The main purpose of this blog will be to track planetary extreme, or record temperatures related to climate change. Any reports I see of ETs will be listed below the main topic of the day. I’ll refer to extreme or record temperatures as ETs (not extraterrestrials).😜
Main Topic: ‘New Year’s Eve Massacre’: Trump Administration Makes Deep Cuts at FEMA as Climate Crisis Accelerates
Dear Diary. As far as Republican mentality goes since before the time of Ronald Reagan during the 1980s, central government should be drowned in a bathtub. Everything done for the public besides military defense should be left up to state governments. Trump and his cronies are just continuing that line of thinking via policy. The line of faulty logic behind this is that society and people in general will prosper more if money and resources ‘trickle down’ from those who will become wealthier via less federal taxes.
This is nonsense looking at history. During the first Gilded Age from about 1870 through World War I and the 1920s we saw a great disparity between classes. Human greed from robber barons didn’t permit much money from tickling down to the poor. It was only after Franklin Roosevelt was elected because of the advent of the Great Depression that federal programs were implemented that greatly alleviated suffering. This meant that upper classes were taxed more, who have been fighting to undo what FDR in the 1930s and Lynden Johnson and Richard Nixon implemented during the 1960s and 1970s.
One such program is FEMA or the Federal Emergency Management Agency. I ask, would it be better if every individual state took care of natural disaster victims? I seriously doubt that. A couple of CAT4/5 hurricanes hitting say Louisiana or Florida would strain those state government budgets such that most people would not get much help. Then again maybe Republicans want an everyone for themselves society such that if you get hit be horrendous weather or wildfires, too bad. This is madness considering that climate change is producing an increasing number of deadly natural disasters.
Here is more Trump madness to start of the new year:
The FEMA Colorado Task Force 1 navigates the Guadalupe River on a boat as search for victims continues on July 18, 2025 in Center Point, Texas. (Photo by Brenda Bazán / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
‘New Year’s Eve Massacre’: Trump Administration Makes Deep Cuts at FEMA as Climate Crisis Accelerates
A former FEMA official said that the agency “can’t do disaster response and recovery without” the employees being terminated by the Trump administration.
Jan 02, 2026
The Trump administration this week made abrupt cuts to the top federal disaster response agency, even as US communities face increased threats from natural disasters caused by the global climate crisis.
Independent journalist Marisa Kabas reported on Wednesday that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) “has begun issuing termination notices” to staff at the agency’s Cadre of On-Call Response and Recovery (CORE) that are effective as of January 2.
A FEMA staffer who spoke with Kabas described the terminations as “The New Year’s Eve Massacre,” and explained that “the driving force behind all CORE employees is supporting and enacting the mission of preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters.”
A Thursday report from CNN added some additional details to Kabas’ reporting, including that the decision to issue the layoffs was made by Acting Administrator Karen Evans, who was appointed to the role after former Acting Administrator David Richardson resigned in November.
One former FEMA official bluntly told CNN that the agency “can’t do disaster response and recovery without CORE employees” that are being laid off by the administration.
The former FEMA official added that regional agency offices throughout the US “are almost entirely CORE staff, so the first FEMA people who are usually onsite won’t be there,” which will mean that “states are on their own” when it comes to disaster response.
CNN also reported that there is anxiety among remaining FEMA staffers that these cuts could just be the start “of a larger effort” by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “to shrink FEMA, potentially axing thousands of workers in the coming months who deploy during hurricanes, wildfires and other national emergencies.”
President Donald Trump has been targeting FEMA for potential termination for nearly a year now, and he said shortly after being inaugurated last January that a goal in his second term would be “fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA,” while emphasizing that individual states should bear the cost of responding to natural disasters.
“I think, frankly, FEMA’s not good,” the president said. “I think when you have a problem like this, I think you want to go, and whether it’s a Democrat or Republican governor, you want to use your state to fix it and not waste time calling FEMA.”
The Trump administration’s deep cuts to FEMA come as the intensity of natural disasters is only projected to increase thanks to climate change.
According to a report published on Tuesday by the Yale School of the Environment, 2025 was the second hottest on record and was only surpassed by the previous year.
“The last three years have been, by a wide margin, the hottest ever recorded,” stressed the report. “Each of the last three years has measured more than 1.5°C warmer than preindustrial times, putting the world at least temporarily in breach of an international goal to limit warming below that level.”
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Brad Reed is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
Here are some “ETs” recorded from around the planet the last couple of days, their consequences, and some extreme temperature outlooks, as well as any extreme precipitation reports:
Here is More Climate News from Friday:
(As usual, this will be a fluid post in which more information gets added during the day as it crosses my radar, crediting all who have put it on-line. Items will be archived on this site for posterity. In most instances click on the pictures of each tweet to see each article. The most noteworthy items will be listed first.)