Hurricane Season Starts Today With FEMA Shorthanded, Its Backlog at 300,000 Projects, and No Confirmed Director

The 2026 Atlantic hurricane season began today. The Federal Emergency Management Agency does not have a permanent director. Roughly half of its 38 senior leadership positions are vacant. The agency enters this season with approximately 5,000 fewer employees than it had eighteen months ago and a backlog of more than 300,000 open disaster projects scattered across more than 600 active disaster declarations.

“We are playing catch-up,” Acting FEMA Administrator Bob Fenton told a reporter last week.

The 76-day lapse in Department of Homeland Security appropriations that ended April 30 resolved FEMA’s most acute financial problem — the DHS Appropriations Act of 2026 provided $26.4 billion to replenish the agency’s Disaster Relief Fund, which had fallen to $1.6 billion before Congress acted. But the operational damage accumulated during one of the longest funding lapses in FEMA’s history will take months to reverse. The question entering the 2026 hurricane season is not whether the agency has money. It is whether the organization can effectively spend that money with the workforce it has left.

How FEMA’s Disaster Fund Ran Out

Federal funding for the Department of Homeland Security expired February 14, 2026, after lawmakers failed to agree on a final appropriations bill. DHS, and FEMA with it, operated without dedicated funding for 76 days.

At the start of the lapse, FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund held approximately $9.8 billion — enough to manage active disaster declarations and begin reimbursing states for completed recovery work. By late April that balance had fallen to $1.6 billion, crossing the threshold that triggers the agency’s most restrictive spending posture.

On April 29, FEMA activated Immediate Needs Funding, the emergency mode it enters when the DRF drops below $3 billion. Under that posture, FEMA can only spend on lifesaving and life-sustaining activities: direct financial assistance to disaster survivors, emergency public assistance, active response contracting, fire management grants, and the operations of Joint Field Offices. Everything else — reimbursements for completed public infrastructure work, hazard mitigation grants, long-term recovery obligations — was paused.

FEMA has used Immediate Needs Funding nine times over the past two decades. This was the first time it entered that posture during an active appropriations lapse, according to agency officials, adding an unprecedented layer of uncertainty about how long operations could continue.

The Senate had already passed the DHS funding bill unanimously on March 27 and again on April 2. The House cleared H.R.7744 on April 30, ending the 76-day DHS funding lapse that had paralyzed the department. Trump signed the legislation the same week, restoring the DRF to levels sufficient to manage active obligations and resume paused reimbursements.

What the Shutdown Cost the Workforce

The funding fight was only one of two overlapping crises. The other was the workforce.

Since January 2025, FEMA has lost more than 5,000 employees — roughly a fifth of its total headcount — through a combination of layoffs, resignations, retirements accelerated by uncertainty, and buyout offers extended across the federal government. Of the agency’s 38 senior leadership positions, approximately 18 are completely vacant, according to the House Homeland Security Committee’s senior Democrats, Representatives Bennie Thompson of Mississippi and Tim Kennedy of New York, who outlined the vacancies in a May 14 letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

To partially offset the losses, FEMA reinstated roughly 200 disaster response employees who had been let go in recent months, a step the agency said was intended to “stabilize” its personnel ahead of hurricane season and the 2026 FIFA World Cup, whose matches begin this month at eleven U.S. host cities that will require federal security coordination. Fourteen FEMA employees who had signed a public letter of dissent last August — warning Congress about disaster preparedness — were told they would return to work after spending eight months on paid administrative leave.

Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem as DHS Secretary in late March 2026, has reversed several of Noem’s most disruptive directives, including a $100,000 expenditure approval requirement that had stalled routine agency operations. But reversing institutional damage from more than a year of leadership upheaval takes longer than a policy reversal.

“We are playing catch-up,” Fenton said. In a separate interview, he also said the agency was ready for hurricane season. Both things are true and not contradictory: FEMA will respond when a hurricane forms. The quality and speed of that response will reflect the organization it actually is today, not the one it was before the disruption.

The Cameron Hamilton Question

The most visible evidence that FEMA’s leadership situation remains unresolved is who is not yet running the agency.

Cameron Hamilton served briefly as FEMA’s acting administrator at the start of Trump’s second term. He was fired in May 2025, escorted out of FEMA headquarters the day after he testified before the House Appropriations Committee. His offense, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt described it: Hamilton had told the committee that “I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency” — a position, Leavitt said, that was “contrary to what the president believes and the goals of this administration in regards to FEMA policy.”

Trump nominated Hamilton to lead FEMA again on May 11, 2026, roughly a year after firing him. The Senate has not yet scheduled confirmation hearings. FEMA will begin the 2026 hurricane season under Fenton’s interim leadership with no confirmed permanent director in the building.

The administration’s reversal on whether FEMA should exist at all — from threatening elimination in early 2025 to renominating a man fired for defending the agency — reflects how the political calculus shifted after an active disaster season and a string of congressional hearings. But the organizational cost of the uncertainty created in between was real, and it is now reflected in the staffing numbers.

The 300,000-Project Backlog

The workforce reductions compounded an existing caseload problem. FEMA is currently managing more than 300,000 open recovery projects across more than 600 active disaster declarations, according to agency officials. Those projects — rebuilding schools, repairing water systems, reimbursing municipalities for emergency protective measures — require staff to process, audit, inspect, and close.

The 76-day shutdown did not create this backlog, but it made it worse. During the period when FEMA operated under Immediate Needs Funding, it paused reimbursements for completed work and deferred all non-urgent obligations. Communities waiting on checks for recovery work they had already completed waited longer. Those delays do not disappear when the appropriations crisis ends; the work to resolve them has to be done by the same workforce that shrank during the disruption.

The DHS appropriations law signed in late April provides funding but does not restore the employees who left. New hiring takes months, and federal emergency managers require specialized training before they can manage disaster declarations independently. The 300 priority positions FEMA was authorized to fill as of May represent a fraction of the overall gap.

What the Season Looks Like

NOAA’s official 2026 Atlantic hurricane season outlook, released May 21, predicts a below-normal season. The agency is forecasting 8 to 14 named storms, with 3 to 6 reaching hurricane strength and 1 to 3 of those becoming major hurricanes — defined as Category 3, 4, or 5 with sustained winds of at least 111 miles per hour. An average season produces 14 named storms, 7 hurricanes, and 3 major hurricanes.

The suppression is driven primarily by the expected development of El Niño conditions in the Pacific, which historically reduces Atlantic hurricane activity by increasing upper-level wind shear. Sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic are somewhat warmer than normal, which would ordinarily favor development, but NOAA’s models weigh the El Niño influence as the dominant factor.

Below-normal does not mean no storms. The most destructive Atlantic hurricanes in recent decades — Katrina in 2005, Harvey in 2017, Helene in 2024 — did not require above-average seasons to cause historic damage. A single major hurricane striking a populated coastline produces the kind of demand that tests FEMA’s capacity regardless of what the rest of the season looks like. Given the agency’s fiscal position and the Moody’s warning about U.S. fiscal trajectory this spring, there is limited appetite for supplemental disaster relief appropriations mid-season.

What Comes Next

The Senate Armed Services Committee has not yet announced a hearing date for Cameron Hamilton’s confirmation. Until he is confirmed, Fenton continues in an acting capacity with no fixed tenure and a constrained ability to make long-term organizational decisions.

FEMA is scheduled to deploy personnel to all eleven FIFA World Cup host cities beginning this month, a security support mission that runs concurrently with hurricane season response. The agency has said the two missions are not in conflict, but they draw from the same pool of deployable disaster responders.

Congress’s next relevant deadline is the end of the fiscal year on September 30. If the FY2027 appropriations process stalls — a recurring pattern in recent years — FEMA could face another funding lapse during peak hurricane season, which runs through November 30.

The 76-day shutdown ended. Hurricane season has not.