMA operationally. As of January 2026, DHS was slashing FEMA's Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) employees—who make up roughly 40% of FEMA's workforce—by letting contracts lapse without renewal. Thousands of FEMA staff departed in 2025 through layoffs and buyouts, deepening what a 2023 GAO report identified as an existing shortfall of more than 6,000 employees (about 35% below needed levels). The administration has simultaneously raised the damage thresholds required to trigger federal disaster declarations, shrinking the number of events for which survivors can receive federal aid. This is the real-world harm: communities hit by hurricanes, wildfires, and floods face a degraded agency whose structural future has been held hostage to internal White House politics for over a year.

The administration's stated vision—voiced by President Trump himself—is that FEMA should "go away" and states should manage disasters with federal block grants. But this vision bypasses Congress: only Congress can legally abolish FEMA, and only Congress can rewrite the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act under which FEMA operates. The bipartisan FEMA Act of 2025 (H.R. 4669), which passed the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee 57–3, reflects a congressional consensus that FEMA should be reformed and elevated—not eliminated—while keeping federal disaster responsibility intact. This EO, by contrast, keeps an advisory body alive past its legal and substantive expiration date, apparently to provide political cover for unilateral administrative downsizing that has already begun.