FEMA's staffing lags well behind its post-Puerto Rico goals

[DonViejo]

The disaster agency promised to hire more people and improve training after 2017. It failed to meet its targets for both.

By DANNY VINIK 12/26/2018 05:04 AM EST

When the Federal Emergency Management Agency assessed its response to the 2017 hurricane season, which featured a trio of major storms in Texas, Florida and Puerto Rico, it immediately noticed a glaring failure: It lacked both the numbers of personnel and the level of training to handle three destructive storms.

The assessment painted picture a far different from the optimistic tweets of President Donald Trump and others: As a result of “staffing shortages” during the 2017 hurricane season, the agency declared in its after-action report, released last July, field promotions “placed staff in positions beyond their experiences and, in some instance, beyond their capabilities.” FEMA “nearly exhausted staff for two units of specialized response teams.”

But 15 months after Hurricane Maria crashed into Puerto Rico, killing 2,975 people, and almost six months after FEMA released its after-action assessment, the agency is lagging significantly behind its targets in training and recruiting, according to a POLITICO review.

The agency’s force strength — the number of personnel it employs to respond to events — has risen to 12,592, up from 10,683 in August 2017. But that is below 13,004, its target for the 2018 fiscal year, which ended on Sept. 30. It’s even further from the staffing levels that FEMA thinks it ultimately needs: 16,305.

The portion of the agency’s staff deemed “qualified” for their jobs — based on FEMA’s review of their employment experience, training and performance — is just 62 percent, up from 56 percent before the 2017 hurricane season but far below its fiscal 2018 target of 88 percent.

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https://www.politico.com/story/2018/12/26/fema-staffing-puerto-rico-1074809