In the week after floods tore through Texas Hill Country, most survivors were unable to get through to a federal aid hotline because the Department of Homeland Security let funding lapse, according to publicly available contract records and internal FEMA call center logs obtained by NPR.
The call center staffing meltdown appears to have happened because of an administrative bottleneck created by the Trump administration. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem personally signs off on all funding requests for more than $100,000, according to House testimony by FEMA acting administrator David Richardson earlier this month. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
Under previous administrations, the FEMA administrator was able to personally sign off on large expenditures, according to Deanne Criswell, who led the agency under the Biden administration.
The FEMA call center staffing agreements with private vendors cost millions of dollars each month. Usually, FEMA renews such funding before it lapses, Criswell says.
"There should have been some kind of request long before they expired," she says.
But the day after the July 4 flash floods in Texas, the call center funding lapsed, contract records show. The next day, FEMA staff filed contract-related paperwork with DHS that stated that the funding had lapsed, according to publicly available contract records and internal FEMA records obtained by NPR.
But the money did not arrive for another five days, contract records and call logs show. Over that period, a surge of flood survivors called the agency looking for help with temporary housing, money for basic food and clothing, and other time-sensitive assistance.
On July 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 FEMA answered just over 15,000 of the approximately 55,000 calls that came in from disaster survivors, according to the internal FEMA logs obtained by NPR. The details of the call logs were first reported by The New York Times.
In comparison, after Hurricane Helene caused widespread devastation in the Southeast last year, FEMA call centers answered about 50% to 70% of calls from survivors, according to call center logs released by the agency.
Michael Coen, who served as FEMA chief of staff during the Obama and Biden administrations, said he couldn't recall ever seeing such a lapse in funding in his time at the agency.
"That's the last thing you want to do in the middle of response," Coen says.
On July 10, five days after the call center funding lapsed, FEMA's acting administrator, David Richardson, sent a memo to Secretary Noem asking her to approve funding for at least one call center vendor. That memo, obtained by NPR, lays out the dire effects of the delay, noting that survivors were waiting "over 90 minutes" to get through to FEMA, and that "The call center service level has gone from 99.9% of calls answered prior to hang up to 20% of calls answered."
Late that same day, on July 10, the funding was approved for all the vendors, and call centers were staffed adequately once again, according to contract reports and call center logs.
"The fact that he took five days is shocking," Criswell says.
NPR hasn't been able to verify when Noem or Richardson found out about the lapse in funding if it was prior to July 10.
In response to questions from NPR about why funding lapsed for FEMA call centers, and the resulting failure to answer calls from survivors, a FEMA spokesperson wrote in a statement to NPR, "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." The call center logs and Richardson's memo directly contradict this statement.
At least one Texas official expressed frustration with FEMA's call center performance and blamed cuts to the agency. In a post on the social media site X, Lesley Briones, a county commissioner in Harris County, Texas, wrote, "The vital agency is understaffed and under-resourced, creating a dangerous situation for communities vulnerable to disasters."
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions from NPR. President Trump has repeatedly said that FEMA should be eliminated. The agency has lost thousands of staff to layoffs, retirements and resignations since Trump took office.
Two of the four private vendors who staff FEMA call centers, Maximus and General Dynamics Information Technology, referred NPR's questions to FEMA. Meredith Matthews, a spokesperson for another vendor called TTEC, wrote in an email to NPR that she could not "share specific contractual or operational details" and that "TTEC has a long-standing history of supporting FEMA's mission to assist disaster survivors, and we're proud to be part of those efforts — especially during times of urgent need like the recent Texas floods." The last vendor did not respond to questions from NPR.
Internal FEMA documents contradict testimony about how many calls were answered
During testimony before a House subcommittee on July 23, Richardson was asked about the agency's staffing of call centers.
Rep. Laura Friedman, D-Calif., asked the FEMA leader about the report in The New York Times that showed FEMA call centers had been inadequately staffed in the week after the Texas floods.
Friedman asked specifically about calls that came in on Monday, July 7, the first weekday after the deadly July 4 disaster. On that day, there was a surge in the number of callers to the FEMA assistance hotline for disaster survivors, according to FEMA call center logs obtained by NPR. But those logs show that only 10% of the more than 15,000 calls that FEMA received that day were answered.
"Isn't it accurate that 80% … of the calls that went to FEMA call centers on July 7th went unanswered?" Friedman asked Richardson.
"When the tragedy struck, we knew there would be," Richardson began, before being interrupted by Rep. Friedman.
"[It's] a yes or no question," Friedman said. "They either answered the calls or they didn't answer the calls on July 7th."
"When there was a spike in calls, FEMA was there to answer the calls," Richardson said. "The majority of the calls were answered at the call centers."
Richardson went on to say, twice, that "there was never a lapse in contract."
Richardson was "splitting hairs," says Christopher Byrne, who worked as a senior contracting officer at the U.S. General Services Administration, which handles procurement across the federal government, for about 30 years before he retired last summer.
The umbrella contract with the vendors did not lapse, Byrne points out. But the funding did. Without the funding, the FEMA call centers stopped working just as survivors began emerging from the Texas floods.
"Why weren't they working between the 6th and the 9th? Because I can't tell you to work without money," Byrne says.
And Richardson's testimony appears to be contradicted by the July 10 memo obtained by NPR showing he requested that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem approve call center funding. That memo, which was signed by Richardson, acknowledges that most calls were not being answered at that time, and says, "The contract was placed on hold on July 5, 2025, and is needed immediately to support the disaster response in Texas."
The call center funding is set to lapse again on Aug. 8
FEMA has the option to renew funding for call center staff every 30 days, contract records show. The current funding expires on Friday, Aug. 8. As of Aug. 6, it did not appear that DHS had approved any more money, according to the public federal procurement database.
The reason that the funding expires every 30 days is that the number of calls the agency receives from Americans seeking help after disasters fluctuates throughout the year. During times of year when there are fewer weather disasters, the agency receives fewer calls and can choose to spend less money staffing call centers.
But the 30-day clock creates a lot of work for FEMA staff, Byrne says.
Byrne reviewed publicly available orders related to FEMA call center contracts for NPR. "Based on these orders, FEMA has a crazy workload," Byrne says, "and they're understaffed."
NPR's Stephen Fowler and Lauren Sommer contributed to this story.
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