Signers of the "Katrina Declaration" said that budget cuts, personnel decisions and other reforms enacted under President Donald Trump could recreate conditions that led to the widely criticized response to the 2005 hurricane.
Since his return to the White House in January, Trump has stated that he wants to abolish FEMA and let states "take care of their own problems."
He accuses the agency of inefficiency and claims without evidence that it has pervasive political bias against Republican-led states.
Hurricane Katrina slammed into the US Gulf Coast in late August 2005, causing catastrophic flooding in the Louisiana metropolis of New Orleans.
Over 1,000 died in the disaster, which also caused over $100 billion in damages.
The federal government response to the catastrophe was fiercely criticized for confusing communications and delays in providing aid to people displaced by floods.
The following year, Congress adopted a law -- the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, or PKEMRA -- to improve natural disaster response.
"Two decades later, FEMA is enacting processes and leadership structures that echo the conditions PKEMRA was designed to prevent," the letter alleges.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's restrictions on spending "reduces FEMA's authorities and capabilities to swiftly deliver our mission," the letter says.
Noem has required a personal review of any FEMA contracts, grants and mission assignments over $100,000.
"Consequences of this manual review became tragically clear during the July 2025 floods in Kerrville, Texas, when mission assignments were delayed up to 72 hours," the letter says.
One-third of FEMA's full-time staff have left the agency this year, the letter says, largely due to budget cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency formerly led by billionaire Elon Musk.
The letter-writers ask Congress to make FEMA a Cabinet-level independent agency and to protect it from "politically motivated firings," among other measures.
They say they hope the letter would "come in time to prevent not only another national catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina, but the effective dissolution of FEMA itself and the abandonment of the American people such an event would represent."
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