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      Trump news at a glance: president hints he already has replacement in mind for Fed governor Lisa Cook

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      Donald Trump has suggested he already has a replacement in mind for the Federal Reserve governor he is trying to force, even as Lisa Cook said she would sue the administration over her removal.Speaking during a cabinet meeting lasting more than three hours on Tuesday, the US president said: “We have some very good people for that position. I think, maybe in my own mind, I have somebody that I like.”Trump said he would consult Scott Bessent, the treasury secretary, and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary.Trump is reportedly considering the possibility of naming his economic adviser Stephen Miran to serve out the remainder of Cook’s term, which does not expire until 2038. Earlier this month, Trump nominated Miran to serve for a much shorter term, as a replacement for another member of the Fed’s board, Adriana Kugler, a Biden nominee who was due to be replaced in five months.Cook has said that she will sue to keep her position as a governor of the independent central bank and her lawyer, Abbe Lowell, called Trump’s move to fire her “illegal”.Here is the key Trump administration news of the day:Fed governor to sue over Trump attempt to fire herThe Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook will sue the Trump administration over its bid to fire her over unconfirmed allegations of mortgage fraud, her attorney has said.Donald Trump announced he was firing Cook on Monday night, in an extraordinary move that marks the latest escalation in the US president’s attack on the central bank’s independence.But Trump has “no authority” to remove her from the Fed’s board of governors, Cook’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, argued in a statement to reporters, saying: “His attempt to fire her, based solely on a referral letter, lacks any factual or legal basis. We will be filing a lawsuit challenging this illegal action.”Read the full storyTrump says he wants ‘nothing less than $500m’ from Harvard Donald Trump said on Tuesday that his administration “wants nothing less than $500m from Harvard” as a condition for restoring billions of dollars in federal funding to the Ivy League university.“Don’t negotiate with them, they’ve been very bad,” Trump told his education secretary, Linda McMahon, in a cabinet meeting.Read the full storyTexas sued for allegedly stripping Black voters of political power Texas’s redrawn congressional maps have drawn a lawsuit from the NAACP, accusing the state of committing a racial gerrymander with its maps that strip Black voters of their political power.Read the full storyCourt tosses Trump lawsuit against Maryland judges over US deportationsA federal judge on Tuesday dismissed an unprecedented lawsuit filed by the Trump administration earlier in the summer against all 15 judges serving on Maryland’s federal district court – a case that opposed pausing some deportations from the state.In a 37-page ruling, US district judge Thomas Cullen of Virginia’s western district – nominated and confirmed to his position during Donald Trump’s first presidency – wrote that “any fair reading of the legal authorities cited by defendants leads to the ineluctable conclusion that this court has no alternative but to dismiss”.Read the full storyUS envoy sparks uproar after telling Lebanese journalists to ‘act civilised’Journalists in Lebanon have demanded an apology from a senior US envoy after he told them to “act civilized” and not be “animalistic”.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      The Trump administration is cancelling another $175m in funding for California’s high-speed rail, marking another setback for the state’s much-delayed project.

      Melania Trump on Tuesday invited schools students to participate in a government-sponsored nationwide contest that is designed to encourage them to work together to use artificial intelligence tools to solve community issues.

      The Democratic governor of Illinois, JB Pritzker, has hit back at Donald Trump for commenting on his weight, saying the Republican president is himself “not in good shape” amid escalating tension over the possible deployment of the national guard on the streets of Chicago.

      Trump has welcomed Cracker Barrell’s decision to reverse changes to its logo that were considered “woke”.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 25 August 2025. More

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      Trump is out to end the Fed’s autonomy. Here’s how he’s trying to get his way

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      When Donald Trump stepped up his campaign to influence the US Federal Reserve, he traveled less than a mile from the White House, to tour the central bank’s headquarters. But as the administration considers how to actually get what it wants, one of the US president’s acolytes looked about 500 miles south.A condominium above the Four Seasons hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, is at the heart of an extraordinary battle over the future of the Fed, and the independence of its power of the world’s largest economy.For a generation, presidents have respected the Fed’s autonomy. They might disagree with its decisions. But they allowed it to make long-term calls in the best interest of the economy, even if they caused short-term political discomfort.Trump has ignored this precedent.Since returning to office in January, he has lambasted the Fed publicly and relentlessly – calling its chairperson, Jerome Powell, a “moron”, a “numbskull” and a “disaster” – and accused the central bank of damaging the US economy by failing to cut interest rates.As the Fed declined to lower rates at five consecutive meetings, Trump escalated his attacks, even suggesting (without evidence) that multi-billion dollar renovations of its Washington headquarters were tantamount to fraud.But policymakers held the line. With most rate-setting officials wanting to wait and see the impact of Trump’s policies – from trade wars to deportations – on the economy, they sat on their hands.While the Fed might be on the cusp of resuming rate cuts, Powell has made clear rates are unlikely to fall as drastically as the president wants.So how does Trump actually get what he wants?Back to that condo in Atlanta. It was allegedly bought by Lisa Cook, a respected economist appointed by Joe Biden to serve on the Fed’s board of governors, in July 2021. Trump’s officials claim she took out a mortgage which listed the property as her primary residence – two weeks after taking out another mortgage, which listed a property in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as her principal residence.The allegations – similar to those that the administration has leveled against other opponents – are unconfirmed. But that didn’t stop Trump from immediately demanding Cook’s resignation.When Cook refused to be “bullied”, he tried to fire her. Cook has insisted Trump has no authority to do so, and her attorney has pledged to sue the administration over its bid to remove her from her post.The Fed’s rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) is in Trump’s sights. There are 12 seats around the table, filled by five representatives of local reserve banks and seven governors.Fed governors, once appointed, are hard to replace. A full term lasts 14 years, enabling them – in theory – to take a longer view on the economy than, say, presidential administrations working on four-year cycles.Cook’s term is not due to expire until 2038. It now appears likely that her future at the Fed will be settled in court. But Trump’s bid to exert control over the central bank, and its rate-setting committee, does not end there.He has already nominated one ally to sit on the Fed’s board of governors, following the exit of Adriana Kugler, another Biden appointee, earlier this month. Two other governors have already publicly sided with the president on rate cuts, and reportedly made the administration’s shortlist of potential successors to Powell.Powell’s term as Fed chair is due to end in May. His term as a governor is not due to expire until January 2028, but departing chairs have typically left the board at the same time.The Fed has so far defied Trump’s demands. But each departure enables him to build his influence over its policy committee – with view to obtaining an outright majority. Like the supreme court, these nominations have implications for years to come.The administration is arguing a mortgage on a condo in Atlanta should allow it handpick another official to join the Fed’s board. Who knows what the next purported reason will be, should it have another go.Trump has made no secret of this plan. “We’ll have a majority very shortly,” he claimed to reporters at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday. “So that’ll be great.”Of course, receiving his backing today does not guarantee his support tomorrow.Eight years ago, when he tapped Powell to lead the Fed, the president delivered a strikingly different verdict to the ones he now routinely publishes on social media. “He’s strong, he’s committed and he’s smart,” said Trump. More

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      Who is Lisa Cook, the Fed governor facing removal by Trump?

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      Lisa Cook, the first Black woman to sit on the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, is now facing removal by Donald Trump, another obstacle in a long line she has faced and written about during her experiences as one of a small number of Black women in the field of economics.Cook was nominated to the Fed in 2022 by then president Joe Biden after building a career that spanned both government and academia, including work at the treasury department, service in the White House, and a long record of scholarly contributions.But her path to confirmation wasn’t without hostility. Republicans opposed her nomination, forcing Vice-President Kamala Harris to break a 50–50 Senate deadlock. That narrow vote made Cook the first, and so far the only, Black woman to serve as a Fed governor.Her potential dismissal comes just days after federal housing finance agency director Bill Pulte alleged on social media that she falsified records and other documents to obtain favorable mortgage terms prior to her appointment. Cook has not been charged with a crime or found guilty of misconduct.By law, governors on the Fed’s board are appointed to 14-year terms and can only be removed for “cause”, generally understood to mean corruption or serious wrongdoing. Cook has continued to push back. Last week, she declared she had “no intention of being bullied” and promised to gather “accurate information to answer any legitimate questions and provide the facts”.In a statement on Tuesday, she insisted that “no cause exists under the law, and he [Trump] has no authority” to strip her of the seat she has held since 2022. Her attorney has said they intend to sue.Since joining the board, Cook has consistently voted in line with chair Jerome Powell, supporting last year’s decision to cut interest rates and this year’s decision to hold them steady. She is sometimes described as a “dove”, a label economists use for officials who lean toward lower rates.Cook was born in Georgia, where she was raised by a hospital chaplain and a nursing professor. She and her sisters were among the first Black students to integrate their schools.She went on to study at Spelman College, then Oxford University as a Marshall scholar, before earning her PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997.Her academic work often linked economics with the realities of race and discrimination. One of her most recognized works, Violence and economic activity: evidence from African American patents, described how lynchings and other acts of racial violence in the late 1800s and early 1900s drastically reduced patent activity among Black inventors.Cook has also written candidly about the challenges she has faced in her profession. In a 2019 opinion piece in the New York Times, she and a co-author argued that “economics is neither a welcoming nor a supportive profession for women”.She added: “But if economics is hostile to women, it is especially antagonistic to Black women.” More

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      What the Democrats can learn from Gavin Newsom’s Trump mockery | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      Gavin Newsom’s recent mockery of Donald Trump proves that imitation isn’t always the sincerest form of flattery. Amid the ongoing battle over congressional redistricting, Newsom’s pitch-perfect posts about Trump’s “TINY HANDS” and California’s “PERFECT MAPS” have been wildly entertaining, and, at least by one measure, wildly successful – the posts have garnered millions of views and counting.While it’s refreshing to see a prominent Democrat unapologetically standing up to the current administration, Newsom’s jabs also reinforce the staying power of Trump’s blustery and incoherent style. And they reveal the degree to which the attention economy has disrupted our focus and degraded our language.Trump continues to benefit from the steady decline in the American attention span driven by social media. His style of short, punchy, inflammatory language – and his strategy of flooding the zone with a new federal freak show day after day – is engineered to succeed in this chaotic environment. But some recent online victories seem to indicate that progressives can also win on this battlefield if they deploy the right combination of profane style and policy substance.It’s possible the Trump era would never have been inaugurated without the concurrent smartphone era reshaping attention spans and media habits. One survey has found that Americans check their phones an astonishing 144 times daily, and about 40% of adults report being “almost constantly online”. As a result, Americans are reading less. In 2024, less than half of adults said they had picked up a book in the past year, continuing a consistent downward trend.The MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes has analyzed this regression in his book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (a story that millions of Americans could benefit from understanding, if only they were still reading). He argues that the relentless competition for attention erodes thoughtful discourse while incentivizing the most thoughtless voices. It has contributed to mental health crises, the decline of journalism, and political polarization. It also fueled the rise of Donald Trump, who long ago proved himself to be a malignant savant of attention manipulation.Trump’s understanding of the new media ecosystem propelled all three of his presidential campaigns. In 2016, he received an estimated $5.6bn worth of free media. By that September, the word Americans associated the most with Hillary Clinton was “email”, while they connected Trump with “speech”, “president” and “immigration”.Fast forward to 2024, and he kept courting online attention with stunts such as working a choreographed 30-minute “shift” at McDonald’s. He dominated news media with mendacity which demanded journalistic coverage, such as his promotion of the xenophobic falsehood that Haitian migrants were eating Ohio pets. As Hayes wrote, Trump’s approach to politics over the last decade has been the “equivalent of running naked through the neighborhood: repellent but transfixing”.Now, Trump is not just benefiting from but intentionally accelerating these reversals. He has defunded and harassed leading research universities, censored historical exhibits at museums, and created Truth Social – an imitation of Twitter that has emerged as a playground for conspiracy theorists.He is attempting the governmental equivalent of a lobotomy.These setbacks have led progressives to increasingly understand that electoral victory requires digital dominance. And squaring up with Trump on social media appears a prerequisite for rallying the public around any political vision. As one strategist put it while praising Newsom’s Trump impersonation: “Democrats are over being the ‘nice guy’ party.”Already, there is some delightful needling of the right easily found in the proverbial social media haystack. The streamer Hasan Piker has been described as a “gateway drug” for progressive politics, while his engaging brand of explicit quips led GQ to name him “the hottest left-wing political commentator online”. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez streamed herself playing the game Among Us with Piker before the 2020 election, she almost broke a livestreaming record on the Twitch platform, drawing about 440,000 concurrent viewers.Elected Democrats are also taking off their virtual gloves. The Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, responded to Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico by threatening to rechristen Lake Michigan “Lake Illinois”. In an example of game respecting game, Zohran Mamdani’s strategy of speaking directly to voters through social media received unlikely praise from Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Greene is less a fan of the Texas representative Jasmine Crockett, who went viral for describing Greene as having a “bleach blond, bad-built, butch body”. And in Maine, the oysterman and Democratic US Senate candidate Graham Platner is drawing headlines for a pugnacious campaign launch video in which he declares: “The difference between Susan Collins and Ted Cruz is at least Ted Cruz is honest about selling us out and not giving a damn.”Still, talking the talk also requires walking the walk by implementing bold, authentically progressive initiatives. One of Newsom’s Trump-mocking posts announced an aggressive redistricting plan to counter Republican gerrymandering in Texas. Bernie Sanders has endorsed that move, just as he endorsed Mamdani, whose affordability agenda represents another ambitious stance to match pugilistic rhetoric.Otherwise, adhering to the philosophy of “when they go low, we go high” risks failing to meet voters where they are. It seems Americans seek a fighter on their behalf and at their side.“THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.” More

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      Republicans are trying to ensure we’ll never have another fair election | Judith Levine

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      “Christians, get out and vote, just this time,” Donald Trump exhorted the audience at a campaign event organized by the conservative Turning Point Action in July 2024. “In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”Since his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020, Trump has been building toward delivery on that promise, first by fomenting suspicion of widespread election fraud, then by trying to overturn the results via legal challenge and intimidation, and finally, on 6 January 2021, by force. Now the White House and Republicans both in Washington and the states are colluding more brazenly than ever to “fix it” – “it” meaning free and fair elections they might lose.Republicans’ aim is permanent control of the US government. Trump’s is the crown. As their assaults on voting rights – and the institution of elections itself – escalate, their success begins to look, if not inevitable, alarmingly possible.Trump’s tactics are working.The 2020 election was the cleanest and most efficient in memory. Claims of rampant fraud are lies – the big lie, as the 2021 House impeachment committee put it. But not among Republican voters. A Pew survey taken before the 2024 election found that Trump supporters were “deeply skeptical about the way the election will be conducted”, especially compared with Harris supporters. Whereas over 85% of Democratic voters believed in 2024 that absentee ballots would be counted accurately, and ineligible voters prevented from voting, among Trump supporters only 38% and 30%, respectively, felt the same.Buoyed by the big lie – and liberated by the supreme court’s 2013 gutting of the Voting Rights Act – voter suppression attempts reached a peak after the 2020 elections, when legislators introduced more than 400 restrictive bills. Signing Georgia’s 98-page Election Integrity Act in 2021, Brian Kemp, the Republican governor, was unambiguous about its partisan aim. “After the November election last year” –when record turnout in the reliably red state yielded victories for Biden and two Democratic US senators, and the secretary of state resisted Trump’s shakedown to “find 11,780 votes” to reverse the outcome – “I knew, like so many of you, that significant reforms to our state elections were needed,” he said.By September 2024, 31 states had enacted 114 such laws.In May 2024, Trump told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he would accept the results of the election only if “everything’s honest” – that is, if he won. This definition of honesty took hold. According to some polls, before election day, fewer than a quarter of Trump supporters believed the election would be fair. After it, their confidence rates more than doubled. And while Republican concerns about fraud were pervasive in 2020, they were – surprise, surprise – virtually nonexistent when the 2024 results came in.With their man in the White House, congressional Republicans set about preparing for his coronation. Three days into Trump’s term, the Tennessee representative Andy Ogles introduced a bill to amend the constitution to allow presidents to serve three terms. At Trumpstore.com, you can buy a red “Trump 2028” cap for $50.On 25 March Trump issued the executive order “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” which melds his xenophobic paranoia-mongering with his desire to “fix” elections. Its mandates range from requiring proof of citizenship to vote (an answer to the spectral threat of undocumented people stuffing the ballot boxes) to a ban on the bar codes that expedite vote counting.The executive order itself is illegal. The constitution gives the states, not the president, the power to regulate elections.On 4 April, the House passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (Save) Act, requiring registrants and voters to document citizenship.The GOP’s election-interference campaign is accelerating. On 7 July, the justice department’s civil rights division wrote a letter to Greg Abbott, the Texas governor, and Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, alleging that four of its majority-minority “coalition districts” are illegal under the Voting Rights Act and directing the state to redraw its electoral map. Voting rights experts dispute this interpretation. In fact, the law prohibits the dilution of the electoral power of voters of color either by packing them into one district or spreading them out by gerrymandering–which is what the new map would do.In mid-July, the justice department issued broad requests to state election officials to turn over their election data and voter rolls. In Colorado, where Biden won by 11 points in 2020, a guy called Jeff Small – chief of staff to the Colorado Republican representative and Save Act cheerleader Lauren Boebert – began contacting officials claiming he was working with the Trump administration on election “integrity” and asking if they would kindly let the feds, or somebody, inspect their voting machines, according to Washington Post reporting. After one such request, the Department of Homeland Security called to follow up.Officials of both parties were outraged, especially when it came to monkeying with the equipment, an illegal act. “Anybody who is asking for access to the voting machines outside of the law” is suspicious, the Republican executive director of the Colorado County Clerks Association told the Washington Post. “That automatically raises red flags in terms of their intent.”Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state made the larger point: “This all is part of a bigger ploy to further undermine our voting in this country,” she said. “They are actively in a power grab.”Meanwhile, the White House was leaning on Texas’s governor and legislative leaders to redraw their electoral map according to Trump’s specifications, dismantling Democratic strongholds to create five more Republican House seats – to which the president averred his party was “entitled”. When Texas got onboard, on 3 August the state’s 51 Democrats left the state, risking fines and arrest, to thwart the effort.To cover all bases, on 7 August, Trump ordered the commerce department to prepare a new US census leaving out undocumented immigrants. Under the constitution, the census counts the number of “persons”, not citizens; it must be conducted “within every … ten years”, and states must redistrict to concur with new data. In a post on Truth Social, the president described a bespoke tally “using the results and information gained from the Presidential Election of 2024”.The same day, the vice-president, JD Vance, descended on bright-red Indiana with a trio of Trump appointees to strong-arm its leaders to redistrict as well. Afterward, on X, Indiana’s lieutenant governor, Micah Beckwith, genuflected to Vance: “Your bold leadership and unwavering support for President Trump’s mission to expand the conservative majority in Congress is exactly what America needs right now.”On Fox News, the vice-president echoed Trump’s contention that counting undocumented immigrants in the census unfairly gives the advantage to Democrats, whom he also charged with “aggressive” gerrymandering. “We’re just trying to rebalance the scales,” Vance said.After two weeks, Democrats returned to the Texas state house. Republican leaders forced them to sign “permission slips” to leave the chamber and assigned police escorts to monitor them. After refusing to sign, one Democrat spent nights in the chamber. While speaking on the phone with Gavin Newsom, the California governor, from the bathroom, she was informed the call constituted a felony, she said.On Saturday, the Texas senate approved legislation creating the new map, which Abbott says he will sign “swiftly”. The move had already set off an avalanche of mid-decade redistricting, led by California. Other states, controlled by both parties, may follow.Last week on Truth Social, Trump announced he would “lead a movement” to eliminate mail-in ballots – an idea he apparently picked up from Vladimir Putin – and also “inaccurate” voting machines. He said he would sign an executive order to this effect soon. “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes,” Trump fantasized. “They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”Maybe the following order will eliminate voting altogether – for the good of our country, of course.

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

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      What Trump’s move to fire Fed governor means for central bank’s independence

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      Donald Trump has said he is firing Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, in a move viewed as a sharp escalation in his battle to exert greater control over the independent institution.Trump said in a letter posted on his Truth Social platform that he is firing Cook because of allegations she committed mortgage fraud. The allegation was made last week by Bill Pulte, a Trump appointee to the Federal Housing Administration, an agency that regulates mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.Cook previously said she would not leave her post.Trump has repeatedly attacked the Fed’s chair, Jerome Powell, for not cutting its short-term interest rate, and even threatened to fire him. Powell, who has previously warned that tariffs will push up inflation, told the Jackson Hole economic symposium in Wyoming last week that the Fed could soon change its policy stance.Powell’s caution has infuriated Trump, who has demanded the Fed cut borrowing costs to spur the economy and reduce the interest rates the federal government pays on its debt. Trump has also accused Powell of mismanaging the US central bank’s $2.5bn building renovation project.Firing the Fed chair or forcing out a governor threatens the Fed’s venerated independence, which has long been supported by most economists and Wall Street investors. Here’s what to know about the Fed:The Fed wields extensive power over the US economy. By cutting the short-term interest rate it controls – which it typically does when the economy falters – the Fed can make borrowing cheaper and encourage more spending, accelerating growth and hiring. When it raises the rate – which it does to cool the economy and combat inflation – it can weaken the economy and cause job losses.Economists have long preferred independent central banks because they can more easily take unpopular steps to fight inflation, such as raise interest rates, which makes borrowing to buy a home, car, or appliance more expensive.The importance of an independent Fed was cemented for most economists after the extended inflation spike of the 1970s and early 1980s. Arthur Burns, former Fed chair, has been widely blamed for allowing the painful inflation of that era to accelerate by succumbing to pressure from Richard Nixon to keep rates low heading into the 1972 election. Nixon feared higher rates would cost him the election, which he won in a landslide.Paul Volcker was eventually appointed chair of the Fed in 1979 by Jimmy Carter, and he pushed the Fed’s short-term rate to the stunningly high level of nearly 20%. (It is currently 4.3%). The eye-popping rates triggered a sharp recession, pushed unemployment to nearly 11% and spurred widespread protests.Yet Volcker didn’t flinch. By the mid-1980s, inflation had fallen back into the low single digits. Volcker’s willingness to inflict pain on the economy to throttle inflation is seen by most economists as a key example of the value of an independent Fed.An effort to fire Powell would almost certainly cause stock prices to fall and bond yields to spike higher, pushing up interest rates on government debt and raising borrowing costs for mortgages, auto loans and credit card debt. The interest rate on the 10-year treasury is a benchmark for mortgage rates.Most investors prefer an independent Fed, partly because it typically manages inflation better without being influenced by politics but also because its decisions are more predictable. Fed officials often publicly discuss how they would alter interest rate policies if economic conditions changed.If the Fed was more swayed by politics, it would be harder for financial markets to anticipate – or understand – its decisions.The supreme court in a ruling earlier this year suggested that a president can’t fire the chair of the Fed just because he doesn’t like the chair’s policy choices. But he may be able to remove him “for cause”, typically interpreted to mean some kind of wrongdoing or negligence.It’s a likely reason the Trump administration has zeroed in on the building renovation, in hopes it could provide a “for cause” pretext. Still, Powell would likely fight any attempt to remove him, and the case could wind up at the supreme court. More

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      Fema staff warn Trump’s cuts risk exposing US to another Hurricane Katrina

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      Donald Trump’s attacks on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) risk exposing the US to another Hurricane Katrina, staff at the agency have warned Congress in a withering critique that also takes aim at its current leadership.Writing in the run up to this week’s 20th anniversary of the devastating 2005 storm that killed 1,833 people and caused widespread destruction in New Orleans and the Gulf coast, more than 180 current and former Fema employees say the Trump administration’s policies are ignoring the mistakes that led to it.The letter, sent to members of Congress and a council formed to examine the agency’s future, follows months of criticism of Fema from Trump and senior administration officials, who have threatened to close it, prompting more than 2,000 staff – about one-third of its permanent workforce – to depart, leaving it short of institutional expertise in key positions.It comes after last month’s deadly flooding in Texas that left at least 135 – including 37 school children – dead. Experts said the death toll may have been inflated by the upheaval at Fema, claiming it diminished its capacity to respond quickly.The letter, entitled The Katrina Declaration, accused the Trump administration of disregarding the Post-Katrina Emergency Reform Act (PKERMA), passed in 2006 with the intention of absorbing the lessons of the disaster.“Hurricane Katrina was not just a natural disaster, but a man-made one,” the signatories wrote.“The inexperience of senior leaders and the profound failure by the federal government to deliver timely, unified, and effective aid to those in need left survivors to fend for themselves.“Two decades later, Fema is enacting processes and leadership structures that echo the conditions PKERMA was designed to prevent.”It is also scathing about Kristi Noem, who as homeland security secretary, has overall responsibility for Fema, and about two administrators who have been placed in charge of the agency since Trump’s inauguration.“Since January 2025, Fema has been under the leadership of individuals lacking legal qualifications, Senate approval, and the demonstrated background required of a Fema administrator,” the signatories said.The letter identifies the current Fema acting administrator, David Richardson, who has no previous experience in disaster management, and his predecessor, Cameron Hamilton, who was appointed by Trump only to be fired after publicly saying he opposed plans to abolish the agency.“Decisions made [by Noem, Richardson and Hamiltion] … hinder the swift execution of our mission, and dismiss experienced staff whose institutional knowledge and relationships are vital to ensure effective emergency management,” it said.Noem has angered seasoned officials by demanding that contracts worth more more than $100,000 be personally approved by her – a stipulation specialists say significantly slowed the response to the Texas floods.Richardson’s suitability was questioned after he told staff that he did not know the US had a hurricane season – which lasts from the start of May till 30 November. His office later insisted he was joking.The letter states: “Our shared commitment to our country, our oaths of office, and our mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters compel us to warn Congress and the American people of the cascading effects of decisions made by the current administration.”Six statements of opposition in the letter include condemnation of “the ongoing failure to appoint a qualified FEMA administrator, as required by law”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIt also includes criticism of the administration’s “censorship of climate science”.“This administration’s decision to ignore and disregard the facts pertaining to climate science in disasters shows a blatant disregard for the safety and security of our nation’s people and all American communities regardless of their geographic, economic or ethnic diversity,” the signatories write.A petition at the end of the letter demands that Fema be given full cabinet level agency status and defended from interference from the Department of Homeland Security. The department recently ordered Fema agents to assist Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) agents in immigration raids, threatening to fire those who refused.Trump, who has set up a review council headed by Noem to consider Fema’s future, has repeatedly said he favors its abolition, though he softened his rhetoric following the Texas floods, amid suggestions that it could be “rebranded” with more of its functions being devolved to the states.Thirty-six of the signatories – including some currently working at the agency – attached their names, leaving them open to possible retribution. Another 144 withheld their identities.One signatory, Michael Coen, a former Fema chief of staff under Joe Biden and Barack Obama, told the Guardian in a statement: “I am proud of the current and former FEMA employees for having the courage to speak up. Lessons were learned from Katrina and Congress took action. Those lessons and actions are being disregarded by the Trump administration.”Daniel Llargués, Fema’s acting press secretary, dismissed the criticisms voiced in the letter.“It is not surprising that some of the same bureaucrats who presided over decades of inefficiency are now objecting to reform,” he told the New York Times. He said the Trump administration “is committed to ensuring Fema delivers for the American people” and to cutting “red tape, inefficiency and outdated processes” in the agency. More