Workers from the Federal Emergency Management Agency have been scouting shelters for the migrant children surging across the Southern border. They’ve been running coronavirus vaccination sites in Colorado, Massachusetts and Washington. And they are still managing the recovery from a string of record disasters starting with Hurricane Harvey in 2017. On the cusp of what experts say will be an unusually destructive season of hurricanes and wildfires, just 3,800 of the agency’s 13,700 emergency workers are available right now to respond to a new disaster. That’s 29 percent fewer than were ready to deploy at the start of last year’s hurricane period, which began, as it does every year, on June 1. FEMA has seldom been in greater demand — becoming a kind of 911 hotline for some of President Biden’s most pressing policy challenges. And the men and women who have become the nation’s first responders […]

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