FEMA is paralyzed. Disaster-torn communities are paying the price.

The tornado, packing winds of 152 miles an hour, hit the city with blunt force, killing five people. In the weeks following the storm, Rand and other private citizens mobilized teams of residents whose neighborhoods had been destroyed to clean up debris, remove fallen trees and rebuild shattered homes.

Largely missing from the recovery efforts, according to Rand, city officials and other residents: the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“I’ve never seen someone from FEMA out on the streets," Rand said.

That is by design.

St. Louis is a test case for the Trump administration’s new policy of shifting more responsibility for natural disasters to states and cities. City officials and local residents who are still clearing rubble from destroyed buildings four months after the tornado struck said the experiment isn’t going well.

Many of FEMA’s core functions related to preparing for natural disasters and leading recovery efforts after they strike have ground to a halt as the Trump administration redefines the agency, according to more than a dozen FEMA employees and local officials, as well as a review of internal government documents.

Crucial contracts and grants haven’t been approved, caught up in layers of new bureaucracy. A wave of senior staff departed the agency when Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency offered buyouts, taking decades of experience with them. Around 400 FEMA employees have been detailed to work at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as that agency rapidly expands. And the administration has started dismantling the agency’s disaster-response infrastructure, which was strengthened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The scaled-back federal response has left places like St. Louis in a bind. The city doesn’t have the finances, institutional knowledge or equipment to rapidly respond to catastrophic disasters like the tornado that struck in May, which the city estimates caused $1.6 billion in damage.

St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer—a Democrat, who had been in office for just a month when the tornado hit—pointed in an interview to the rapid federal response to a tornado that struck Joplin, Mo., in 2011. “That didn’t happen here," she said. “We’re running the response ourselves."

St. Louis Mayor Cara Spencer, who took office just before the tornado hit.

As a result, entire streets remain lined by shattered houses with yards covered by heaps of the city’s famous red bricks and torn-up trees. Much of the damage occurred in the majority Black northern sections of St. Louis.

It took the White House two weeks to approve a disaster declaration in early June, a move that typically unleashes a gusher of cash and on-the-ground assistance. But city officials said they are still waiting for most of that aid. FEMA officials arrived to go door-to-door to help residents apply for federal funds. But they stopped providing the service as the administration canceled the door-to-door program nationwide, according to a city official. FEMA closed disaster-recovery facilities where residents could apply for financial assistance last week.

Tricia McLaughlin, spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which has housed FEMA since 2003, said the agency “moved quickly to support Missouri and St. Louis in the aftermath of the May tornado." She denied that FEMA pre-emptively pulled back door-to-door teams in St. Louis.

The city has run into a problem that is plaguing the entire agency’s operations: A requirement that all spending of $100,000 or more go through a byzantine process for approval that involves up to a dozen layers of review.

The process, instituted by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, is breaking down the agency’s ability to respond to disasters at every level, according to several FEMA employees and the review of documents.

The review process “has had no negative impact to providing assistance in Missouri," said McLaughlin. “Under Secretary Noem’s leadership, DHS is rooting out rampant fraud and abuse." She said claims that core disaster-response operations are unfunded are “simply false."

As of early September, roughly 1,000 contracts and grants were pending approval—many of which are central to disaster response, the documents show. Now, at the peak of hurricane season, employees said they are spending the bulk of their work hours trying to get spending approved and coming up with contingency plans for entire programs that have been denied funding.

For St. Louis, a major part of its requested federal assistance involves disposing of the estimated one million tons of debris that lined city streets and yards, which the city estimated would cost more than $700 million. Its request to FEMA to help cover those costs remained in limbo until mid-September, four months after the tornado struck, when the city said FEMA had agreed to cover 75% of eligible debris-removal costs. Private citizens such as Rand have stepped in to fill the gaps.

Ginelle Bess, the founder of a recovery nonprofit, walked past debris from the May tornado that still lines the streets.A tornado-damaged home. Volunteers stacked bricks during cleanup efforts.Ali Rand, right, spoke with neighbors Bill Atkins, left, and Larry Powell, center. Rand and other residents volunteered to help organize recovery efforts.

To President Trump and other White House officials, that is a new-and-improved model for disaster response. Trump has called for FEMA to be eliminated or drastically downsized, arguing that the agency has failed to adequately respond to disasters. States and the private sector are better equipped to perform FEMA’s mission, he has said.

In January, shortly after his inauguration, Trump said FEMA was “very bureaucratic, and it’s very slow," adding that the agency’s disaster response costs “a tremendous amount of money."

DHS requested a $36.2 billion budget for the agency for fiscal year 2026, up $3.9 billion from the previous year. Under Trump’s plan to downsize FEMA, federal funds would be granted to the states for them to manage recoveries, although details of how things would operate or whether the budget would shrink haven’t been made clear.

“President Trump is committed to right-sizing the federal government while empowering state and local governments by enabling them to better understand, plan for and ultimately address the needs of their citizens," said Abigail Jackson, spokeswoman for the White House.

‘Pencil-and-paper methods’

The bottleneck in operations created by the new funding approval process has caused deep concern throughout FEMA about its ability to respond to a major Atlantic hurricane like the two storms—Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton—that hit the Southeast this time last year.

Funding has yet to be fully approved for key contracts, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that track the spending approval process. That includes a program that handles preliminary disaster assessments, which are congressionally mandated and form the basis of a federal disaster declaration.

The funding for software and cloud systems through Oracle that underpin many of FEMA’s operations, including databases that are used by victims to apply for assistance, is also held up.

Employees have been instructed by senior staff to prepare to operate like FEMA did in the early 1990s, when work was handled manually or by using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with complicated formulas for calculating assistance. Funding requests are also routed through DOGE, which adds another layer of bureaucracy to the process and contributes to delays, according to FEMA employees and state officials.

After wildfires spread in Colorado in late August, an email sent to employees directed them to manually fill out forms to prepare for the potential loss of access to a program used for damage assessment. “[W]e are recommending that…you revert to pencil-and-paper methods," according to the email, which was reviewed by the Journal.

As of early September, hundreds more grants and contracts had yet to be approved, including funding for replenishing the agency’s supply of boxed drinking water, rent for facilities, storm surge monitoring data and the updating of flooding maps, including for flood-prone regions such as Kerr County, Texas, where flash floods this summer killed more than 135, including children.

Officials are also looking at shutting down entire FEMA offices across the country, according to people familiar with the discussions, as part of the administration’s efforts to downsize the agency and shift responsibility to states.

Noem has said approvals for disaster response would be expedited. But guidelines sent to employees detailing how to write a memo for contract approvals state that disaster-related approvals have to be made “in less than 20 days," a timeline FEMA employees said was slower than typical, warning the system could add significant delays to projects. The process also includes at least seven layers of review.

During a recent response exercise, which employees do regularly to prepare for a disaster, officials spent the bulk of the time figuring out how many spending memos would be needed in the immediate aftermath of a major Atlantic hurricane, according to people familiar with the exercise. Based on the spending level for Hurricanes Helene and Milton, employees determined it would require at least 80 funding approvals by Noem in the initial days to effectively save lives and assist victims, one of the people said.

A task force with dozens of employees was created in early July to help process the spending approval memos. But employees said the process remained convoluted, with leadership frequently changing the template for the one-page memos, sending them back repeatedly over small wording changes or asking for basic acronyms to be spelled out, including the acronym FEMA. That task force was abruptly disbanded recently, and the system tracking progress of funding requests was frozen, making the process even more opaque.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokeswoman, said the task force was designed to be temporary.

‘Completely unacceptable’

Trump touted his administration’s response to the fast-moving floods that ravaged Kerr County. But inside the agency, employees said Noem’s spending approvals paralyzed FEMA.

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem at a discussion after the floods in Kerr County, Texas.

It took 72 hours for spending to be approved for search and rescue teams on the ground, which concerned Ken Pagurek, the head of FEMA’s Urban Search and Rescue unit, enough to resign, according to employees familiar with his thinking.

It also resulted in a delay in helping people affected by the flooding who were reaching out to FEMA’s phone line for assistance. The agency uses contractors to help answer phone lines, but funding for those call centers lapsed on July 6—two days after the flooding in Texas began.

On July 7, the agency started moving over FEMA staff to manage the phone lines, where wait times for victims were hours long. Data reviewed by the Journal show more than 500 people waiting in the queue in early July.

“Flash floods are extremely fast and just devastating for the people who are living in their wake, and so making them wait all day on the phone for four, five even more hours is just completely unacceptable," said Abby McIlraith, an emergency management specialist now on administrative leave, who was one of the FEMA employees who got reassigned to help respond to the flood of calls.

Noem eventually extended the call center contract, but funding lapsed again on Sept. 10, and employees were told to prepare to operate without that support. The following day, employees were alerted that the call centers were “back online," but there was still confusion over how long the contract had been extended for. The back-and-forth over key operations and their long-term uncertainty has been detrimental to the agency, employees said.

McLaughlin said “FEMA experienced no delays in deployment of assets" in Texas. She also said that despite the influx in calls, “FEMA’s disaster call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance."

Experienced staff leaves

The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan agency that works for Congress, said in a September report that a high number of reductions across FEMA’s workforce, including the loss of experienced disaster-management officials, “could reduce effectiveness of federal disaster response for upcoming disasters."

Two dozen senior executive employees at FEMA had left the agency between Jan. 25 and June 1, ahead of the hurricane season, according to the report. Agency officials told the GAO that the departures, many of which were part of the DOGE buyout offer, had left FEMA with just 50% of its senior executive service staff.

The loss of experienced staff has been exacerbated by the new decision-making process at the agency, which is largely controlled by political appointees, disrupting the traditional chain of command and slowing response times, employees said. Top appointees lack emergency-management experience, and David Richardson, the acting administrator, has largely ceded his authority to DHS, according to people familiar with the agency’s operations.

Richardson “is leading FEMA’s response to every declared disaster" and “is focused on results not recognition," McLaughlin said.

The GAO issued another report on Sept. 15 alleging that FEMA has violated the law by “improperly withholding or delaying" funds for a pair of food and shelter programs. McLaughlin said the GAO report is “simply incorrect" and that FEMA still plans to award funds to the programs.

With ICE looking to expand its immigration enforcement operations significantly, DHS is using hundreds of FEMA staffers to help with human resources work and background checks, according to people familiar with the operations.

DHS continued to reduce employees even after the official start of the hurricane season in June. The agency put on leave more than 30 FEMA employees, including McIlraith, who signed a public petition to Congress known as “The Katrina Declaration." The petition alleged that FEMA’s leadership wasn’t following the laws that were put in place in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to strengthen disaster response.

Declan Crowe, who was put on leave for signing the letter, grew concerned after seeing the agency’s response to the flooding in Texas. He decided to work in emergency management after seeing the effects of Hurricane Sandy in 2012 on his family members. He didn’t think the agency was living up to its mission under the current administration.

“There was definitely not enough assistance right after the disaster" in Texas, he said. “Now, take a bigger hurricane, or something like that, and there’s a real problem there."

Approaching winter

In some ways, St. Louis is luckier than other cities and states struck by disasters this year, since Trump approved its disaster-declaration request in June. As of Aug. 31, a dozen outstanding disaster requests from across the country were sitting on Trump’s desk, nearly double the average on that date from 2016 to 2024, according to Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who tracks federal disaster spending.

Trump approved six more in mid-September, but FEMA employees said the process for approving disaster declarations remains slow and opaque.

Bess spoke to resident Jeanette Robinson this month about a cleanup day.

Officials in North Carolina complain that funding from FEMA for recovery from Hurricane Helene remains stuck in the gears of the federal bureaucracy. Sen. Ted Budd (R., N.C.) has moved to put a hold on DHS nominees as a protest against funding delays from FEMA in his home state.

St. Louis is also still waiting for money to arrive. Besides the funding for debris removal, St. Louis is awaiting funds for crisis-counseling services from FEMA, said Julian Nicks, who is leading the city’s recovery efforts. FEMA also isn’t providing alternative facilities for the roughly half-dozen schools that remain closed in the city, a service it has historically provided. Instead, the city is busing students to schools that have extra space.

In the absence of FEMA, much of the recovery effort has been led by private citizens such as Rand, who have raised funds to clear streets and yards and repair houses. Ginelle Bess, founder of a nonprofit helping with recovery efforts, said her group has raised more than $70,000 to clean up damaged homes and clear debris.

Bess said a number of residents continue to live in homes ravaged by the tornado, some of which are contaminated with mold. It’s unclear what will happen to them as temperatures start to dip, she said. “I’m so nervous about the winter," Bess said.

Write to Scott Patterson at scott.patterson@wsj.com and Tarini Parti at tarini.parti@wsj.com