The head of FEMA defended the agency on Capitol Hill. Trump fired him.
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On Thursday, the Trump administration forced Cameron Hamilton, the acting head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, out of his job. The move came one day after Hamilton told lawmakers that the agency, which the administration favors dismantling, shouldn’t be eliminated.
“I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” Hamilton told members of the House homeland security subcommittee. President Donald J. Trump named him acting head of the agency — more specifically, the senior official performing the duties of the administrator — in January. His bio no longer appears on the FEMA website.
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Hamilton’s statement directly contradicted one made a day earlier by his boss, Kristi Noem. She leads the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, which oversees FEMA. Addressing the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday, she said, “The president has indicated he wants to eliminate FEMA as it exists today.”
Neither FEMA or DHS explained why Hamilton is no longer in his position.
Tension between Hamilton and Noem has been mounting for weeks. In late March, after news leaked that DHS was considering downsizing FEMA, the department suspected Hamilton of leaking the information and gave him a lie detector test, which cleared him. Politico was the first to report his ouster.
“I think Cam did the best he could with what he was facing,” one person who recently left the agency and asked to remain anonymous told Grist. “He earned a lot of respect from FEMA staff.”
FEMA employed more than 20,000 people at the start of the second Trump administration. Its stated mission is “helping people before, during, and after disasters.” For many Americans, the agency is the face of the federal government’s response to events such as Hurricane Helene, the Los Angeles fires, and other disasters. It also runs the National Flood Insurance Program, which covers millions of American homes.
As climate change fuels more extreme weather, the long-underfunded agency has strained to keep pace with its mandates. Hamilton’s departure is happening as the country heads into an Atlantic hurricane season that begins June 1 and is expected to be especially active.
Both FEMA and DHS confirmed that David Richardson, the assistant secretary at DHS’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, will take over for Hamilton. Richardson, who previously served as a Marine in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa, takes the helm at a time when the future of FEMA remains both unclear and in peril.
Noem has already begun to dismantle the agency. In early April, she announced that it would discontinue mitigation-related grant initiatives. The cancellations include the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, program — the agency’s main climate adaptation program — which was launched during Trump’s first term and has helped hundreds of communities across the country prepare for the impacts of climate change.
DHS has also recently revived President Trump’s earlier “fork in the road” approach to downsizing, which gave employees various options to leave voluntarily, such as early retirement, deferred resignation, or a buyout. It’s unclear how many FEMA employees took the offer.
Hamilton reportedly had been making further plans to significantly transform FEMA’s workforce, including potentially sending more employees into the field to respond to disasters. Apparently those changes weren’t enough.
“When Disaster Strikes, We’re Here to Help,” the FEMA’s website reads. The worry among the agency’s supporters is that, in removing Hamilton, the Trump administration may be clearing the path for broader rollbacks — or a future in which FEMA doesn’t exist at all.
This article originally appeared in Grist at https://grist.org/politics/the-head-of-fema-defended-the-agency-on-capitol-hill-trump-fired-him/.
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