“I hadn’t heard about a hurricane. The hurricane is going in the vicinity of Alabama. That’s not good.”
President Trump said that on Wednesday when reporters asked whether he still planned to fly to Tuscaloosa for Saturday’s Georgia-Alabama game. By Wednesday night Isaias was a hurricane. Florida and Alabama have since declared emergencies across 65 counties.
The football is the least of it. Isaias is forecast to come ashore late Friday or early Saturday, and Friday is also the day a federal judge expects the government and the unions that sued it to report whether they have agreed on how to undo FEMA staff cuts she already ruled unlawful. If the storm lands as forecast, it will be the first Atlantic hurricane to make US landfall since Milton in October 2024. The 2025 season sent none ashore. So this is the first one to meet the FEMA this administration shrank.
At 4 a.m. Central on Thursday the National Hurricane Center had Isaias at 80 mph and strengthening, with hurricane warnings from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, to the Bay-Gulf county line in Florida and 5 to 7 feet of storm surge forecast for Mobile Bay. It is also the latest first hurricane of any Atlantic season since 1905, one day short of the record.
In 2019, the president drew Alabama into a hurricane forecast with a Sharpie. This week the forecast did it without him.
What happened to the agency between Milton and Isaias:
- May 2025. Acting administrator Cameron Hamilton was fired a day after telling Congress that eliminating FEMA was not in the public’s interest.
- June 2025. Trump said he wanted to start phasing FEMA out after that hurricane season.
- Fiscal 2025. More than 4,300 employees left, a 55 percent jump in departures, and the Government Accountability Office concluded FEMA “is not positioned to determine whether it has the right number of people with the right skills in the right positions at the right time to meet its mission.”
- May 2026. Trump renominated Hamilton, the man he had fired, to run the agency. He took office in August.
- September 11. Judge Susan Illston ruled that DHS acted unlawfully when it ordered FEMA’s workforce cut in half, writing that the number “appears as if pulled from thin air,” and gave both sides until October 9 to settle the remedy.
- September 14. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said a judge telling DHS how many people to keep on staff was “laughable”, adding, “It’s not always personnel that you need.”
DHS says the half-the-staff plan was abandoned and some fired workers were rehired. We argued last month that the ruling was a win on the law, not a rescue for hurricane season, and Isaias is the test of that.
Our position is simple. The government should walk into court on Friday with an agreement that restores FEMA’s authority to renew its on-call disaster staff, the power the judge found DHS took away without reason. It costs nothing to sign. It just requires admitting that personnel is, in fact, what you need when up to 7 feet of water is headed for Mobile Bay.
Trump said he would “let the hurricane determine” his weekend. The hurricane will. What FEMA can do about it was determined over the last 20 months.