(CNN) -- Even before the Los Angeles fires, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was under assault on all fronts.

Increasingly frequent weather disasters have strained its workforce and drained its Congress-funded coffers. And, since the first Trump administration, the agency has had further strain from bankrolling Covid recovery and paying states to shelter migrants.

Disaster-ravaged Americans speak of being thwarted by bureaucracy and red tape in their lowest, darkest moments. Republicans are calling for the agency to be overhauled and President Donald Trump on Friday suggested maybe FEMA shouldn't exist.

"I'll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA, or maybe getting rid of FEMA." Trump told reporters in North Carolina. "I think, frankly, FEMA is not good."

That could have chilling effects on emergency response even at state levels, former FEMA chief Deanne Criswell told CNN.

"We need to take him at his word, and I think state emergency management directors should be concerned about what this means for spring tornado season" and the coming hurricane season, Criswell said. "Do they have the resources to protect their residents?"

FEMA's past leaders agree something has to give, and told CNN the agency's current model - and the government structure it's housed under - is not sustainable.

"It's become a dumping ground for complex problems," said Brock Long, FEMA's administrator during Trump's first term.

Situated under the immigration-focused Department of Homeland Security, Long said FEMA has been saddled with issues beyond its natural disaster remit, including sheltering migrants and funding a complex nationwide Covid response.

"We can't keep adding more parts to FEMA and expect the agency to be able to accomplish its mission," Long said. "Its day job is hard enough."

FEMA is responding to increasingly frequent climate change-fueled disasters. Hurricane season used to be the agency's biggest concern. Now, it is activated around the clock as the US is battered by year-round disasters ranging from wildfires to spring thunderstorms producing biblical amounts of hail.

"We're seeing hurricane season last longer, we're seeing spring severe weather season get more significant and we're seeing the fire season go year-round now," said Criswell, who served in President Joe Biden's administration. The agency is "more engaged in wildfire response than we ever have before," she told CNN. Days before she stepped down amid a change in administrations, Criswell was overseeing the response to the deadly Los Angeles wildfires.

FEMA's disaster fund has run out of money 10 times since 2001. In 2024, its disaster fund was depleted even before hurricanes Helene and Milton. The agency's disaster fund will take another hit from the devastating Los Angeles wildfires just months after it was replenished.

Long oversaw FEMA during 2017, the costliest disaster year in US history. Multiple major hurricanes walloped the country, including Maria, the strongest hurricane to hit Puerto Rico, and Category 4 Hurricane Harvey. Since 2017, the US has experienced 164 separate disasters each costing over $1 billion in damage. Together, these disasters have killed more than 6,000 people and cost the US more than $1.3 trillion.

"After Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the agency has been redlining ever since, and has been stuck in this response phase," Long said.

The budget situation worsened due to the Covid-19 pandemic. In March 2020, Trump simultaneously greenlit 59 major disaster declarations - one for every state, plus territories and tribes - the first time FEMA's disaster fund was used during a public health crisis. It swamped the agency with funding requests.

"With that many disaster declarations ... it's like nothing we've ever seen before," Criswell said. "It takes years to pay and reimburse the expenses that jurisdictions have from any disaster."

Those constraints, combined with the fact that FEMA and DHS are required by law to keep budget requests capped to certain levels of spending, means FEMA is frequently running out of money. The agency will soon end its Covid-era reimbursements to states, closing out a major strain on its disaster relief fund.

A lot of the criticism lobbed at FEMA stems from misunderstanding what it does and how it works. Trump recently suggested disaster response should be managed by states - which is precisely how the system already works.

"I don't believe they truly understand what our role is," Criswell said of Trump and Republicans calling for such overhauls.

FEMA does not replace first responders, she said, and their mission "is to support state and local jurisdictions with their needs. They're the ones that are on the ground. They're the ones that are responding, and we want to be able to bring them the resources as quickly as possible."

FEMA is "lost" within the "big, behemoth organization" that is DHS, said Long, who suggests FEMA should be an independent, neutral agency like the FBI - more insulated to political changes in the White House.

"It really should be an agency void of politics," he said. "Hurricanes don't recognize the difference between Republicans and Democrats."

Criswell said making FEMA a cabinet-level agency would give it the "stature it needs" to sit on equal footing with other agencies and make sure each one is paying into longer-term recovery efforts.

But not all former FEMA heads agree pulling it out of DHS would be for the best.

"Think about how much time and money would be spent standing up FEMA as an independent agency," said Craig Fugate, who served under Obama. "What matters is the relationship between the FEMA administrator and the president."

Making communities more resilient and better prepared to withstand disasters in the first place is the path forward, multiple former FEMA heads told CNN. And FEMA is already doing that work, with billions of dollars from Biden's infrastructure and climate bills.

"We're not going to change the weather patterns," Criswell said. "But we can change the way communities are impacted by them."

The-CNN-Wire

™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.