The Future of FEMA and Distrust

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I'm Lef Nasser. and to stay the obvious, we here at the show are normal human people. mostly Even occasionally civically minded people So there are stories and topics, especially newsy sorts of things that we think are important and that we care about kind of thing we usually cover And when something is going on that we feel that way about, often our friends over at on the media are covering it. and then we realize, oh, this is even more interesting and strange and tricky than we thought And that was the case recently with a series of episodes they did about the Federal emergency Management aggency, or FEMA which under the current administration has been fighting for its very existence I'll also be signed an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA. The series they put together is a deeply researched and reported dive into the agency's origins, its troubled history over the last few decades, and it's also a prescient peek into its uncertain future. I think we're going to recommend that FEMA go away The series sprung from the mind of on the media co host, Michael Loowinger. Okay, here I am. Congratulations. Thank you God, you've been working on this for a really long time. So today we're going to play some excerpts from that series. We're going to talk to Micah about his reporting because it feels like a very American, very now story about on one side the idealism and promise of good government On the other side, the frustration with bureaucracy and mismanagement and under it all, a profound distrust in government power It's also just an impressive, compelling and immersive bit of journalism that we'd like to share with you. Thank you. With kind of at its heart, I think, is like an agency to help people Yeah. But then it's like to kind of watch the swirl of this money, all this power, all these politics, all these moves around this very simple, very pure drive Americans wanting to help Americans. Yeah, and that was the kind of the thing that caaught me off guard about diving into FEMA, You take that mission and then you kind of compare it to like the stories that have been told about FEMA.. And it's like, how did we get to a place where the agency that's supposed to like Be the backstop between you and like financial and literal ruin. How did that become like one of like these these villains of the internet. The series basically takes on that question, How did FEMA become so hated by so many people Four episodes long, but I want to start by playing you some of episode one, which details the origin of FEMA as an agency turnurns out all the conspiracy theories that plague it today We're there from the very beginning. Yeah The conspiracy theories about FEMA that date back to this era of the agency that no one thinks about or talks about anymore It was hiding things from the American public And it all starts, as you'll hear in the piece with a plane wreck On december first, nineteen seventy four, heavy rain and fog rerouted a passenger plane over northern Virginia, some fifty miles from Washington, DC On its descent, the aircraft dropped into the forest below, sheering off the tre topops Crashing into the side of Mount Weather The two pilots were killed first, lanced by trees that burst through the cockpit The rest of the aircraft crumbled into pieces, a mangle of shrapnel in the body parts of the ninety two passengers and crew members There were no survivors One woman whose parents were on the flight said it seemed like the mountain had jumped up and bit the plane News coverage of the day quickly turned to the blame game and the miscommunication from air traffic control amidst a violent storm But our focus is something that was buried in the reports When TV crews arrived at the crash site, they discovered rather ominously that Mount Weather had already been sealed off on the orders of federal security agents. The quick action was taken because the big jet had landed almost a mile away from a super secret government installation underground complex of emergency offices set up for federal officials in the event of nuclear war Crash had inadvertently uncovered a tightly guarded Cold War secret Inside Mount Weather was a massive covert facility. And somehow that undersells it through a tunnel that burrows into the mountain and behind a thirty four ton blast door lies a subterranean strange Lvian lair free standing city with a hospital, a crematorium, an emergency power plant, and even a broadcasting studio. Everything that the White House and thousands of federal workers would need to run the country underground while millions melted on the surface. I expect your people to save our government. That's what President Dwight Eisenhower told the first director of Mount Weather after it was built in nineteen fifty five It's still operated by FEMA today. It's actually being renovated as I speak. But back in the nineteen fifties, Mount Weather was run by FEMA's predecessor, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, the FCDA, which poured billions into making America nuke proof at least lulling people into the belief that with enough preparation, they might survive atomic hellfire D' stop, B down' stop The FCDA was behind this delightful, if slightly morbid PSA, instructing school children to hide under their desks during bomb drills There was a trail by the name of Bert Andever the turtle was very alert And danger then we never got h. He knew just what to do. He dct and cover. For adults, the FCDA organized Operation Alert, a series of dramatic exercises where millions of people acted out the day of their likely demise, emptying the streets of America's biggest cities. While the sirens wail their grim warning, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers scurry for shelter against the attack Riders and drivers taking cover in a realistic drill for a day all Americans pray will never come Operation alert was also the first time that Mount Weather saw action. As soon as the alert sounded in Washington, President Eisenhower reached for his hat and strode to a waiting limousine to be driven to an emergency base of operations in the mountains outside Washington's exact location kept secret secret until that terrible plane crash in nineteen seventy four Fortunately, nuclear obliteration never came and Mount Weather was never truly put to use. There's something ironic and revealing that a single storm brought more death and destruction to the base than thirty years of the Cold War By the nineteen seventies, it had become clear that the nuclear preparations had done little to protect America from an arguably greater threat Mother nature. We just didn't have that many nuclear wars, which is great but we do have a lot of natural disasters. Garret Graff is a journalist and author of a book about the origins of FEMA titled Raven Rock, the story of the U.S. government's secret plan to save itself while the rest of us die Before the agency was created, America's disaster response system was Well, barely a system. It didn't make sense for every state to be developing its own totally independent ability to respond to a hurricane, because in any given year, most states don't get hit by a hurricane. Which became a big problem in the sixties and seventies when the country was rocked by a series of record breaking disasters. No one knows the full size of the disaster yet. in Betsy's wake There's only darkness, confusion, and death. After suffering one of the most serious earthquakes in history, Alaska had to undergo the further ordeal of over forty severe earth tremors Imagine being there as the streets reared up around you like the scene of some terrible biblical retribution They called her Camille. Born of the sea, she turned like a woman scorned. He screamed and ripped and flooded killed These big disasters overwhelmed towns and counties and states, the big ones often do But when they asked for help, the federal government was too disorganized to act quickly or efficiently. Supplying extra ambulances, delivering food and water to survivors, fixing roads and power plants, each piece of the emergency management process could come from a different office or department. A hundred agencies might play a role. Navigating this patchwork of services and jurisdictions was a major pain in the ass for local leaders, Especially during a crisis when lives are on the line and every second counts Like in nineteen seventy two, when another big storm hit. Many of the people here and others in the path of Hurricane Agnes were completely wiped out Many of them feel that federal aid is too slow in coming and too little. Trump says FEMA should return its responsibilities to the states whichich is odd because states often bring in FEMA when they're unable to respond on their own And anyway, it was the states that asked for FEMA in the first place In nineteen seventy eight, the National Governors Association drew up plans for a streamlined one stop shop for federal emergency response and delivered it to a sympathetic White House. Washington President Carter proposed merging five big federal emergency preparation and disaster relief agencies into one agency as part of his reorganization plan Civil defense experts say it will provide much needed communication between the state and federal levels In nineteen seventy nine, Jimmy Carter signed an executive order giving life to the Federal Emergency Management Agency FEMA was a federal Frankenstein with a dual mission, Cold War civil defense, and disaster relief I wish I could illustrate this moment by playing you like a triumphant speech from President Carter or some colorful news footage, but either that stuff never existed or no one thought it was important enough to archive Even the earliest employees at FEMA were confused about how to talk about it. Wait a new director there And there was a message when that went out to us that said If we're referring to the agency publicly, we should say either Federal Eergency Management aggency or FEMA, because the word FEMA, he thought sounded too much like a laxative. This is Leo Bosner, a retired FEMA official who's taught me a lot about the earliest days of the agency. He was working as a flood insurance specialist with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in one of the offices that was folded into FEMA. We're all working along in the office and one day they tell us, okay Everybody go down to phhoto ID, you're getting new photo ID. So we walked down the stairs If new photo IDs that' say FEMA. turnurned in our photo ID's and say housing urban development And then we're all told we're all getting new job titles and our new job title is emergency management spepecialist then. And I'm thinking What on God's earth as an emergency management specialist? likeike this is the end of my career. What kind of? Leo would spend the next thirty years at FEMA He eventually found really satisfying work helping hospitals and medical organizations prepare for floods, wildfires, and hurricanes But less than two years after he started getting the hang of his new job Fema fell into a decade long tailspin The big shift really didn't come until nineteen eighty. Ronald Reagan appears to be heading toward a landslide electoral victory tonight across the United States. Ronald Reagan got elected president. And there's a super U turn from Jimmy Carter was mostly all about social welfare and Ronald Reagan was more about national defense To run FEMA, Reagan picked someone who would stir up a lot of trouble for the agency. This man. Only a masochist with a death wish would accept the job of directing FEMA. Army Colonel Louis Jafrida, speaking here with a caller on Larry King's radio show. I really don't believe that we can be safved if there is a nuclear war. I mean, How are you going to save me if you're blown up too? But you're not suggesting that because we both might be blown up by a nuclear war that we shouldn't have in place a system that would take care of us if there was an earthquake or a tidal wave or a hurricane or anything that sort of. While Lewis Jeafrida paid lip service to FEMA's disaster relief mission, he was quietly funneling most of FEMA's budget towards Cold War civil defense Leo Bosner. All of a sudden, we start seeing all these military officers signing in at the login desk go, why these military people here the military if you'll go to floods or something And then we learn little by little that FEMA's mission was really, really going to be to get ready for the big nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. In the early eighties, Leo started to hear whispers about classified programs at the agency Every day on his trip up the elevator at FEMA HQ, he'd ride by a secret fifth floor manned by a security guard Mostly, he rolled his eyes at all the Cold War theater, wishing FEMA would focus more on preparing Americans for natural disasters But he still wondered What are they doing in there majority of its funding. Garrett Graft and about a third of its workforce was actually hidden in the nation's classified black budget, the special budget that Congress oversees that protects our most secret programs and capabilities. And FEMA on a daily basis is in charge of tracking the whereabouts of everyone in the presidential line of succession so that in the event of a nuclear war Ns where all of those people are, how to get them to secure relocation sites like the Mountain Weather Bunker and who would be best positioned be the person who takes over as president of the United States in the event of a nuclear war I wonder if this classified continuity of government planning helps explain why there was so little media about FEMA when it was first created I think the Feds just didn't want to draw attention to their secret plans That said, the coverage did pick up when the agency launched a controversial new initiative. The head of emergency management, Louis Jeffriida, says the heart of the proposal is crisis relocation. What we want to accomplish is taking the maximum number of people from High risk areas. to areas of lesser risk a mass evacuation program There was sort of this sense of, well, if you could just get twenty, thirty, fifty miles away from a major city, you would at least have a chance to survive The initial blast from the nuclear weapons and then live into nuclear winter Government officials estimated that in the worst case, sixty million Americans could survive an attack Can you imagine all those urbanitees swamping small towns and rural areas News reports at the time featured a mixture of fascination and incredulity. My God, you're going to have modified anarchy after that sort of thing. How in the world are you going to coordinate the recovery and putting leadership back into place. A' going do that sixixty million is still a lot of people. That is the modern population of France those people would need functioning government and functioning infrastructure afterwards This is where we start getting into the bizarre conspiracy theories that haunt FEMA today In nineteen eighty two, in an effort to game out some of these post apocalyptic scenarios, President Ronald Reagan signed a secret executive order to create a covert program called Project nine notot eight. It's nine zero eight, but they called it nine notot eight pulled billions of dollars in top officials from the National Security Council, FEMA, and the FBI The FBI was in charge of pre identifying buildings that could serve as refugee camps If I have this right, basically you had FBI agents working Undercover for FEMA Traveling around the country, visiting warehouses. C shops Casinos Walmart helping identify businesses that could be used to house citizens after a nuke was dropped on an American city Yes, and often without telling the businesses that they were being scouted for these purposes. There was, thankfully never a need to construct these refugee camps But the secrecy went way deeper and darker. Five years after the launch of Project nine hundred ninety eight, a bombshell report from the Miami Herald revealed that before Jafrida was asked to help run FEMA, he'd written his master's thesis on how the military could quell race riots by detaining millions of black people and putting them in concentration camps Members of Congress were given a copy of his thesis during Jfrida's confirmation hearings A horrifying detail that makes me think they considered this to be part of his qualifications for the job The most damning part of that Miami Herald piece though, was news that Jafrida had worked with Reagan's National Security Council to write plans for declaring martial law and putting the country temporarily under a sort of shadow government And not just in the case of a nuke, but also in a so called national crisis, like a war. of this comes out in the late nineteen eighties amid the Iran contontra hearings and investigations.s out that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who was the central figure at the White House of Iran Contra. Also one of the planners Yeah Project ninety. Oliver North was asked about these martial law plans during the Iran contontra hearings. Colonel North, in your work at the NSC Were you not assigned at one time to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster North was questioned by Texas Representative Jack Brooks We see North Pause whisper to his attorney And Th then the chairman of the hearings, Daniel K. Eoway jumps in to respond on the government's behalf. I believe the question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area. so may I request that You not touch upon that, sir I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman because I read in Miami papers and several others That there had been a plan. a contingency plan that would suspend the American Constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe he was. I most respectully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage The government never acknowledged any of this stuff until much of it was declassified years later. Louis Jeffrida ended up resigning from FEMA for totally unrelated reasons following a congressional fraud investigation According to Senator Albert Gre, Giofreda had spent one hundred seventy thousand dollars of federal money to build a house on federal property for his own use By the start of the nineties, FEMA employee Leo Bosner was beyond tired of the dysfunction and the kooky national security schemes. Frankly, for me, once that stuff was in the rear view mirror, it's like findine, that's the trash. I hope they come on Friday and pick it up and dump it to the landfill There were some pretty nutty people working back there then. fortunately, nothing much ever came of that, except they ate up most of her budget. He was eager for the agency to shift resources to preparing for floods and hurricanes But all this doomsday planning had done a number on FEMA's reputation talk on my off duty time to people on Capitol Hill or report news reporters and say, look, this is a dangerous thing. We're ignoring these natural disasters And I was having lunch with a news reporter one day and I'm telling him this And the guy's looking really bored. He says, ye, Leo, that's all really bad, but Tell me about FEMA's secret plan to round up all the liberals in the country and put them in concentration camps What Yeah, you he should, buddy People are so inept they couldn't organize a two kark parade and they were never going round up everybody in the country. come on get I out would of here it were you Leo didn't know it at the time, but those FEMA Camppss conspiracy theories had started popping up in fringe message boards on the early internet. The FEMA plans to imprison American citizens have generated a lot of interest in locating the potential prison camps throughout the country This woman, Linda Thompson, a sort of godmother of the right wing militia movement made a nineteen ninety four documentary, America Under Siege which warned that FEMA was part of the New World Order A global authoritarian takeover that would require rounding up anti government dissidents. These may be facilities that have other uses, but which could be quickly used to detain large numbers of people, such as this Amtrak facility in Beeachgrove, Indiana. Following in her footsteps a couple decades later were militia leaders like Stuart Rhodes of the Oathkeepers, one of the January sixth guys A lot of this stuff is dual use. They put together a detention center or an emergency center supposedly for refugees from other countries. and infoWars host, Alex Jones. People are waking up in drroves. To the FEMA camps, to the New Wld Order to the troops on the streets, theseese FEMA camps. And Glen Beck, when he was still on Fox News. I'm tired of hearing. You know about them? No. We've now for several days, done research on them I can't debunk them After whipping up this paranoia, Beck did eventually debunk the theory with help from the editor in chief of popular Mechanics. This is an Amtrak repair facility in Beach Grove, Indiana We set a crew there the other day and we got this your video Yes. And sure enough, what did we find They're repairing trains in there Remember how earlier Garrett Graft told us about stores like Walmarts being scoped out by the government to be used as refugee camps They don't exist, but people on TikTok and YouTube still like to make videos about them. It's like military style entrance kind of like a FEMA camp cond Why in the hell does Walmart's suuper center need that? See the Walmart trucks? These videos are low effort and easy to laugh off. But I mean, if FEMA could operate Mount Weather, why not a Mount Walmart? The challenge. of a lot of these conspiracies is that they have a germ of truth to them. Derek Graff, in the early stages of the Cold War Jadgar Hoover at the FBI had pre selected lists of suspected communists and political dissidents that he wanted to round up in the event of a nuclear war. Not to mention the fact that the US imprisoned over one hundred thousand Japanese Americans during World War two. I think FEMA has always been in a difficult place and this is true by the across all of the continuity planning and doomsday planning. You just can't talk about these classified bunkers and classified operations even if you're trying to debunk conspiracies. The secrecy in and of itself is naturally gonna to feed conspiracy theories Absolutely The kicker to all this is that some of what the conspiracy theorists warned about is happening, just not to them This past July, FEMA, under Christy Gnhmess Department of Homeland Security, revealed a new program FEMA allocating six hundred eight million dollars in state grants for construction of detention centers. Migrant detention centers, partart of Trump's mass deportation program The announcement came right around when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis opened Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious facility in the Everglades. And while he built the jail using state emergency funds intended for natural disasters He claimed that federal reimbursement was on the way. A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirms Florida did submit an application to FEMA and were awarded two days ago. the full amount Florida applied for. six hundred eight do The coverage made it sound like the money was in Florida's bank account But at time of recording, those FEMA funds have actually been held up by Trump's Justice Department Florida officials say the money is still likely, but who knows Despite that uncertainty and many legal attempts aimed at closing it Alligator Alcatraz remains open. Amnesty International says immigrants held at the ice jail in Florida were shackled inside a two foot high metal cage and left outside without water for up to a day at a time. In a new report they also detail on sanitary conditions, lights on twenty four hours a day, poor quality food and water, and lack of privacy And while Governor DeSante says the conditions are up to standard, the families of migrants being held inside are calling it a concentration camp That is the most real FEMA camp ever built What do you think it says that FEMA would actually use public funds for the very thing that has been F right booyman I mean, there is something uniquely dystopian about a right wing government elected on the backs of the anti government conspiracies that it is now implementing After the break, Micah will explain how we got to this present day iteration of FEMA and help us understand what might happen to it going forward from here We'll be back in just a minute. RadioLab is supported by AT and T. Smmer is great for many reasons. The best reason are plans we made finally making it out of the group chat, because there's more time to fit everyone in. 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And the series picks up that story in the nineteen nineties when FEMA stops obsessing over nuclear winter and focuses on climate disasters It's still the subject of conspiracy theories at that point. you know, relatively popular with the general public then nine and eleven With all the concerns about counterterrorism, the agency's attention was once again divided And the series shows how that was a big part of what led to their catastrophic mishandling of Hurricane Katrina in two thousand five Mica then told me how FEemMA hit its next inflection point with Hurricane Helen. Hurricane Helene hits in twenty twenty four and brings historic flooding to Western North Carolina. FEMa in a way was not caught off guard by the actual hurricane. It had prestaged water and medical supplies and search and rescue teams, nothing like what happened during Hurricane Katrina. That said, what FEMA was not ready for was just an absolute onslaught of misinformation and conspiracy theories. and Political lies aimed at making it look like FEMA Totally screwed up. Yeah We're talking about a month before the twenty twenty four election, Donald Trump, he spreads a lot of conspiracy theories about FEMA's response among them that FEMA iss running out of money because it's given all of its money to migrant housing. He told a story of FEMA just giving money away to migrants at the expense of American hurricane survivors, which was just not true. That was a lie. Micah told me that those old stories about FEMA camps also resurfaced during this time, and there were stories about FEMA favoring Democratic voters over Republican voters And it leads to violent threats against FEMA employees, intimidation and harassment of federal workers on the ground. And so Just a few weeks later, Hurricane Milton hits Florida. And this one canver for FEMA, who's going door to door knocking, telling people, hey, these are the assistance programs you can apply for. H team that she's managing, they're telling her Hey, we're being harassed, especially at houses with Trump campaign signs. So this woman, Marnie Washington, FEMA manager, says, well You guys can just skip these Trump homes to be safe That gets leaked to the right wing press. It goes viral and then now now basically Pof Aa proof have proof They have proof. Yeah. They create they created this chaos with lies and then when it kind of filters out and leads to like fear among FEMA employees, they end up with evidence that Yeah, FEMA was neglecting Trump supporters all along. so I just found that it felt like he like threw Boomerang in Hurricane Helene, caught it in Hurricane Milton and then sort of ran with it as soon as he became president Trump three days after inauguration press conference in North Carolina, where he straight up says, I don't like FEMA very much. It's really expensive. They don't do a very good job I think we should either reform or get rid of it altogher. And Micah says that in the year and a half or so since that speech Fema has been locked in a struggle to survive That's basically the fourth episode of the series. that I want to ' play just one part of that episode here for you because Micah managed to score an interview with a guy named Cameron Hamilton, who was the interim head of FEMA in the early days of Trump's second term right after Helene who was fired a year later. And then in a strangeer of events may now be the man who holds FEMA's future in his hands. On march twenty seventh, twenty twenty five, 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 I received a phone call That was veryer distressing It was Corey Lewindowsky, a special government employee working closely with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Christi Nome Lewandowsky was ripping mad. He'd persceided to berate me. 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 And the topic was abolishing FEMA. A day earlier, Politico had published a story about a meeting where Corey Lewandowsky, Christy Noome, 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. To which I responded a liar, Malgra, a man of honor. And if I tell you the truth, it's the truth. Lewandowski didn't buy it. I wanted to choke somebody, and that's exactly what came through my mind I'm just living in my flesh, doing some very unchristian things to a certain person, but nonetheless A certain person being mr. Loew Das. Yeah I think you can read between the lines in that statement After his call with Lewandowsky, 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. 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 them in the face and remind them that you're not a liar So that's what I chose to do. Just a quick bit of context here, Micah actually interviewed Cameron Hamilton five months before they released this episode. So early in twenty twenty six. And one of the reasons Micah wanted to talk to him was because Hamilton was acting head of the agency at the moment. when Donald Trump gave that speech in North Carolina, saying he might maybe want to abolish FEMA, which apparently took everyone by surprise 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 going happen? This was just Hamilton's third day on the job, and all of a sudden, FEMA's twenty thousand plus workforce and the entire world of emergency managers were spinning out. There were state directors. and governors that heard this and thought This is a terrible idea FEMA employees at the agency's headquarters were barging into Hamilton's office in tears I assembled a leadership chainment of 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 deal with this crisis and meet it head on. and do it with a small on ourface 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 Eergency Management Reform Act requires that FEMA's leader have significant experience responding to disasters Trump's last FEMA administrator, Pete Gainner, who served in Trump's first term, had done over ten 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 CEAL 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 meGa warrior, saying all the right things. Cameron, tell me about your race Hey, good morning, Thankks for having me and all the patriots out there. Thankk you for listening So I'm runningirgin. This is an interview on Real America's voice from march twenty twenty four, when Hamilton was running for a congressional seat in Virginia, about ten months before he ended up at FEMA. I've worked in the federal government in various different jobs and capacities, and I understand exactly the bureaucratic sickness that our government is playged bureaucratic sickness that our government is plagued by. So are you ready and able to dismantle the administrative state? I think so Absolutely. When Trump is president, if you win, are you? He lost in the Republican primary three 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 twenty twenty five 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 four point seven million households 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 consonservative. I don't think DHS should exist. Dismantling DHS and moving FEMA to the Department of Interior were also two goals of Project twenty twenty five During Trump's transition, Hamilton was put in touch with the DHS secretary to be, Christine Nom. The interview went very well And we discussed the principles of emergency management. How did you make the case to her that you were the man for the job 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 biocontainment, for Ebola You name it I did not pretend or presume by any means to be the most qualified individual 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 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. 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. 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. all of a sudden, every action, everything that we did was now immediately under the microscope That afternoon, Hamilton asked that FEMA remove climate resilience from the agency's top three goals. in an effort, he said, to make it seem less quote unquote political But it was a little 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 hell bent on gutting the agency than Secretary Christine Noome and her special employee, Corey Lewandowski, a MAGA operative and former pundit who was rumored to be having an affair with Noome Neither of them, says Hamilton, knew the basics of FEMA's history or its disaster relief systems. 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. We were tasked by Coral Landowsky and the Secretary to write a memo on how we would abolish FEMA This is Marian Tierney, who was Hamilton's deputy, his number two She's a longtime emergency manager who had risen through the ranks at the agency in the decades following nine hundred eleven And now here she was helping craft plans for how to radically reduce the staff at FEMA It was very upsetting, but part of your job as a senior executive is to implement a 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 raiseed the legal concerns associated with it As we discussed in episode two, 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 Christy Noome, Coreory Lewandowsky, and Kaman Hamilton was an opportunity to discuss these different strategies. They were eager to see my plans on reform, and then I think that they wanted to have a rebranding Hamilton's memo suggested some potential name changes for FEMA, including the National Office of Emergency Management, NOEM, as in Gnome. As she said, I love this, let's just rename it, we'll it abolishing And then politically it would look like it was an abolition when in reality, it was just a relabeling and a reshuffling of the deck That was just one idea, but Hamilton told me he insisted that they wait to see what Congress and Trump's FEMA Review cououncsel proposed before taking action And you know a bit about what happens next. Politico reported on the existence of that meeting, and Lewandowsky blamed Hamilton for the leak, despite the fact that many other people knew that the meeting was happening. That meeting was transmitted too us through an ESEC process, the executive secretariat The meeting's label was FEMA, abolish or reform So The meeting The topic itself was visible to about fifty to one hundred people Nevertheless, Lewandowski insisted that Hamilton sit for a polygraph test. They're not always perfect. You can get them wrong Yeah I feel like they're famous for not being that accurate 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, I see. 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 Hamilton was cleared, but he never received an apology Then, DHS began working its way through the agency's senior leadership I would say about eight to ten FEMA staff were polygraphed as a result of the meeting and the memo. Marianne Tierney was spared from the witch hunt. I even consulted an attorney because I thought I was going to be polygraphed It traumatized our workforce Did they find the leaker? Well I suspect I know where the leak came from. It did not come from FEMA. I'll put it that way. When Cameron Hamilton was called to testify on may seventh, twenty twenty five before the House Appropriations Committee, he knew his days at FEMA were numbers The morning of my testimony at about ten, maybe ten thirty. 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. Yeah. M Anne Ped 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 Aropriations commommittee now. that will indicate that I've been removed and that I will not be able to testify The apartment then realized the optics of it would not look proper So they backtracked esssentially indicating, hey, just sort of pretend this didn't happen. You can go ahead and testify, but When you come back, you're fired. That's not what they said, but that's what I understood it to mean Does this administration seek to eliminate FEMA? And do you support eliminating FEMA? US rep Rosa DolLoreo of Connecticut questioned Hamilton later that day. I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal emmergency management agency Having said that, that is a conversation that should be had between the President of the United States and this governing body Acting head Cameron Hamilton was abruptly fired yesterday. It came one day after he testified before Congress that FEMA should not be scrapped And then this march, just when morale at FEMA had hit rock bottom So Secretary No, at any time during your tenure as Director of Department of Homeland Security Have you had sexual relations with Corey Lewandowski mister Chairman, I am shocked that we're going down and pedalling tabloid garbage in this committee today. Reclaiming m'am In a congressional hearing, lawmakers like California Representative Sydney Komlager Dove ri Christie N It' O for you toize the quest it is also a question. So what I would say you should be able to answer what we do at the Department of Home Lairily on a wide range of topics, including her decision to delay disaster recovery funds to North Carolina and allegations of corruption and dysfunction at DHS more broadly. Chair Before I yield my time, I would like to enter into the record some articles and I'm asking for unanimous consent Noome tightens her grip on DHS. Lewandowsky fired FemMA addmin. W objection. Okay. The next one is Christy Noome, secretly took a cut of political donations from pro public. Without objection. Christie Nom fires Pilot over a blanket but is forced to reinstate him to fly home Wall Street Journal out objection We're coming on the air because President Trump has just announced that homeomeland Security Secretary Christy Noome is out of a job. This follows reports that the president was frustrated by her recent testimony on Capitol Hill. After Nonome was abruptly fired in March, FEMA's fortunes began to slowly turn around Trump's new DHS secretary, Mark Wayne 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 Halene recovery Lets know what we can do better. notot just beat up ment that's not the point because they've done a great job. but what is it that we can maybe tweet just a little bit? Over the past couple of months, Secretary Mullin began to lift Christy Noome's one hundred thousand dollars review policy President Trump also released some state disaster relief funding that his White House had withheld But most surprising of all. 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 Trump is now trying to rehire the guy who just a year or so ago he fired. Yes. he he get Not even just his old job, but now he's up for Senate confirmation. So he gets to be like the real deal, the real McCoy. He's like the guy drummed out in disgrace and then they just call him back and like they're like, oh, and by the way, will you just take your old job? Yeah. Okay, so I want to play youug just one last bit of tape here from that episode four because after Cameron Hamilton was nominated to lead FEMA again, Mica and his senior producer, Eloise Blondio got a call from Hamilton Pice, how are you? I'm good. Hey Kam. I'm here with Micah who you spoke to before Okay, excellent. Well, thank you. I wanted to call reach out because I understand that you are getting ready to air our previous conversation. and I wanted to speak with you about that if you have some time. Yes, Kam. Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I am recording this conversation but I'm happy to talk 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 So what is the status now? now is FEMA still on the bubble? Is FEMA still going to exist? How do we What does it look like So It's I do feel like the agency is like turnurned a corner in a significant way That said, you know, The disaster season is about to begin. Hurricane season, wildfire season is basically about to start. And there are serious concerns about the agency's capacities to respond to these disasters. It's like we're punching ourselves in the face at the time when we when we need to be most on it, you know? It's so depressing. Absolutely. That is incredibly depressing for me too And in a way, it felt to me like the continuation problem with FEMA at its core all along, which is that it is the agency where our leaders like dump their worst fears. And it really matters what you're afraid of as a country. Interesting. During the Cold War, it was nuclear annihilation. After nine eleven, it was the war on terror Yeah, DHS basically had FEMA throw out the old book and write new emergency response protocols with terrorism at the heart. Then we have Hurricane Katrina Arguably, a version of that has happened again today under Christy Noome and this Trump two point zero where fear of immigration became like the thing that DHS was obsessed with Yeah. And they even tried to pull fEMA workers out of the agency and make them help out at IC. just to illustrate