Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is in trouble because her boss’ attempt to use her agencies to occupy Minneapolis has been a tragic disaster. Gaining less attention, for now, is her equally problematic oversight of several other disasters that weren’t created by ICE. It’s less of an affront to democracy than what’s happened in Minneapolis, but a greater threat to leave millions of Americans immiserated.

Along with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, Noem is in charge of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which she and President Donald Trump have often mused about destroying. Though it survived the first year of Trump’s second term, Fema came through it significantly weakened. Noem has overseen the departure of about 20 per cent of the agency’s staff and plans to further cut its workforce in half.

Worse, Noem is holding up about $17 billion of the relief funds Fema awards to people and places that have suffered disaster losses, the New York Times reported this week. That’s more than the $12 billion Fema spends in an average year. Some of these are payments for disasters that took place as long ago as 2017, early in Trump’s first term.

And the tally keeps rising: The winter storm and deep freeze that hammered much of the country this week, causing dozens of deaths, destruction and about a million power failures, will generate new Fema claims. Private forecasting service AccuWeather has estimated total economic losses from the storm to be at least $105 billion.

The hold-up in Fema funds is partially caused by Noem’s order last June that she must clear every item of spending above $100,000. That decision appears to have contributed to Fema’s suboptimal response to the deadly floods that struck the Texas hill country in July. The agency was slow to deploy disaster-relief teams and failed to answer about two-thirds of the calls coming from flood survivors, partly because Noem had fired many call-centre employees right before the disaster.

Texas was relatively lucky in one sense — it got Trump to approve its request for disaster relief in just a day. Many other states waited months for the same privilege, the Washington Post reported in July. Several only received approval after the Post published its report. The paper also noted that it was taking Fema weeks to approve spending on a wide range of critical services.

Meanwhile, four-fifths of applicants for Fema relief in Kerr County, Texas, were still without it three months after the disaster, the Texas Tribune reported in October. Texas is far from alone. In September, a year after Hurricane Helene struck North Carolina, the state had received federal relief funds amounting to 12 per cent of an estimated $60 billion in damage, far below the typical 70 per cent, according to the New Jersey Organising Project, a non-profit advocacy group that represents disaster survivors, which this week gave Noem’s first year in office an “F”.

Noem kept her post after the widely publicised Texas fiasco. Not so lucky was Fema’s interim chief at the time, David Richardson, a former Marine officer who had no experience managing disasters before taking the gig and who exhibited little interest in learning on the job.

Since November, Fema has been run by its chief of staff, Karen Evans, who also lacks disaster experience despite a law requiring it. Her second-in-command, Gregg Phillips, is a conspiracy theorist known mainly for starring in the discredited documentary 2000 Mules about the 2020 election. He now runs Fema’s Office of Response and Recovery, in charge of quickly delivering billions of taxpayer dollars in relief after catastrophes.

Considering this leadership void, the US got lucky last year when it came to disasters. Billion-dollar weather events in 2025 inflicted total damage of just $115 billion, according to the non-profit group Climate Central, which took over tracking such numbers after Trump’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ditched the practice. That was down from $187.9 billion in 2024 and one of the lowest totals this century. It helped that not a single hurricane hit the US last year for the first time in a decade. We’re unlikely to get such a break in 2026. Replacing Noem at DHS probably wouldn’t improve things much at Fema as long as Trump is picking her successor. He seems to have backed away from his desire to abolish Fema and shift its burden entirely to state and local governments that often can’t bear it. But he has also punted on efforts to reform the agency, cancelling the release of a working-group report last month and leaving the agency in limbo.

Many of Fema’s problems predate either of Trump’s presidencies. The agency has long been hobbled by complexity and chronically underfunded. Its flood maps are hopelessly out of date, and the National Flood Insurance Programme covers too few who need it. The agency needs to be empowered by cutting it loose from DHS and elevating it to a Cabinet-level agency, with its leadership subject to Senate approval. Freeing up the billions of dollars in resilience investment Trump has frozen would save Fema many multiples of those sums in the future.

As the climate becomes more chaotic and potentially destructive, the importance of a strong Fema will only grow. The agency’s best assets would be a president and Congress that recognise this importance and behave accordingly. Without that, the costs will keep rising for the rest of us.

· Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change.