The White House has extended the life of its embattled Federal Emergency Management Agency review panel — again — this time buying it just enough runway to finish a job that’s already more than a year in the making.
An executive order dated March 24, 2026, further continues the FEMA Review Council until either 10 days after the panel submits its final report to the President under section 3(c) of Executive Order 14180, or May 29, 2026 — whichever comes first. It’s a narrow window, and it signals that the administration is pushing hard to wrap this up.
A Council With a Long History of Short Deadlines
The FEMA Review Council wasn’t born yesterday. President Trump established it through Executive Order 14180 on January 24, 2025, with a mandate to conduct what the order called a “full-scale review” of the agency. A second executive order — 14378, signed on January 23, 2026 — continued the council through March 25, 2026. Now, with that deadline effectively expired, a third order keeps the lights on.
Under all three orders, functions assigned to the President under the Federal Advisory Committee Act as they relate to the council are delegated to the Secretary of Homeland Security — currently Kristi Noem.
What Trump Said Was Wrong With FEMA
When Trump first launched the council in January 2025, he didn’t mince words. FEMA, in his view, had fundamentally lost its way. The agency had “lost mission focus, diverting limited staff and resources to support missions beyond its scope and authority, spending well over a billion dollars to welcome illegal aliens,” he said. It was a blunt indictment of an agency that, by any measure, was already under enormous pressure following a brutal stretch of natural disasters.
The council’s stated purpose was equally pointed. “Americans deserve an immediate, effective, and impartial response to and recovery from disasters,” the original order read. “FEMA therefore requires a full-scale review, by individuals highly experienced at effective disaster response and recovery, who shall recommend to the President improvements or structural changes to promote the national interest and enable national resilience.” Hard to argue with the goal. The question, as always, is what the cure looks like.
A Leaked Report Raises Serious Questions
That’s the catch. A leaked draft of the council’s recommendations, obtained and reviewed by housing and emergency preparedness advocates, paints a picture of sweeping structural change — and not everyone is comfortable with the direction. Among the proposals: shifting FEMA’s public assistance disaster aid to a parametric insurance-style model, where aid is triggered by the type of disaster rather than individual damage assessments. The draft also proposes releasing aid within 30 days of a federal disaster declaration.
Still, the numbers buried deeper in that draft are what have caught the attention of emergency management professionals. Federal reimbursement to states and localities — currently set at 75 percent of disaster costs — would drop to 50 percent under the proposed framework. And the staffing projections are stark: the draft reportedly calls for cutting FEMA’s workforce by half over a two-to-three-year period. That’s not a trim. That’s a restructuring of the kind that tends to echo for decades.
A 160-Page Report Whittled Down to 20
Whatever the council originally produced, the public may never see most of it. Secretary Noem reportedly reduced the council’s report from more than 160 pages to roughly 20 pages before it was circulated more widely. That’s an extraordinary compression — more than 140 pages of analysis and recommendations, gone. What was cut, and why, remains unclear.
The extension of the council through May gives the administration a final, firm deadline to deliver something to the President. Whether that “something” resembles what the full council originally recommended — or what the leaked draft outlined — is a question that disaster relief advocates, state emergency managers, and Congress will be watching closely.
More than a year after its creation, the FEMA Review Council is running out of time. So, depending on the final recommendations, might the agency it was built to fix.
