DHS shutdown impacts FEMA disaster response capabilities, expert warns

SPECIAL: A public safety expert warned that the Department of Homeland Security’s partial government shutdown could have a critical impact on local disaster response without assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Jeffrey Halstead, director of strategic accounts at Genasys, a provider of communications hardware and software that helps communities during disasters, said in an interview with Fox News Digital that shutting down DHS due to curtailed FEMA support could impact emergency response and recovery efforts.

“Each time the government goes into one of these shutdowns, a different part of the federal government is affected, both reviewing the grant program and distributing funds from previously awarded grant programs. This is exactly the area of ​​DHS and FEMA that impacts emergency managers, emergency response, and recovery of different cities, counties, and regions if they are faced with a weather and/or disaster-related event,” Halstead said.

Halstead, who is also a retired police chief in Fort Worth, Texas, who spent more than 30 years in law enforcement, explained that government shutdowns that have delayed federal funding have “severely impacted” local response to disasters.

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“I know personally, I was in Arizona for over 21 years, I was in Texas for over seven years as a police chief, and then I was in Nevada for an extended period of time and I worked directly with several states in the Western United States,” he said.

“The last government shutdown largely ended the grant application process, meaning grants will not be approved, allocated, and/or funds will not be released,” he continued. “This greatly impacts their ability to plan and coordinate many of the response events they plan. In Arizona, in the central UASI district or the Urban Area Security Initiative, none of their grants are vetted; this replaces legacy equipment, tools, and funding training so they can meet standards every three months and be ready in case something happens.”

This comes as the Trump administration ordered FEMA to suspend the deployment of hundreds of aid workers to disaster-stricken areas across the country during the DHS shutdown.

More than 300 FEMA disaster responders were preparing for upcoming missions but were told to halt their travel plans. Grant systems are also not fully functional until lawmakers reach an agreement to fund the department.

“The biggest impact is funding, distributing grants and then aligning all of that equipment and training so they can have a really successful year as they prepare for a disaster,” Halstead said.

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More than 300 FEMA disaster responders were preparing for upcoming missions but were told to halt their travel plans. (Kent Nishimura/Getty Images)

“If there was a traumatic weather event, a critical incident or something that would require FEMA support, FEMA personnel or FEMA resources, those may not be available,” he added. “This greatly impacts city, county, state, and federal collaborative efforts where resources are literally immediately activated, aligned, and deployed, sometimes within 12 hours. So it greatly impedes their ability to plan effectively when a critical incident, catastrophic event, or weather-related event comes their way. They’re not going to have all of these federal assets and resources that they’ve depended on and relied on and worked with, both in their planning and in their training events or in previous disasters that they’ve responded to and provided support for.”

As part of the move to end FEMA deployments, personnel currently working on major rescue efforts will remain on site and cannot return home unless their mission ends, but no new personnel can join them or perform their duties without DHS approval.

Recovery efforts are still ongoing in places like North Carolina, where Hurricane Helene devastated the region in the fall of 2024.

As Halstead put it, the recovery effort is “the final piece of the emergency management cycle for that area getting back to normal.”

“When that’s dramatically impacted, a few years later you see some parts of North Carolina struggling in the recovery phase that’s still being completed,” he said. “This is directly related to all of these pauses and delays in FEMA, FEMA funding, and financial support needed to complete the recovery phase.”

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FEMA personnel working on major rescues will remain at construction sites and cannot return home unless their mission ends, but no new personnel may join them or be dismissed without DHS approval. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Asked about the importance of federal funding given recent extreme weather across the U.S., including snow on the East Coast, flooding in California and wildfires that forced evacuations in the High Plains, Halstead said it was “extremely critical” and that a delay in funds could impact the safety of local residents.

“It’s absolutely extremely critical that emergency managers, your fire departments, and your law enforcement agencies utilize not only those partnerships and resources, but also funding allocations so that they can effectively plan in response, operational control of the disaster, and then getting into recovery mode… Then sometimes that delay will impact the safety and well-being of Americans,” Halstead explained.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress have yet to reach an agreement to end the partial shutdown, and the GOP has so far resisted, largely due to Democrats’ demand for tighter oversight and reform of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) following the shooting deaths of two U.S. citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis last month.

President Donald Trump argued earlier this week that this was a “Democrat shutdown” and “has nothing to do with Republicans.”

Halstead said he wants lawmakers on Capitol Hill to negotiate in good faith to end the shutdown so first responders have “effective tools to do our jobs safely and very, very efficiently.”

Recovery efforts are still ongoing in places like North Carolina, where Hurricane Helene devastated the region in the fall of 2024. (Tribune News Service via Travis Long/The News & Observer/Getty Images)

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“I know a lot of people are really upset because they’re exploiting an important political issue over a joint financing agreement that needs to be approved very quickly,” he said. “This has happened all too often in the last two to three years. We’ve seen one shutdown after another. What many citizens don’t realize is that when the government is shut down, all of that work—grant reviews, proposals, funding, payments—is delayed. There’s a significant delay in getting back to an open government.”

“They’re still negotiating these extremely politically sensitive issues that are really divisive not just on Capitol Hill but in our country,” Halstead added. “Then all of that backlog is now taking even longer to get approved, to fund, to distribute the funds. So that creates a compounding impact on all of our emergency managers and first responders to do their jobs effectively.”

Halstead emphasized that a deal to close a shutdown is unlikely to be reached before Trump’s State of the Union address next week, the president confirmed he will make that speech regardless, and continued delays in FEMA funding could last weeks.

“It could be at least another two weeks before we can fund this and reopen,” Halstead said. “But we still have a significant backlog. This will take a significant amount of time.”