14 Jul 2025

Noem Allows FEMA Call Center Contracts to End the Day After Texas Flash Floods

by | | 0

Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem allowed four contracts for call center support to expire for the Federal Emergency Management Agency on 5 July 2025, the day after flash floods in Texas and in the midst of the resulting crisis.

Noem did not renew the contracts until five days after they expired.

A spokesperson for DHS insisted, “When a natural disaster strikes, phone calls surge, and wait times can subsequently increase. Despite this expected influx, FEMA’s disaster call center responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently, ensuring no one was left without assistance.” Statistics showed that was a lie.

As reported by Maxine Joselow of the New York Times, on 5 July, the last day the contractors were allowed to work, FEMA got 3027 calls from Texas flood survivors. It answered 3018 of them (about 99.7%). Then contractors at the call centers were fired because the contracts under which they worked had lapsed. On 6 July, FEMA got 2363 calls and only answered 846 (about 35.8%). On 7 July, FEMA got 16,419 calls and answered 2613 (about 15.9%).

In May, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) told her, “You are spending like you don’t have a budget…. You’re on track to trigger the Anti-Deficiency Act. That means you are going to spend more money than you have been allocated by Congress. This is a rare occurrence, and it is wildly illegal. Your agency will be broke by July, over two months before the end of the fiscal year. You may not think that Congress has provided enough money to [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], but the Constitution and the federal law does not allow you to spend more money than you’ve been given, or to invent money. And this obsession with spending at the border…has left the country unprotected elsewhere.”

Noem may be cutting FEMA partly for Donald Trump’s desire to eliminate the agency and partly to scrounge funding for her obsession with detaining large numbers of people through raids that purport to be for immigration enforcement.

DHS recently posted a video to Facebook Reels invoking violent Christian nationalist enforcement of God’s commandments by Noem’s agents. The video cites Isaiah 6:8 in which God asks, “Whom shall I send?” and Isaiah answers, “Here am I! Send me.”

Click here for more details.