What’s Going On With FEMA?

Cameron Hamilton was appointed to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency when the second Trump administration began in January 2025.

Read more A Democratic Governor Just Failed Our Democracy in the Worst Possible Way

From the start, there were reasons to feel like Hamilton’s tenure was fraught. There were reports that Hamilton had drafted a memo for his bosses titled “Abolishing FEMA.” But there were also reports that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem forced Hamilton to get a polygraph after news about the whole abolishing FEMA thing leaked to the press.

Congress had questions about all this and called on Hamilton to answer a few, and he ended up being publicly fired. After he left, there were two more acting FEMA administrators. One just left—not exactly a sign of strength at an agency that you might not think about at all until you really need it.

A year later, Hamilton is having a comeback. He has been nominated to lead FEMA permanently.

“Now that Kristi Noem is gone, he seems to want to jump right back in there,” says Micah Loewinger, who co-hosts the podcast On the Media, which is in the middle of a whole series on FEMA.

But the agency Hamilton would be expected to run is having a disaster of its own. On a recent episodeof What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Loewinger about what the Trump administration has done to FEMA and what it still wants to do. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Last week we got this look at what Donald Trump wants to do to FEMA. It was a report by this council of experts picked by Trump. It outlines recommendations to overhaul FEMA. The big ones are raising the threshold for the federal government to get involved in disaster recovery and shrinking the National Flood Insurance Program. It really makes clear that the responsibility for fixing a natural disaster is mostly going to fall on the states. Could we end up in a situation where, even if FEMA’s not gone, it’s like a ghost ship?

Micah Loewinger:I hope not. The reforms that have been outlined in the review council report are really complicated. A lot of experienced emergency managers I’ve spoken to, including people who are very high up and very well respected within the agency, believe in some of these reforms. There is a belief within the agency that FEMA responds to too many disasters.

But isn’t that what the states want? They want FEMA there to respond because it’s a huge responsibility.

Absolutely. There’s no doubt that the states want the federal government to be more involved, ultimately, in disaster preparation, recovery, and response. There is no doubt about that because disasters are hugely costly, and somebody has to pay to rebuild, and state budgets are strained, and the federal government has access to a lot more money, manpower, and infrastructure.

So yes, states want FEMA in there, but there’s a complicated question of when should FEMA be there. There is a real belief within FEMA that FEMA has responded to too many disasters. Some of them are really not very big. And in doing so, it has burned through a lot of taxpayer money and has maybe spread itself too thin.

Read more The Supreme Court Weighs How Much Google Surveillance Can Be Used Against You in Court

Now, a really, really massive storm that affects multiple states, causing billions of dollars of damage, I don’t think that this review council is saying that FEMA wouldn’t get involved. It’s a question of what do we do about these smaller disasters that can still upend people’s lives, can still cause millions of dollars of damage that states have to deal with, but aren’t catastrophes. They’re not breakdowns in government. But I am hearing from people who live in less resourced parts of the country, smaller states with smaller governments, like Vermont, who are saying this is spooky. They rely on FEMA support for the majority of disaster grants and workforce.

That report from the Trump administration was really vague. We don’t know what’s going to actually happen, how much they’re actually going to implement. But if we take this as a potential paradigm shift, it could fundamentally change the way that states and people interact with FEMA after terrible disasters.

Well, and then there’s the political side of this. There’s evidence that blue states are three times more likely to have their aid requests denied than GOP states. Do you think this idea of FEMA as a cudgel is going to stay? 

I hope not. This has been a really disgusting weaponization of FEMA that is frankly not acceptable. I don’t completely understand where Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin lands on this. I’m not sure if he would like to see the drama at FEMA pulled back all the way, or if his goal is to just slowly try to stabilize.

Frankly, the agency is not in a good place right now. The morale there is terrible. There are vacant positions. There are really smart, dedicated, experienced people who have left. And that concerns me going into this summer, when we could see big storms and wildfires and the like.

One of the reasons we’re talking is because Cameron Hamilton is reappearing as the head of FEMA. And he seems to have really campaigned for the job after having been forced out. But I don’t understand why he wants it. FEMA really looks like a mess. You have people inside FEMA doing things like writing this “Katrina Declaration” a year ago, which basically said FEMA is in a really bad state, the same way it was pre-Katrina. You have people outside saying you need to rip up the playbook and stop giving so much aid. It feels like a really hard agency to manage. You spoke to Hamilton. Why does he want to return to this?

I wish I knew what was going through his mind right now. When I spoke to him, it was five months ago. It was maybe at a time when he didn’t realistically think he could end up back in the job. But look, this is an enormous job with a lot of power. It puts you in contact with every important state leader. It puts you in contact with the continuity of government systems—I would imagine the intelligence community and the Department of Defense. FEMA is at this nexus of American power in a way that’s really unique and fascinating.

I think he understands this is maybe the biggest job he’ll ever have. Maybe he has greater ambitions. I have no idea. Would I want to run an agency that’s currently in rough shape, that will certainly be blamed for enormous disasters to come if it can’t fulfill its responsibility? No, I wouldn’t want to do that. But that’s why I’m a journalist and not a government official. But he, in his short time at the agency, really came to see its importance, and he liked the way the suit felt. This was a job he wanted to have. He said that he always hoped that Trump would eventually ask him to stay on in a more permanent capacity, so he’s getting his chance.

There are a whole lot of emergency management people who don’t seem to be raising their hands here.

Yeah, and maybe that’s because people have seen, a year and a half into the Trump administration, that it’s pretty chaotic up there. There are a lot of volatile personalities who will try to stab you in the back and strap you down to a chair and force you to take a polygraph test. There are good jobs in the emergency management world at the state level where you can do good work and wield a lot of power. It’s not so fun to get too close to the crazy at the top.

Read more The End of Thomas Massie Is the Beginning of Something New