*Correction in transcript below*

Brooke: Hi, this is Brooke. When Micah and Eloise, his producer, were out for long stretches working on the series, I did ask myself once or twice, "What is it about FEMA? What is it we don't already know?" Wow, this was new, gripping, painstaking, original reporting. As great as Micah and Eloise are, there's another person who made it possible, and that's you. Listener support is the largest and most reliable source of funding for our show and for the whole station. Support us today, make a donation, and get our brand-new On the Media jumbo tote with an extra-large On the Media logo. Just go to onthemedia.org/donate. Thank you. Now, the final episode of American Emergency.

[music]

Micah: On this week's On the Media from WNYC, the Trump administration has threatened to kill or at least maim the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA isn't going down without a fight.

Trump: I'll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA, or maybe getting rid of FEMA. I think, frankly, FEMA's not good.

MaryAnn Tierney: We were tasked to write a memo on how we would abolish FEMA.

Cameron Hamilton: He proceeded to berate over the fact that the media got a hold of a story and was running a topic that they felt was too sensitive and not fit for public domain.

Micah: The topic was abolishing FEMA?

Cameron Hamilton: Correct.

News clip: President Trump has just announced that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is out of a job.

Alt-FEMA: As soon as I heard the news, I remember calling my co-worker and telling them, but as soon as they picked up the phone, they said, "The witch is dead. The witch is gone. She's out of here."

Micah: The past, present, and future of FEMA after this.

MICAH: From WNYC in New York this is On the Media. Brooke Gladstone is out this week. I’m Micah Loewinger. 

On March 27th 2025, Cameron Hamilton, Trump's interim top leader at FEMA, was meeting with some high ranking officials in an undisclosed secure location. He wouldn't tell me who he was with or where. Just that he had to run out abruptly.

Cameron Hamilton: I received a phone call that was, uh, very distressing

It was Corey Lewandowski, a special government employee, working closely with Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem. Lewandowski was ripping mad.

Cameron Hamilton: He proceeded to berate me over the fact that the media got ahold of a story and was running a topic that they felt was too sensitive and not fit for public domain.

Micah: The topic was abolishing FEMA.

Cameron Hamilton: Correct.

MICAH: A day earlier, Politico had published a story about a meeting, where Corey Lewandowski, Kristi Noem, and Cameron Hamilton had discussed whether to dismantle the agency and how they might do it. Lewandowski was now calling, because he believed Hamilton had leaked the story.

Cameron Hamilton: To which I responded. I'm not a liar. I'm not a leaker. I'm a man of honor. And if I tell you the truth, it's the truth.

Lewandowski didn't buy it. 

Cameron Hamilton: I wanted to choke somebody. And that's exactly what came through my mind. [laughter]

Micah: Oh my God.

Cameron Hamilton: Just living in my flesh, doing some very un-Christian things to a certain person, but nonetheless…

Micah: A, a certain person being Mr. Lewandowski.

Cameron Hamilton: No, no, we're, yeah, I think you can read between the lines on that statement. 

MICAH: After his call with Lewandowski, Hamilton got an email from a DHS official, asking him to submit to a voluntary polygraph test, as in, a lie detector. Hamilton told me he had nothing to hide but he was shocked and not sure how to respond. So he started calling his friends around Washington.

Cameron Hamilton:I called people in the White House. I called people in Congress, people in the Senate. My first question is, is this normal? I've never encountered such unprofessionalism ever in my life. To which unanimously their perspective was, I've never seen something like this. And then the second argument that I had received from others was, do I resign in protest or do I do this?Overwhelmingly the advice was, please do not resign. They will try to destroy you if you do. Publicly. So they said the honorable thing to do is to take the test, pass it, and then look 'em in the face and remind them that you're not a liar. So that's what I chose to do.

MICAH: As far as I can tell, I'm the only journalist to have had an extended sit down interview with Cameron Hamilton about his time as former Acting Director of FEMA. We spoke in December of 2025, when he was out of office. Last week Trump nominated him to return to the agency – this time in an official capacity. 

You're listening to the fourth and final episode of our four-part series, American Emergency: The Movement to Kill FEMA. Over the course of the series, we’ve explored how FEMA’s Cold War doomsday planning inspired wild conspiracy theories. How catastrophic failures during Hurricane Katrina hurt relief efforts and broke trust with the public. And how FEMA was overwhelmed by viral lies pushed by Trump and the MAGA fringes when Hurricane Helene struck in 2024. 

This week, we reckon with the future of FEMA -- and our country's capacity to handle disasters. But first, let's return to the place where we began this series: Donald Trump's speech in North Carolina...

Trump: We've come to North Carolina with a simple message for all the people of this region who were hit so hard by Hurricane Helene. And that message is very simple. You are not forgotten any longer. You were treated very badly by the previous administration. 

MICAH:  Just three days into his 2nd term, President Trump announced that changes, big changes, might be coming to FEMA. 

Trump:  I'll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of fema. I think frankly, FEMA's not good.

MICAH: The executive order announced that recommendations to reshape the agency would come from a new FEMA review council, a panel of emergency management professionals and politicians, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Meanwhile, Trump’s mention of "getting rid of FEMA" was sending shockwaves through Washington.

Cameron Hamilton: My phone was blowing up. Probably about at least a dozen members of Congress called me that Friday saying, basically, is this really what's gonna happen? 

MICAH: This was just Hamilton's 3rd day on the job, and all of a sudden, FEMA's 20,000+ workforce, and the entire world of emergency managers, were spinning out..

Cameron Hamilton: There were state directors and governors that heard this and thought, this is a terrible idea.

MICAH: FEMA employees at the agency's headquarters were barging into Hamilton's office in tears. 

Cameron Hamilton: I assembled a leadership team and said, guys and gals, this is our moment, this is our make or break testing period here. We can either let this Sword of Damocles drop on us and let us fail, or we can dig down deep, which is what emergency managers do, and deal with this crisis and meet it head on and do it with a smile on our face.

MICAH: Some seasoned FEMA staffers I spoke with were not happy to have Hamilton leading them through this crisis. They believed his appointment was part of the problem.  The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act requires that FEMA's leader have significant experience responding to disasters. Trump's last FEMA administrator, Pete Gaynor, who served in Trump’s first term, had done over 10 years of emergency management in Rhode Island before coming to FEMA. Hamilton's resume looked nothing like that. He had served for a decade as a Navy Seal, and then in DHS and the State Department. Running FEMA, even temporarily, was a gigantic promotion.  He got the job, because as the second Trump administration was taking shape, he was a well-connected MAGA warrior saying all the right things.

Real America's Voice: Cameron, tell me about your race. 

Cameron Hamilton: Yeah. Well, good morning. Thanks for having me. And all the Patriots out there, thank you for listening.

This is an interview on Real America's Voice, from March 2024, when Hamilton was running for a Congressional seat in Virginia. About 10 months before he ended up at FEMA.

Cameron Hamilton: I've worked in the federal government in various different jobs and capacities, and I understand exactly the bureaucratic sickness that our government is plagued by.

MICAH: The bureaucratic sickness that our government is plagued by.

Real America's Voice: So are you ready and able to dismantle the administrative state? 

Cameron Hamilton: I think so. Absolutely.

Real America's Voice: When Trump is president, if you win [fades out]

MICAH: He lost in the Republican primary 3 months later. After Donald Trump was elected that fall, Hamilton began seeking the approval of conservative groups in the hope of scoring a role in the incoming administration. The Heritage Foundation had lobbied for decades to reduce the size and role of FEMA. Its Project 2025 stopped short of calling for the end of the agency, but it laid out ambitious plans like  scrapping preparedness programs,  pushing much more recovery costs to the states, and privatizing the part of the agency that offers home flood insurance to 4.7 million households. 

Cameron Hamilton: My recommendation, believe it or not, when I talked to Heritage was actually about move FEMA to the Department of Interior. And I say this as a constitutional limited government conservative, I don't think DHS should exist. 

MICAH: Dismantling DHS and moving FEMA to the Department of Interior were also two goals of Project 2025. During Trump’s transition, Hamilton was put in touch with the DHS Secretary-to-be, Kristi Noem.

Cameron Hamilton: The interview went very well. And we discussed, uh, the principles of emergency management,

Micah: How did you make the case to her that you were the man for the job?

Cameron Hamilton: *Clip added:  I worked in emergency management more specifically at my time at the State Department. So while the traditional model of emergency management, is domestically focused, all my experience was overseas, dealing with mass evacuation planning, dealing with Biocon containment for Ebola, you name it.* I did not pretend or presume by any means to be the most qualified individual, but my arguments to her were simply, I would love to be an asset for you to have an ally within the agency. But also, still give the president time to make his determination. 

MICAH: As in, time to decide whether to nominate Hamilton officially for the job or find a more qualified FEMA administrator, who might have an easier time passing senate confirmation. 

Cameron Hamilton: Nowhere in this conversation was there ever a discussion about abolishing FEMA. And that didn't happen until the president traveled to North Carolina when the president spoke at that press conference,

Trump: I'll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA. I think, frankly, FEMA's not good.

Cameron Hamilton: All of a sudden every action, everything that we did, was now immediately under the microscope, 

MICAH: That afternoon Hamilton asked that FEMA remove "climate resilience" from the agency's top 3 goals, in an effort, he said, to make it seem less quote-un-quote political. But it was a bit late for that. In a matter of weeks, Elon Musk sent his DOGE goons to FEMA. Hamilton told me he was wary of them, but he gave Musk's team full access to the agency's payment systems. 

No one was more hellbent on gutting the agency than Secretary Kristi Noem and her "special" employee Corey Lewandowski, a MAGA operative and former pundit who was rumored to be having an affair with Noem. Neither of them, says Hamilton, knew the basics of FEMA's history or its disaster relief systems.

Cameron Hamilton: The general lack of understanding from DHS, at least at the senior political level of what it is that FEMA does, is what necessitated the meeting to be held in late March.

MaryAnn Tierney: We were tasked by Corey Lewandowski and the secretary to write a memo on how we would abolish FEMA. 

MICAH: This is MaryAnn Tierney, who was Hamilton's deputy, his number 2. She's a longtime emergency manager who had risen through the ranks at the agency in the decades following 9/11. And, now here she was, helping craft plans for how to radically reduce the staff at FEMA.

MaryAnn Tierney: It was very upsetting. But part of your job as a senior executive is to implement the prerogative of political leadership, right? And that's something that I still take seriously. And so what our memo laid out was how you could do it, but also raise the legal concerns associated with it.

MICAH: As we discussed in episode 2, the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act limits how much DHS can meddle with FEMA. The memo identified parts of FEMA that, with help from Congress, could be killed or doled out to different agencies. And so that March meeting, between Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski, and Cameron Hamilton was an opportunity to discuss these different strategies. 

Cameron Hamilton: They were eager to see my plans on reform, and then I think that they wanted to have a rebranding.

MICAH: Hamilton's memo suggested some potential name changes for FEMA, including the National Office of Emergency Management. N-O-E-M. As in, Noem.

Cameron Hamilton: And she said, I love this. Let's just rename it. We'll call it abolishing, And then politically it would look like it was an abolition when in reality it was a relabeling and a reshuffling of the deck. 

MICAH: That was just one idea, but Hamilton told me he insisted that they wait to see what Congress and Trump's FEMA Review Council proposed before taking action. And you know a bit of what happens next. Politico reported on the existence of that meeting. And Lewandowski blamed Hamilton for the leak, despite the fact that many other people knew the meeting was happening.

Cameron Hamilton: That meeting was transmitted to us through an eSec process, the executive secretariat. The meeting's label was ‘FEMA: abolish or reform.’ So the meeting topic itself was visible to about 50 to a hundred people.

MICAH: Nevertheless, Lewandowski insisted that Hamilton sit for a polygraph test.

Cameron Hamilton: They're not always perfect. You can get them wrong and - 

Micah: Yeah. I feel like they're famous for not being that accurate.

Cameron Hamilton: Well, they're more accurate than people realize. It's just the difficulty now is there are more people in the American populace who have had training on how to defeat them and how to overcome them. 

Micah: I see.

Cameron Hamilton: I've had that training before in the military, specifically as a Navy seal. My interrogator understood this. And they made it very clear, you are not to use certain techniques. But I will just say, I made my statements there without any methods to shield myself from accountability.

MICAH: Hamilton was cleared, but he never received an apology. Then DHS began working its way through the agency's senior leadership.

MaryAnn Tierney: I would say about eight to 10 FEMA staff were polygraphed as a result of the meeting and the memo. 

MICAH: MaryAnn Tierney was spared from the witch hunt.

MaryAnn Tierney: I even consulted an attorney because I thought I was going to be polygraphed … It traumatized our workforce.

Micah:  Did they find the leaker? 

Cameron Hamilton: No. Well, I suspect I know where the leak came from. It did not come from FEMA. I'll put it that way….

MICAH: When Cameron Hamilton was called to testify on May 7th 2025 before the House Appropriations Committee -- he knew his days at FEMA were numbered.

Cameron Hamilton: The morning of my testimony, at about 10, maybe 10:30, FEMA security received a phone call from DHS security asking them to terminate my access to the building which is essentially a firing, if you will. MaryAnn had asked how would you like us to handle this? And I said, I'd like you to notify DHS that I'm submitting a letter to the Appropriations Committee now that will indicate that I've been removed and that I will not be able to testify. The department then realized the optics of it would not look proper. So they backtracked, essentially indicating, hey, just sort of pretend this didn't happen.

Micah: You can go ahead and testify, but when you come back, you're fired.

Cameron Hamilton: That's not what they said, but that's what I understood it to mean.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro: Does this administration seek to eliminate FEMA, and do you support eliminating FEMA?

MICAH: US Rep Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut questioned Hamilton later that day. 

Cameron Hamilton: I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

Rep. Rosa DeLauro: Okay. 

Cameron Hamilton: Having said that, that is a conversation that should be had between the President of the United States and this governing body

News tape: Acting head Cameron Hamilton was abruptly fired yesterday. It came one day after he testified before Congress that FEMA should not be scrapped. 

MICAH: Meanwhile, MaryAnn Tierney had decided separately that her time at FEMA was coming to an end.

MaryAnn Tierney: It was extremely chaotic. I was not doing anything productive. All I did all day was keep DOGE at bay or argue with the department. All at the same time, we had people being put on administrative leave. We're supposed to be getting ready for hurricane season. We weren't doing any of that and I, I just did not feel like I could help. And so it was time to move on.

MICAH: After nearly 15 years at FEMA, MaryAnn resigned, a few weeks after Hamilton was fired.

MaryAnn Tierney: This is like therapy. Could we, like, do this every week?

Micah: You, you're enjoying this?

MaryAnn Tierney: I, I'm enjoying it. Look, I love, I loved my job, I loved working for FEMA. I care very deeply about the agency. Um, and I care very deeply about being able to help people on their worst day. And my primary concern, [sigh] my primary concern now is that we are walking away from an obligation to the American people. And so anything that I can do to help raise that concern, I want to do that.

MICAH: MaryAnn Tierney’s deep sense of mission reminded me of the other FEMA stalwarts I’ve met while reporting this series, people like Leo Bosner and Marty Bahamonde and Jaclyn Rothenberg. I think there’s something about being there on the worst days of peoples’ lives, and being able to offer some help - maybe it changes you? Maybe his short stint as temporary head of FEMA changed Cameron Hamilton. 

When I spoke to him in December I asked him about the time before he was in the job, when he appeared to endorse MAGA’s lies about the agency’s response to Hurricane Helene in 2024. Hamilton reposted the following video from Florida Representative Anna Paulina Luna on X.

Anna Paulina Luna: North Carolina's underwater, a thousand people missing, and we have a majority of our residents that aren't gonna be able to come back to their homes because they're completely destroyed. The Biden-Harris administration and radical leftists in Washington gave illegals one point one billion dollars in housing assistance.

Micah: This was a very common narrative we heard at the time, but that wasn't true. Right? The money that FEMA was giving for temporary housing to migrants - 

Cameron Hamilton: It was a separate appropriation.

Micah: It was a separate appropriation, yes. It was not coming at the expense of disaster relief for American citizens.

Cameron Hamilton: My reposting of people like Anna and others was more of concern over the optics of why it seems like hundreds of millions of dollars are reimbursing states for housing migrants, and yet we have all these complaints of people that need help and they feel like they're left out.

Micah: This narrative was frankly a politically expedient lie. It was used to undermine faith in government during a crisis by telling people that the reason FEMA was running out of money to help disaster survivors was because it had spent that money on housing migrants. That wasn't true.

Cameron Hamilton: That is correct. That is a factually inaccurate statement.

Micah: You had also shared posts on X from Elon Musk, who claimed that FEMA was blocking his aid. That also wasn't true.

Cameron Hamilton: I've said things and I've reposted things that I know now to not be true. So I took responsibility for it within the agency, and I had to let them understand that, you know, I recognize that that was the case and I wish I could go back and change it. I can't.

MICAH: Coming up on American Emergency....a group of FEMA workers form an anonymous news outlet of sorts. This is On the Media. 

MICAH: This is On the Media, I'm Micah Loewinger.  We just heard the story of Cameron Hamilton, a Trump appointee who was ousted after he stood up to the administration. He may not have leaked that story to Politico. But, at the time, in early 2025, there were plenty of frustrated employees throughout the agency who felt they had no choice but to speak with the press.

ALT FEMA: I was angry. Full stop. And feeling like, I know I'm not the only one who feels this way in the moment. 

MICAH: This is a FEMA employee that I'm gonna call Alt-FEMA. He asked to remain anonymous for reasons that will make sense in a moment, and so we had an actor to bring his voice to life. 

ALT FEMA: The Trump administration had only been in office for 73 days, and in that very small span of time, FEMA had already experienced really significant changes.

MICAH: Before the big ouster, he had grown more and more frustrated with Cameron Hamilton, whom he described as kind but unqualified. Fear and uncertainty had gripped the workforce under Hamilton. Some well-respected emergency managers had resigned after DOGE's infamous "fork in the road" email. The higher-ups had tried to freeze funds and block contracts with states, towns, territories, and tribal communities. All while leaving them and much of the FEMA workforce in the dark.

ALT FEMA: I wasn't sure how later on how this was going to be explained. And as we've seen, this administration likes to change the narrative and gaslight us and say, well, no, that didn't happen that way. You're incorrect.

MICAH: On April 3rd, he launched a newsletter on Substack called "Alt-FEMA." A place to quote "document the lived experience and insights of those on the inside, perspectives that are often overlooked by external media outlets unfamiliar with the agency’s inner workings." In his first post, Alt-FEMA shared a mission statement and a link to a signal account for sending tips. The first one came later that day from a friend.

ALT FEMA: I took that tip and ran with it. It was the shutdown of the BRIC program. So if you're not familiar with what that is, it's the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant.

MICAH: A mitigation program that has given billions to states to, say, build special roads.

ALT FEMA: That would be like, uh, permeable pavement surfaces to prevent pooling of water.

MICAH: or riverside parks that reduce the impacts of floods.

ALT FEMA: You incorporate green spaces to soak up that water and it helps the local ecosystem as well.

MICAH: Which brighten up communities and help save a ton of money down the line.

ALT FEMA: It's estimated that for every dollar you spend in mitigation, you save $6 to $11 in disaster costs. So by spending more money on mitigation, you save money in the long run if there's an impactful disaster in your area. 

MICAH: When Alt-FEMA learned that Cameron Hamilton was feeding BRIC to the wood chipper, he went digging for more information. He found a memo that, apparently, had been hidden from the leaders that operate BRIC.

Ironically, the BRIC program was created, in 2018, in Trump's first presidency, which this administration seems to have forgotten about because they called it wasteful and political when they announced its cancellation.

Alt-FEMA was not the first to break the story -- news outlets got there first -- but he heard through the grapevine that some state and local emergency managers had learned about the BRIC cancellation through his newsletter. 

ALT FEMA: They like the fact that it's actual FEMA employees who are sharing this information with them.

MICAH: 20 states soon filed a lawsuit to block the defunding of BRIC, and in December the program was reinstated... Today, the Alt-FEMA newsletter has around 2,500 subscribers. Its readers include emergency managers, journalists, and even staff members in Congress. Not long after the BRIC article, Alt-FEMA started hearing from other employees who wanted to write their own stories and op-eds for the newsletter.

ALT FEMA: We have about 12 people who are active.

Micah: Do you know who your writers are?

ALT FEMA: Some of them I do. Some of them I don't because we try to remain as anonymous as possible. I mean, we all have families and things we want to protect.

MICAH: In some ways, this crew is as much a clearinghouse for leaks as it is a newsroom. They say they've spoken on-background with NPR, Grist, CNN, and other outlets  — helping corroborate what other sources are saying around FEMA. Though I haven't been able to confirm that with the news outlets themselves. 

ALT FEMA’s most viewed article is about Cameron Hamilton's successor, another temporary administrator named David Richardson, a former Marine who also had no emergency management experience. *Copy changed to: "a former Marine who also had little to no emergency management experience."*

ALT FEMA: David Richardson came in and we were called to an all hands meeting, we have never received an all hands meeting for the entire agency. That is unheard of.

David Richardson: I am the president’s representative at FEMA. 

ALT FEMA: It was basically him standing at this podium, going on this very, very long tangent about how he was there to do the president's will.

David Richardson: I and I alone speak for FEMA, okay? Now, this is the tough part. Between ten and twenty percent of personnel will embrace change. They'll welcome it. However, there's somewhere south of twenty percent that decide that they are going to get in the way. So, don't get in my way I will run right over you. 

ALT FEMA: Yeah, he threatened us big time. We left that meeting feeling just completely deflated and feeling like our worst fears of what this administration was going to do to the agency was going to come true in that moment.

Micah: What were your worst fears?

ALT FEMA: That we wouldn't be able to do our jobs. They're calling FEMA waste, fraud and abuse. But when you're sitting on the other side of a table speaking to a mom who has just experienced a tornado, and a tree fell through her house and almost crushed her three-year-old, and they don't know where they're going to sleep tonight, and they're looking for help…How do you call that waste or fraud or abuse of the government funding system?

Texas caller: We live about a mile down the road from Camp Mystic, and we've already got two little girls who have come down the river, and we've gotten to them, but I'm not sure how many else are out there.

MICAH: When floods ripped through Central Texas last July, 136 people were killed, including 25 young campers. Meanwhile, David Richardson could not be reached for 24 hours. That dysfunction was cited as one of the reasons why FEMA's search and rescue teams were deployed too slowly. Along with a bottleneck created by Kristi Noem's policy that she personally sign off on contracts and grants over $100,000...

News tape: Kristi Noem responded to allegations that FEMA cutbacks meant delays in answering people's calls for disaster assistance and aid after the flood. 

MICAH: In many ways, the agency and the country were lucky that last year's hurricane season was exceptionally mild. But the tragedy of Camp Mystic was enough to force David Richardson to resign in November after just six months as Acting Director. 

His temporary successor, Karen Evans, wasn't much better. She was rarely seen at the agency's headquarters. Meanwhile, more and more experienced FEMA workers moved to the private sector or took early retirement.

ALT FEMA: We've just lost so much knowledge and experience. 

MICHA: Alt FEMA.

ALT FEMA: Just like, we have to rebuild after a disaster. We are going to have to rebuild the agency. And, unless they drag me by my cold, dead hands away from my cubicle, I'm going to be sticking around.

MICAH: Then, this March, just when morale at FEMA had hit rock bottom…

Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove:  So Secretary Noem, at any time during your tenure as director of Department of Homeland Security, have you had sexual relations with Corey Lewandowski? 

 

Kristi Noem:Mr. Chairman, I am shocked that we're going down and peddling tabloid garbage in this committee today. 

 

MICAH: In a congressional hearing, lawmakers like California Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove grilled Kristi Noem.

Kristi Noem: Has no authority to be, um, making decisions and putting him in a position. 

 

Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove: But it is also a real question. So what I would say to you- And you should be able to answer the question clearly ...

 

MICAH: On a wide range of topics, including her decision to delay disaster recovery to Helene survivors in North Carolina, and allegations of corruption and dysfunction at DHS more broadly. 

Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove: Before I yield my time, I would like to enter into the record some articles, and I'm asking for unanimous consent. "Noem tightens her grip on DHS. Le- Lewal- Lewandowski fired, FEMA admin also in the okay." 

 

Voice: Without objection. 

 

Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove: The next one is, "Kristi Noem secretly took a cut of political donations," from ProPublica. 

 

Voice: Without objection. 

 

Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove: Uh, "Kristi Noem fires pilot over a blanket, but is forced to reinstate him to fly home," Wall Street Journal. 

Voice:Without objection. 

 

News tape: We're coming on the air because President Trump has just announced that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is out of a job. This follows reports that the president was frustrated by her recent testimony on Capitol Hill.

ALT FEMA: As soon as I heard the news, I remember calling my coworker and telling them, but as soon as they picked up the phone, they said, the witch is dead. The witch is gone. She's out of here. Just having that simple moment and laughing together. And feeling like, like a weight has been lifted off our shoulders. That meant everything to me.

MICAH: Coming up on American Emergency...FEMA might need an overhaul but is this the administration to do it? This is On the Media. 

MICAH: This is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. When we began reporting this series almost a year ago, there was a good reason to believe that the movement to kill FEMA would succeed. My sources at the agency told me about rumors that massive staff cuts were coming in May 2026. A leaked report from the president's review council confirmed that Kristi Noem wanted to downsize by 50% ahead of hurricane season. 

But after Noem was abruptly fired in March, FEMA's fortunes began to slowly turn around. Trump's new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin brought a decidedly more conciliatory tone, when he traveled to North Carolina to meet with local emergency managers, first responders, and regional FEMA staff working on the Hurricane Helene recovery.

Markwayne Mullin: Let us know what we can do better. Not just beat up on FEMA, that's not the point, because they've done a great job, but what is it that what we could maybe tweak just a little bit…

MICAH: Over the past couple of months, Secretary Mullin began to lift Kristi Noem's $100,000 review policy.  President Trump also released some state disaster relief funding that his White House had withheld. But, most surprising of all...

News clip: the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is about to get a second crack at the job. President Trump has nominated Cameron Hamilton to lead the agency a year after he was removed from that very same position.

ALT FEMA: It was a complete and utter shock.

MICAH: This is Alt-FEMA, that anonymous substack writer.

ALT FEMA: That was a plot twist that none of us expected would happen.

Micah: How does it make you feel about the future of the agency?

ALT FEMA: At this point, there's no way they can justify getting rid of the agency. I do think it's gonna look very different. And change isn't unwelcomed. It's just that considering everything they've done so far, you can't help but anticipate the worst kind of change

Maryann Tierney: the systems that we ask people to work in are complex and bureaucratic and need substantial reform.

MICAH: This is MaryAnn Tierney again, the former FEMA employee who worked alongside Cameron Hamilton.

Maryann Tierney: If you haven't done it, you should call the one 800 number for FEMA. The first thing that we tell people, like the first thing you hear as a survivor when, say, you've lost everything, there's this long message about how you could be arrested or fined if you provide us false information.

Voice: If you provide false information or lie in an attempt to get assistance, it is a violation of federal and state law, which carry criminal or civil penalties, or both. 

Maryann Tierney: There's lots of stories about people who get FEMA assistance illegally, but we have a process for that. We investigate, and then people get prosecuted. But we've set up a system that treats everybody like they're gonna cheat us from the jump. I don't think that's a good survivor experience. 

MICAH:  To illustrate the complexity of FEMA's assistance programs, MaryAnn told me about a fun analogy she'd often use when discussing this stuff around the agency.

Maryann Tierney: Oh, the Christmas tree analogy?

Micah: Yeah. Christmas tree.

Maryann Tierney: So, FEMA's programs are like a Christmas tree. And every year we've got a new idea or a new rule.  If you go back to the Stafford Act, right, Robert T. Stafford Emergency Disaster Relief Act.

MICAH: This is one of the fundamental laws that undergirds FEMA's work. It gives the president the power to issue a disaster declaration and unlock aid for states after, say, a hurricane or earthquake.

Maryann Tierney: That law was passed in 1988, right? And over the years it's been amended. All of these other acts, whether it's the Sandy Recovery Improvement Act, Post-Katrina, all of them get incorporated into regulation underpinned by the Stafford Act. And so every year, FEMA tacks on an ornament to further administer these programs. And if you have a Christmas tree, you know, 'cause I've had this happen, you don't put the ornaments on in the right distribution, or you have too many of them, the tree falls over. Over the years we've added ornaments, but we haven't thought to declutter. And that's how I look at FEMA's programs.

MICAH: This is why MaryAnn was excited to see which reforms would be suggested this month by President Trump's 12-person review council.

Michael Miron : It is my great pleasure to introduce Secretary of Homeland Security Sec- Secretary Markwayne Mullin. The floor is yours, sir. 

Markwayne Mullin: Thank you. (fade under) 

MICAH: This meeting was kind of like Game 7 of the World Series for the emergency management universe. Many people streamed it live and then anxiously read the council’s final report the moment it was shared online. It outlined sweeping changes at the agency, many of which require new legislation from Congress. 

Markwayne Mullin: What does the nation think about FEMA and it’s response? [fade under]

MICAH: The report called for a reduction in FEMA's workforce but didn't give any numbers. It also argued that states should pay a larger share for disasters, but was vague on that, too. 

It's kind of a Rorschach test: Some emergency managers celebrated the idea of a leaner FEMA that gives less money to states, but gives them that money more quickly. Climate advocates were dismayed that the report made only a single reference to our growing climate crisis. Others didn’t think that FEMA could afford to lose more staff. And some experts like MaryAnn Tierney praised the report’s call to reform and streamline the agency’s individual assistance programs. She also praised the report's recommendation that FEMA should respond to fewer disasters going forward. 

Maryann Tierney: FEMA has gotten involved in a lot of disasters that are not necessarily needing of federal support. They're disasters that state and local government should be able to manage and respond to and recover from on their own.

MICAH: She's referring to smaller disasters that can still upend lives and cost states millions of dollars. To be clear, she believes FEMA should definitely be involved when it comes to Hurricane-Katrina-type events, and big disasters that hit multiple states.

Maryann Tierney: Over the years, the amount of disasters declared by the president, over multiple administrations, both Democratic and Republican, has been on an upward trend. That drains FEMA's attention and resources from the truly catastrophic events.

MICAH: To reduce FEMA's role and make states pay more for disasters, the report suggested changing the equation used for determining when the federal government needs to help. An equation that hasn't been touched since the Stafford Act was passed in 1988. Right now if a storm causes a bunch of flooding in a state, FEMA and the governor go out and tally up the total damage to see if it reaches a certain dollar amount. That threshold is determined, in part, by a state's population. Bigger states need to see more damage before FEMA steps in. But small states like Vermont and Delaware, only need about a million dollars of damage before they can request federal support.

Maryann Tierney: In my region, where I worked, West Virginia, we averaged two or three declarations a year from flooding. You have a lot of these smaller declarations, it eats up FEMA staff. You have to deploy. You have to set up an office. Now, are all of those disasters disasters that FEMA should be responding to? I think that's a part of the policy discussion that needs to happen now.

 MICAH: MaryAnn told me this particular proposal is non-partisan. I've heard other former leaders at FEMA endorse it. Which has surprised me because the first time I encountered this idea was in policy briefs from the Heritage Foundation that were written over a decade ago. A higher per capita threshold, as the report argues, would mean fewer disaster declarations, which would force states to set up, or add to, their own state disaster relief funds. But all that's easier said than done for a state like Vermont.

Eric Forand: We don't have a lot of, um, cash reserves. The state does not have a state-run disaster relief fund at all.

MICAH: This is Eric Forand, the director of Emergency Management in Vermont. He's nervous about some of the changes outlined in the FEMA review council report.

Eric Forand:  We're, I believe, the second least populated state, so six hundred and fifty thousand individuals in the state of Vermont, so our tax base is, is pretty low.

MICAH: In other words, it would be hard to squeeze more money out of the state budget. More difficult than a state like Florida, which has a robust state disaster relief fund thanks to their 20-million citizens paying taxes. And the timing for Eric Forand is especially rough because in recent years Vermont has seen a rise in costly floods.

Eric Forand: Normally we've had, over the past decade, about two declared disasters per year. And over my first two terms, we had eight.

News clip: Vermont under a state of emergency tonight. Some of the worst flooding in nearly 100 years. The capital of Vermont tonight underwater,

News clip: And the unthinkable happened. Another deluge once again caused extensive damage. Some of the same communities getting soaked a second time, and some new ones added to the list.

Eric Forand: We've had three major disasters on July 10th. July 10th of '23, July 10th of '24, and July 10th of '25.

Micah: Wait, so you've had floods on the same day three consecutive years?

Eric Forand: That's correct. The one in '25 only hit five towns, but it was significant.

News clip: Vermonters brace themselves for the third July in a row where water's endangered the lives of them and their neighbors.

Eric Forand: One of the towns had damage that was three times their annual budget. We have some funding from the state, but how do we manage that?

MICAH: Eric Forand's team requested that Trump issue a major disaster declaration for the 2025 floods to unlock FEMA money. But, the president denied it in what appears to be a larger trend of punishing Blue states.

News clip: The declaration would have authorized FEMA to provide financial assistance to repair public infrastructure. The president approved declarations for Alaska, Nebraska, and North Dakota late Wednesday, but denied requests from Vermont, Illinois, and Maryland. Trump announced which states would receive aid on Truth Social, calling attention to the fact that he won elections in those areas.

MICAH: Eric Forand told me that because Vermont is so reliant on funding from FEMA, if the agency decides to raise the disaster threshold, or if Trump continues to weaponize declarations, his state may suffer.

Eric Forand: If we get denied more disaster declarations, even if they're over threshold, what is the state gonna do? How are the towns gonna manage? So those are things that we're trying to navigate right now. And I'd rather have a flood than this FEMA disaster. 

Micah: Oh my god.

Eric Forand: Uh, but we're just managing it as best we can. 

MICAH: And Vermont's not alone. 

Jake Bittle: Nevada and many other states, across the entire Great Plains, certainly in the Northeast, they would be in a lot of trouble

MICAH:  This is Jake Bittle, a staff writer at Grist who covers FEMA and climate change.

Jake Bittle: Responding to disasters, big disasters, cannot become a line item in the budget for most states. It just won't work.

MICAH: When I called up Jake, I was trying to process what I was seeing; that -- even as longtime FEMA watchers like MaryAnn Tierney support some of these reforms -- much of this felt like the product of a lobbying effort from the Heritage Foundation and other groups that want to cut public programs and feed parts of our government to the private sector. Stock prices for insurance companies surged after the review council suggested privatizing FEMA's flood insurance program, part of the Project 2025 wishlist. All this at a time when climate disasters are more common and more costly -- when maybe we need more federal relief, not less...

Jake Bittle:  I'm a believer, at a personal level, not as a reporter, I believe that we should have an active federal government. I believe the federal government has an important part to play in American society. And if you believe that, then you believe that they're capable, with the right funding, the right staffing, of responding to every disaster. But there are many people who've worked in the agency who say, "Look, that's just not the reality, the states should be incentivized to take this up because they work faster, they work cheaper, they know what's going on the ground." And I've been covering the agency long enough, you know I have to give some credence to that.

Micah: So, you find, in your own internal struggle, you find that your idealism is tempered by what experienced people have tried to convey to you?

Jake Bittle: I don't know that this is, like, all, like, that I would, like, love for this to be, like, part of the segment. But like - 

Micah: I like it though, 'cause I, I'm struggling with this too. I'm trying to understand it and it's helping me.

Jake Bittle: There may be points of agreement between conservatives and people who have been frustrated by bureaucracy, but just given the experience of the Trump administration in other areas, when they say, "Hey, we're gonna pull back," you have to think this is not a reordering of costs in a way that is ultimately gonna lead to more efficiency and a reformed agency that is capable of both moving fast when it needs to move fast and sizing up when it needs to size up for a big hurricane. You have to think it's just kind of like a pell-mell austerity. That's what the pattern has been. 

Micah: Do you think that Trump's threats to kill FEMA and Kristi Noem's stranglehold on the agency forced Washington to kind of reckon with how important FEMA really is?

Jake Bittle: Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. The problems that were created by Noem – and also just the wake-up call of Trump saying we should get rid of this – activated opposition that you don't always see from Republicans in Congress. These people were not about to let this happen in a way that they did with AID right? Where AID is established by statute too. You can't technically just delete it, but there was no constituency in Congress to save it. But there was no way they could have gone and said, "Hey, we're shutting down FEMA." There's just nobody left who wanted to do this. And you know everyone's kind of wiping their brow, I think, that they got through the Noem era without you know a total national calamity happening.

[phone rings ]

Cameron Hamilton: Hi, Eloise. How are you? 

Eloise: I'm good. Hey, Cam. I'm here with Micah, uh, who you spoke to before.

Cameron Hamilton: Okay. Excellent. Well, thank you…  I wanted to call and reach out 'cause I understand that you are getting ready to air, um, our previous conversation. Um, and I wanted to speak with you about that if you have some time.

Micah: Yes, Cam. Hey. Um, I just wanted to let you know that I am recording this conversation, but I'm happy to talk about it. 

MICAH: Earlier this week, Eloise and I got a call from Cameron Hamilton. When we called him back, he asked us to delay the release of this episode. He was concerned that our interview from five months ago could draw negative attention ahead of his upcoming senate confirmation hearing. I told him I thought the request was inappropriate and that we would release the episode as planned.

It’s true that he may face tough questions about his qualifications. If confirmed, he would be the least experienced FEMA administrator since Hurricane Katrina-era leader, Michael Brown. And my sources believe Hamilton will still likely get the job.

I came to this topic as an outsider. I cover the media, not emergency management or climate policy. But when I dove into the history of FEMA, there was immediately something familiar to me. Much like the media, this agency is a funhouse mirror. It reflects what our leaders fear most at any given moment. In the Cold War years, it was nuclear annihilation. A time when the agency prioritized secretive doomsday planning, which did little to prepare Americans for natural disasters and spawned decades of harmful conspiracy theories. After 9/11, FEMA was transformed as the War on Terror hysteria swept through American institutions, when a mass exodus of FEMA staffers left the agency unprepared when Katrina hit. In Trump's second term, fear of immigration gripped the Department of Homeland Security. Last year, Kristi Noem paralyzed the agency as she focused on MAGA's mass deportation program. She even reassigned some FEMA staffers to ICE.

Fear, of course, is a corrupting force. It's the fuel of authoritarianism and moral panic. But in the right doses, in the right hands, it's a powerful motivator. 

California Emergency Manager: My mom tells me that I'm a professional worrier and that finally I'm getting paid to do what I've always done. 

MICAH: This is a local California emergency manager, who asked to remain anonymous in case of retaliation. He got into this line of work after he developed an intense fear of wildfires — after his home was nearly engulfed by flames.

California Emergency Manager: I just wanted to transmute that abject fear… into something more productive, and I kind of got into emergency management that way. 

MICAH: Now he's part of a tiny team working for a tribal nation in California, preparing people in this very remote area for floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, and wildfires.  Native Americans are 7 times more likely to die from extreme weather than their White counterparts.  He says his office is funded entirely by grants from the federal government. And with the dysfunction and recent shake-ups at FEMA, he's worried that the agency's commitment to helping our most vulnerable is waning.

California Emergency Manager:  Funding can make the difference between a community standing up an evacuation shelter, or not. When something devastating happens on tribal territory, that might be the difference between saving lives or not. 

MICAH: As he looks ahead to the Summer, he sees looming threats: Climate scientists are forecasting an El Nino supercharged by our climate crisis -- a weather pattern that brings increased risk of wild fires and floods to the American West. 

With staffing cuts at the National Forest Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and with FEMA's workforce gasping for air... lives hang in the balance. 

FEMA's brightest spots were moments when its leaders feared the right things. Like during the James Lee Witt era of the 90s, before the agency had lost its cabinet position, before it had been absorbed into the machinery of DHS. When FEMA proved it could respond to natural hazards quickly and efficiently. And, then, after Katrina, when FEMA tried to understand its catastrophic failures, and vowed to never repeat the mistakes of the past. But here we are. 

In this very uncertain time for this agency, the one thing we can be sure of is that there will be a next disaster. And people will ask: where’s FEMA? Instead of fearing the unknown, maybe what our leaders should fear most, is a disaster of their own making.

MICAH: That’s it for American Emergency: the Movement to Kill FEMA. This series is reported and hosted by me, Micah Loewinger. With additional writing and reporting from…

ELOISE: Me, Eloise Blondiau, On the Media’s Senior Producer. Jared Bartman designed the artwork for this series. Our fact-checker is Tom Colligan. Original music and mixing from Jared Paul. “American Emergency” was edited by Executive Producer Katya Rogers.

Micah: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Special thanks to Chris Catalano, Shana Udvardy, Andrew Rumbach, and Eric Umanksy. On the Media is produced by WNYC. Brooke Gladstone will be back next week, I’m Micah Loewinger.