The Cold Is Brutal. FEMA’s Failure Will Be Worse.

By David Shuster

The United States is now facing a winter storm of almost biblical proportions: ten days of iron-cold temperatures in some areas flirting with minus 50, trees exploding like artillery shells, power lines collapsing in frozen tangles, and deep snow burying more than a dozen states, including large swaths of the South that regard sleet as a theological mystery.

Some 180 million Americans may feel the bite. Nature, never daunted by our civic arrangements or emergency stockpiles, is coming to collect.

But the storm itself is only the opening act. The real horror will arrive when we witness the machinery of government supposedly designed to respond.

State and local governments—already worn down by years of overlapping calamities, hollow budgets, and chronic exhaustion—are stretched thin. And looming above this brittle structure is FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, that great alphabet relic Americans are supposed to trust when the lights go out and the heat dies.

Today, under Donald Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, FEMA resembles less a rescue agency than a badly managed charity raffle staffed by ghosts.

Once upon a time, FEMA’s purpose was clear: coordinate disaster response, marshal federal resources, and prevent citizens from freezing to death in the rubble of their own bad luck.

Now, FEMA is an agency that has been gutted by Trump/DOGE budget cuts, staff purges, and administrative malpractice—presided over by political leadership that regards emergency preparedness as an optional hobby.

Consider North Carolina, where the wounds from 2024’s Hurricane Helene remain fresh. According to multiple local reports, FEMA evicted residents from temporary housing earlier than promised—some as recently as this week—despite these residents having nowhere else to go.

This, mind you, as snow, ice, and freezing rain threaten prolonged power outages. If the goal was to demonstrate a talent for cruelty at precisely the wrong moment, the agency succeeded.

Across the country, the story is the same. Over the past year, the Trump administration closed dozens of FEMA offices and dismissed hundreds of staff.

Trump, Elon Musk, and Kristi Noem did this in the name of “efficiency,” that beloved corporate euphemism that actually means, “fewer people doing more work until nothing functions.” The very employees who would normally be planning, staging, and coordinating disaster response were sent packing, leaving entire regions to face catastrophe with little more than crossed fingers.

Now, at the last possible moment, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has ordered a halt to the termination of disaster workers, extending contracts that were allowed to expire in the first place.

The headlines are unintentionally comic: FEMA halts termination of disaster workers as agency prepares for massive winter storm.

An internal email obtained by CNN instructed staff to “cease offboarding” disaster workers whose contracts were expiring—a process that had been cheerfully underway since early January. But reality, that rude intruder, refuses to cooperate. Roughly 300 disaster workers have already been let go this month, with only a handful rehired. Current and former FEMA employees confirm what common sense already knows: the agency is not prepared.

This sudden reversal is not leadership. It is panic.

Disasters, unfortunately, are not mitigated by ideological experiments, management theories, or last-minute political theater. Responding to a massive storm requires competence, people power, and foresight—qualities in short supply in the Trump administration, where agencies are run as if government itself is the enemy. When Americans are left shivering in the dark, Trump and Noem's explanations about budget discipline will not provide warmth or comfort.

So, as the cold descends and the power grid groans, our nation is once again confronting an uncomfortable truth: the deep snow, unrelenting ice, and subzero temperatures may be ferocious, but the failure to adequately prepare and respond will be almost entirely the fault of the Trump administration.

And when FEMA falters—as it surely will—the blame will not belong to the blizzards, the wind, or the indifferent laws of physics.

It will belong to the Trump team idiots who mistook destruction for efficiency, ideology for governance, and last-minute reversals for competence—and who will now force the suffering public to pay the price, one frozen night at a time.

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