FEMA just started hurricane season with 12 percent of its disaster workforce available to deploy.
While Washington cycled through three acting FEMA administrators in eighteen months – none with a single day of emergency management experience – one governor was building the answer.
DeSantis just proved Trump right about which level of government should be handling disasters.
Florida Is Filling the Vacuum Washington Left Behind
The GAO report is worth reading slowly.
Twenty senior executives left FEMA under workforce reduction programs last year, gutting institutional knowledge at the leadership level.
https://twitter.com/GovRonDeSantis/status/2061890546566648257?s=20
Staff were redeployed mid-disaster to cover new ones, with employees sent to perform jobs they had never been trained to do.
During Hurricane Helene, FEMA shipped desk workers out to help survivors apply for assistance – workers who had never done that job – and the predictable result was a backlog of nearly 500,000 applications that had to be escalated to more experienced staff, further delaying help for people who had just lost everything.
Peter Gaynor – the man who ran FEMA during Trump's first term – called the agency "in desperate need of permanent leadership."
That is the national backdrop against which Ron DeSantis stood in Orlando on Tuesday and announced the Coalition for Operational Readiness in Education – CORE.
What CORE Actually Does
This is not a press release program.
CORE connects the Florida Division of Emergency Management, the state Department of Education, FloridaCommerce, colleges, and private-sector partners into a single workforce pipeline producing trained emergency management professionals before disasters arrive – not scrambling to find them after.
https://twitter.com/GovRonDeSantis/status/2061960125720457458?s=20
The timing is deliberate.
Emergency management faces a nationwide staffing crisis – aging workforces retiring, younger workers deterred by the physical demands, and disasters arriving faster than agencies can train replacements.
Florida is solving that problem at the state level while Washington debates whether it still has a federal agency capable of solving anything.
"Preparedness starts long before a storm forms," FDEM Executive Director Kevin Guthrie said. "Through training, collaboration, and education, we are building stronger, more resilient communities and ensuring emergency management professionals are equipped to respond when disasters occur."
DeSantis put it more directly.
"We are the best in this field now, anywhere – but I think this initiative shows we're not satisfied with simply being better than everybody else."
This Is What Trump's Model Looks Like in Practice
Florida did not invent its reputation.
Hurricane Andrew hit in 1992 and exposed catastrophic federal failures – and Florida spent the next thirty years building something better.
https://twitter.com/GovRonDeSantis/status/2061852746047971801?s=20
In 2003, Florida became the first state in the nation to receive full emergency management accreditation.
When four major hurricanes hit in a single season in 2004 – Charley, Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne – Florida's program was already the model every other state followed.
DeSantis inherited that record, built a new state-of-the-art Emergency Operations Center, and now created CORE to make sure the talent pipeline never runs dry.
Trump has said from the start that states – not Washington – should own disaster response.
DeSantis has been running that playbook for years.
"On the core prep, response and then stabilize and get people back to normal, just know that we've never relied on FEMA for any of that here in the state of Florida," DeSantis said last year.
CORE is not just a workforce program.
It is the institutional proof that the Trump model works – and that the states willing to build real capacity will leave the federal bureaucracy so far behind it won't matter whether FEMA has 26,000 employees or six.
Sources:
- Florida Voice News, "DeSantis launches CORE program to train next generation of disaster response leaders," Florida Voice News, June 2, 2026.
- Alachua Chronicle, "Governor DeSantis encourages Floridians to prepare for 2026 Atlantic hurricane season," Alachua Chronicle, June 2, 2026.
- Tampa Free Press, "The Cone of Uncertainty Is Back: Florida Officials Launch 2026 Hurricane Prep Drive," Tampa Free Press, June 2, 2026.
- U.S. GAO, "FEMA Staffing Shortages Could Mean Disaster for Future Response Efforts," GAO, September 2025.
- IBTimes UK, "Trump's Fired FEMA Nominee Returns to Lead Disaster Agency Hurting From 5,000-Worker Shortage," IBTimes UK, June 2, 2026.
- White House Archives, Craig Fugate biography, Obama White House Archives.
