Prepare for America’s Summer of Pain

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Over the past four months, we’ve watched large swaths of the US government be eviscerated without thought or planning by Elon Musk’s DOGE and the Trump administration. Entire agencies, boards, and institutes are gone; workforces have been cut irrationally and foolishly. And yet, for the most part, outside of a few select areas — like foreign aid, where the incautious cuts are being felt immediately on the ground in troubled regions around the world — America at home mostly has yet to feel and reckon with the damage that’s been done to foundational programs of the federal government.

That will likely start to change this month.

June 1st marks the beginning of the traditional hurricane season, schools are starting to let out as summer vacation and travel season starts, and looking ahead, America is almost certainly in for a summer of pain and hardship with a government less prepared, able, or interested in responding than anything we’ve experienced in modern life. 

As Winston Churchill once said: “We’re entering a period of consequences.”

Or as the kids say these days: We’re into the “FO” portion of “FAFO.”

Specifically, the careless DOGE cuts and the Trump administration’s reckless restructuring of the government — and enforcement of ideological purity — has done real damage to arguably the four core agencies and federal functions that secure and watch over summer across the country: FEMA, the FAA and the national air traffic system, NOAA’s National Weather Service, and the Department of the Interior’s National Park Service and the broader wildland firefighting system.

Back in January when that Army helicopter and a commercial plane collided during landing at National Airport, I wrote about how it matters that government leaders be ready on day one and the truism that “government works until it doesn’t.”

Right now, we’re facing a crisis-level moment in both regards at the agencies that will matter most in the months ahead.

Let’s unpack what’s been happening in each place.

FEMA

FEMA always has a busy summer — summer thunderstorms, tornadoes, hail storms, wildfires, and, of course, hurricanes. I’ve long believed that FEMA is one of the most critical agencies in the US government — and one, like a lot of the government, that most people don’t think about at all until they desperately need it. It’s an agency that spends a lot of the year working — coordinating resources, training personnel, and holding exercises — to be ready to surge to disasters during the summer. While we usually think of FEMA at headline-grabbing hurricanes or tornadoes, the reality is that it responds to more than 100 disasters nationwide annually — and its presence at those scenes can last a year or even two.

The agency, though, been under unique, sustained stress since January — not the least of which has been the firing, cutting, or departure of about 2,000 personnel, roughly one-third of the agency’s entire workforce, a scale of disruption that will surely ripple through emergency response coast-to-coast.

FEMA has been under fire since the Trump administration returned to office and making headlines for all of the wrong reasons. The Trump administration and dog-killer-turned-DHS-cosplayer Secretary Kristi Noem have been trying since January to both shift much of FEMA’s work out to the states instead while also working to politicize even the very idea of the federal government helping with disaster relief. If you’re a governor who wants federal aid, you best behave — and you best be in a red state.

As Trump himself said in January, “I think, frankly, FEMA is not good. FEMA has turned out to be a disaster…. I think we’re going to recommend that FEMA go away.”

In April, Trump started to withhold funding for basic disaster preparedness. Then, in early May, the senior civil servant working as the acting head of FEMA was walked out of the building for having the temerity to suggest in congressional testimony that he thinks the agency should actually exist. “I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” he told Congress. Barely 24 hours later, he was gone.

Instead, Noem installed as FEMA’s new head a Trumper named David Richardson, who is DHS’s assistant secretary for countering weapons of mass destruction. The move was particularly odd because Richardson has no background in emergency management and June 1^st — that was this week! — marks the start of the national hurricane season, which isn’t normally the time you want to bring in untested and inexperienced leaders.

Richardson didn’t exactly try to make friends in his first moments in the agency: According to leaked audio from an all-hands meeting, he told FEMA staff, “Don’t get in my way… I will run right over you.” And added, “I, and I alone in FEMA, speak for FEMA. I’m here to carry out the president’s intent for FEMA.”

But it’s gotten worse.

Richardson evidently told a staff meeting on Monday he didn’t even know the US had a hurricane season — a comment that the White House is trying to spin as a joke. If so, it was a morale-busting one. If serious, it’s a terrible indication of how unprepared he is to lead a critical agency at a critical time.

This is why you want to hire people who are ready on day one. Richardson clearly isn’t.

There’s a terrible cycle across FEMA’s history where Democrats, like Clinton and Obama, invest in FEMA’s capacity and have competent leadership, only to have that work undone by GOP hacks. (Oddly enough, the one exception to the rule: Trump I, where FEMA chief Pete Gaynor and deputy Dan Kaniewski were two of the best appointments in all of DHS.)

The downside risk of bad leadership at FEMA is literally paid for with American lives.

As a country, we even have a uniquely famous punchline of what happens when FEMA’s leadership specifically fails to live up to the moment: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”

Richardson’s other moves have been destabilizing too: He rescinded the agency’s strategic plan and plans to start over, the first time anyone can remember that happening. To be clear, FEMA strategic plans are not meant to be partisan political documents — it’s a document that lays out big picture transformation and operational goals, an exercise core to an agency that it all about preparedness. As one employee told WIRED, “We are huge planners. Things like the strategic plan have big downstream effects, even if it’s not immediate operationally.”

How FEMA operates in a disaster zone also appears to be changing: Reporting from WIRED shows that as part of its intention to shift the burden of disaster relief to state and local officials — who absolutely don’t have the resources to accept that burden — FEMA will stop going door-to-door in affected areas to help victims. This is a recipe for a lot of people who need and deserve help failing to be able to access it — or even know it exists for them.

What form FEMA takes in the weeks and months ahead is evolving — and unraveling — rapidly. Richardson has already said that the administration intends to double the amount it requires states to contribute to disaster relief and rebuilding — raising the cost-sharing from 25 percent to 50 percent. That will be an enormous, state-budget-busting change, one with crippling ripples as small and large states alike get hit by large disasters. 

The Trump administration’s vision for making states do what FEMA does now is laughable. After writing my RAVEN ROCK book, I’m one of the only people in the country who might be able to claim to be a “FEMA historian,” and I can state simply that the entire reason we ended up with FEMA as an national federal agency was learning the hard way across decades that any medium- or large-scale natural disaster quickly outstrips the ability and resources of any state — even big capable states! — to handle it. It also just doesn’t make to build up and sustain at the state level the expertise for disasters that occur only occasionally in any one specific state even though they occur frequently somewhere in one state or another.

Put all that together — the giant staff cuts, the inexperienced and hostile new leadership, strategic uncertainty, and day-to-day policy changes — and it’s not clear that when states call 911 for federal government help this summer that anyone will be around to answer the phone. 

(There’s a dark irony to the Trump attacks on FEMA’s competency: False conspiracy theories about how FEMA was failing to respond to flooding in North Carolina last year played a major role in right-wing circles during the fall campaign and were a major talking point for Trump — a talking point that came with a real negative impact on the ground for FEMA. There’s an argument that but for the conspiracies about FEMA and the Biden administration’s response, Trump might not even be president.)

FAA and Air Traffic Control

Then we come to the nation’s air traffic control network, another system that faces unusual stresses and burdens in the summer. As much as you may think of a big winter storm as the major disruptor of air traffic, there’s nothing more disruptive to national air traffic than a major fast-moving summer thunderstorm. 

Winter storms you can generally see coming for a few days and airlines have gotten pretty good at prepositioning and pre-adjusting flight schedules. Summer thunderstorms, not so much. As one paper explains, “Current technology cannot provide reliable long- term forecasts of the aviation impact of thunderstorms. Even when good short-term forecasts are available, the current air traffic management system often can not effectively exploit them to improve network flow because of workload and airspace management difficulties.”

While the mess of Newark airport has received the bulk of the headlines, it’s hardly an outlier — it’s probably more seen as a warning about what’s likely to infect more and more of the country in the months ahead.

The Newark problems are not (entirely) Trump’s fault — the specifics of the staffing instability actually (partly) predate him. The FAA Air Traffic Control network is famously stressed and understaffed; warnings have been coming for years. When that January plane crash happened in Washington, D.C., 285 of 313 air traffic control centers nationally were understaffed.

But here’s where we get to what is DOGE’s fault and the culpability Trump will bear this summer: One of the major challenges of the ill-advised and illogical cuts that DOGE and the Trump White House made in the opening months of the administration this year is that the wide-ranging firings, “fork in the road” voluntary buyouts, and other personnel cuts have led to even more departures across the FAA. “Employees are departing the agency in mass quantities across all skill levels,” one internal FAA presentation this spring warned.

This is exactly where “Move fast and break things” doesn’t work when you’re talking about the US economy and human lives.

Aviation is an industry where safety is built on redundancy and extreme margins of safety — and the decimation and instability of the federal workforce right now means that the Trump administration has removed the margin of error for staffing nationwide. A few staffing shortfalls here and there now ripple across the country in major impacts to flight schedules, delays, and cancellations.

And that’s exactly what’s playing out right now. Flight problems aren’t confined to just Newark. Austin saw a wave of recent disruptions. Just a few days after Newark’s problems, Denver had a similar equipment outage that left controllers out of touch with incoming planes. Those incidents will almost certainly be more common over the high-traffic and high-disruption period of summer travel.

Government works until it doesn’t.

NOAA’s National Weather Service

Speaking of violent fast-moving thunderstorms, we come to the National Weather Service, which is also entering the summer in a period of unprecedented staffing crises. Since January, about 1,000 workers have left NOAA — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that’s the parent of the National Weather Service — a number that includes about 550 weather service personnel.

The New York Times wrote earlier this week, “In recent months, the Weather Service said it was preparing for “degraded operations” with fewer meteorologists available to fine-tune forecasts. Some forecasting offices no longer had enough staff members to operate overnight, and others had to curtail the twice-daily launches of weather balloons that collect data on atmospheric conditions that feed into forecast models.”

What does that look like in practice? It looks like the weather office in Jackson, Kentucky, which in mid-May was one of four in the country that doesn’t have sufficient staff to do overnight forecasts, and officials were scrambling to find meteorologists to ready forecasts for severe storms bearing down on the Midwest.

At the time, the other affected offices included northwestern Kansas, Sacramento and Hanford, Calif., and the union expected that staffing levels would also fall in the days ahead to force similar critical decisions in four more offices — Cheyenne, Wyoming, Marquette, Michigan, Pendleton, Oregon, and Fairbanks, Alaska.

Those departures and shortfalls are serious enough that as of this week, the agency is working to hire 126 new personnel — which, again, if you’re good at math, would still leave it more than 400 under where it was just a few months ago. Illustrating the insanity that we’re living through, the weather agency’s union says it “expects that many of the approximately 100 probationary NWS employees terminated in the Trump administration job cuts may reapply for the positions, some of which they may have already been trained and certified for.”

By the way, it’s worth noting the Weather Service is predicting this will be a more-active-than-normal hurricane season too, including between 13 and 19 “named” storms, three to five of which could turn into large, serious storms.

Weather forecasts are much like the air traffic control system — we’ve gotten so used to it functioning safely, smoothly, and at a high-level that Americans don’t really realize or think about how precarious it can all be.

Government works until it doesn’t.

The union’s hope that the already-fired still care enough to reapply for the exact jobs they were doing earlier this year illustrates how much of this is instability and recklessness with American lives is just … unnecessary. Whether or not Elon Musk is really gone gone, it’s going to take years or decades to undo the wreckage DOGE and the Trump administration has created in just the last four months — if we’re ever able to do so.

Wildland Firefighting and the National Park Service

The federal workforce freeze/hiring/firing/”fork in the road” turmoil of the first months of the Trump administration hit the nation’s wildland forest-firefighting resources particularly hard as the disruptions came just as the hiring process for the summer’s 15,000 seasonal firefighters  was unfolding. Now state officials are worried that they don’t want resources they can count as the summer fire season approaches.

“This is the time when we make certain that we have the aviation we need, when we have the personnel we need and that all of our systems check out and are ready to go when the alarm bell rings,” a Washington state forestry official said last month. “Without knowing what our partners are doing or not having a clear understanding of what actions are being taken, we struggle with missing the third leg of the stool that we have.”

Needless to say that having resources and staffing lined up and coordinated ahead of a fire starting is most of the battle. But headed into the summer, the country’s firefighting resources and normally highly coordinated system appears to be anything but.

Part of the issue is that no one really knows who or what has been affected. The country’s wildland fire resources are spread across a variety of agencies, including the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management at the Department of the Interior and the Forest Service at the Department of Agriculture, among others. “It’s all really muddled in chaos, which is sort of the point,” one Forest Service employee told ProPublica in April. 

Some 1,000 National Park Service personnel were fired this spring as were about 5,700 probationary employees at the Department of Agriculture — and while the Park Service has been one of the mass firings that kind of sort of has been undone, it’s unclear if any of the ones brought back by court order are actually working, since many across government were just then put on administrative leave.

One former park ranger is warning the National Park Service is in its “worst condition in modern history,” which unfortunately is saying something given the service has long struggled with underfunding. The Forest Service has also seen big cuts, as has the Bureau of Land Management, which has faced almost a 10 percent cut in its already small 10,000-person workforce and now is in the midst of a major tussle over how to reallocate its important work. 

While the Trump administration has tried sleights-of-hand, saying for instance that none of the 2,000 fired from the Forest Service were “operational firefighters,” that’s very different than saying that firefighting is unaffected. The truth is that in agencies like the National Park Service, Forest Service, and BLM, almost everyone has a role in supporting wildland firefighting during the peak season or during local fires — for example, about 700 of the 1,000 fired from the National Park Service hold what are known as government “red cards” showing they’ve undergone fire training. As Washington Sen. Patty Murray warned, “Around three quarters of forest service workers are trained in wildland firefighting. They provide crucial surge capacity when a crisis strikes.” 

“Uncertainty is at an all-time high. Morale is at an all-time low,” one federal wildland firefighter told ProPublica this spring.

That’s not exactly the posture you want this vital national resource to be in as the country’s summer fire season arrives — particularly given that the year has already some of the worst fires in recent memory take place in Los Angeles outside of the normal fire season.

And, of course, what I’m talking about here regarding the National Park Service is just one slice of the way that the DOGE cuts and Trump instability will hit the park systems as hikers, campers, and families head off into the country’s amazing natural resources this summer. One group is sponsoring hundreds of billboards nationally warning about the other ways the National Park Service has been harmed — and how Americans might experience those cuts this summer.

If you see anyone from the National Park Service on your summer travels, give them a hug.

Or for that matter: If you see any civil servant from the federal government this summer, give them a hug. They all need it.

In the meantime, let’s hope this will be a quiet and uneventful summer. I fear otherwise.

GMG

PS: If you’ve found this useful, I hope you’ll consider subscribing and sharing this newsletter with a few friends:

PPS: I had the chance in May to moderate a wonderful session with Casey Cep about her work chronicling the federal bureaucracy as part of the Washington Post series-turned-book “Who Is Government?” I encourage you to watch it if you want a bit of balm for how genuinely awesome the civil servants are who represent the backbone of the workforces of the above agencies and more.