Winter off to a roaring start in the Midwest and East as record cold moves in behind today’s winter storm in the Northeast

Dec 02, 2025

Over the weekend, CNN reported that 14 employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) who had been placed on administrative leave after putting their names on the “Katrina Declaration” — an August open letter from FEMA employees to Congress warning of potential serious emergency management failures due to the state of the agency — were reinstated to their jobs last week. CNN reported that the employees received notices stating, “the misconduct investigation has been closed, and as a result you are being removed from Administrative Leave.” One employee was told by a supervisor that the investigation had found that employees had not followed policy but were “protected by the whistleblower act.”

Then, in an amazing reversal, yesterday afternoon the Department of Homeland Security “re-suspended” these 14 employees, with a spokesperson stating:

CNN reporting revealed that 14 FEMA employees previously placed on leave for misconduct were wrongly and without authorization reinstated by bureaucrats acting outside of their authority. Once alerted, the unauthorized reinstatement was swiftly corrected by senior leadership. The 14 employees who signed the Katrina declaration have been returned to administrative leave. This Administration will not tolerate rogue conduct, unauthorized actions, or entrenched bureaucrats resisting change. Federal employees are expected to follow lawful direction, uphold agency standards, and serve the American people.

This is incredibly disturbing to me for a variety of reasons. At a basic level as someone who supervised federal employees for 25 years, I cannot imagine treating employees this way. I will fully admit that there needs to be reform in the way that federal supervisors can manage and discipline employees to reduce bureaucratic overhead — but a core tenet for employers should be to treat people with dignity and respect, and that is not happening here. This situation is just one of many over the last several months in FEMA and NOAA in which employees have been jerked around about their employment status. The mission of these federal agencies is to serve and protect our citizens, and we want a federal employment system that is seen by potential employees to be fair and attractive to the most talented candidates. Stories like this seriously damage the reputation of the federal government as a place for the best and brightest to build a career.

Furthermore, as someone who had to take annual Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA), my instinct is that an investigation did in fact find that the “Katrina Declaration” is a protected disclosure under that law, meaning that employees cannot legally be disciplined or retaliated against in any way for signing it. The WPA enables federal employees to disclose information to anyone that they “reasonably believe to be evidence of violation of any law or regulation, gross mismanagement, gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority or a substantial and specific danger to public health of safety.” It is hard for me to see how the Katrina Declaration would not fall under the WPA; hence, these “re-suspensions” will surely be seen by current federal employees of evidence that the administration will act against them even in situations where they should be protected by law.

This story also just adds to the woes at FEMA. Just yesterday, Government Executive published an article about all of the chaos at the agency as it waits for the release of the FEMA Review Council report. There is no doubt that FEMA needs significant reform, but again, it needs to be done in a holistic manner in a way that best supports effective emergency management at all levels of government. I fear that everything that has happened in 2025 has only caused additional significant damage to an agency that was already hurting; even if the soon to be released reform report calls for productive changes, this damage will likely make change even harder to implement.

We were very lucky to avoid a landfalling hurricane this year, but the next major disaster is only a matter of time. Effective emergency management is about not only responding to these disasters, but preparing for and mitigating against them ahead of time to save lives and reduce impacts. It is in all of our interests to have a world-class emergency management system at all levels of government. The next several months will be crucial to determining if the federal government can lead a process that will achieve that goal.

Taking a look at the winter storm we have been talking about, over the last 24 hours a swath of moderate to locally heavy snow spread from the Midwest across the Ohio Valley and into the eastern Great Lakes region. The heaviest snow fell over parts of the upper Ohio Valley with 3-6” and some locally heavier amounts common.

The forecast for today still generally looks on track with widespread heavy snowfall of 8-12” across the interior Northeast. Freezing rain has fallen in parts of the central Appalachians this morning causing issues, but most of that precipitation has now come to an end. Precipitation over the Northeast will be tapering off from west to east tonight.

In the wake of this storm system, the big story will be the unusually cold air filtering in behind it, with a number of record lows possible across the Midwest on Wednesday morning (top graphic) and from the Midwest into the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast on Thursday morning (bottom graphic). A number of record low maximum temperatures could also occur on Wednesday afternoon in the Midwest.

A new storm system will begin to develop along the Gulf Coast region Thursday and move east-northeast into Friday. While there is still uncertainty about how this system will evolve, it appears as though most of the heaviest precipitation will remain south of the cold air and fall as rain. However, some wintry precipitation is possible on the northern side of the precipitation shield from the Tennessee Valley into the Mid-Atlantic.