The Future of FEMA

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
Brian Lehrer on WNYC. So here's a story you may not have heard with the war and the election and everything else going on. Last Wednesday, the man, President Trump, wants to run FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which Trump loves to hate.
The guy he's nominated to run it, Cameron Hamilton, went before the Senate for his confirmation hearing. And here's a strange thing. This is the same guy Trump fired last year for refusing to go along with the plan to shut the agency down. Now, as some of you weekend listeners know and podcast listeners know, our very own Micah Loewinger, co-host of On the Media, is, as far as we know, the only reporter who sat down with this likely new FEMA head for an interview. The two spoke for Micah series American Emergency, the movement to kill FEMA.
And he's bringing that conversation and more to the green space. Tomorrow night, we have some clips of Cameron Hamilton to play right now. And Micah joins us now with a preview of how this series is concluding and tomorrow night's event. Hey Micah.

**Micah Loewinger** (1:15)
Hey Brian, thanks for having me.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:17)
So for anyone who only thinks about FEMA on the worst day of their life, like when their house gets blown down by a hurricane, just really briefly, what does the agency actually do?

**Micah Loewinger** (1:27)
The agency helps states prepare and respond to natural disasters and big emergencies of all different kinds. It helps send lots of money really, really quickly to communities when they need it most.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:41)
Why does Trump hate FEMA?

**Micah Loewinger** (1:44)
That's the million dollar question. We get into all the nitty and gritty of it in our podcast series, American Emergency, The Movement to Kill FEMA.
One reason is that he became convinced by conspiracy theories about the agency, how it was supposedly biased against Trump supporters or has ulterior motives. I think frankly, on the campaign trail in 2024, he just found it politically expedient in the middle of this tightly contested election with Kamala Harris. There's a couple of big hurricanes.
Of course, in Western North Carolina and Florida, all up the eastern coast. So it was just convenient, I think, at the time to blame the Biden administration for failing disaster survivors. He just ran with that when he came into office last year. During the Doge era that we've all lived through, wild stories used to justify cutting down government agencies was kind of like the MO.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:54)
For listeners who hear OTM ever in recent months, they're aware of the amazing reporting you've been doing in your series, American Emergency, the movement to kill FEMA.
Now, for people who just are tuning in to the idea that you've been covering this for a long time, who is Cameron Hamilton? And I said a little bit of it in the intro, but why is this nomination by Trump such a strange turn?

**Micah Loewinger** (3:25)
Such a strange turn. One reason is that he was running FEMA at the beginning of the Trump administration. He came in in January with very little emergency management experience. He's running this very important, you know, 25,000 person disaster response and recovery and preparation agency.
And he is put in this bizarre situation where just three days into the second term, Trump says, I think maybe we should get rid of FEMA altogether or change it a bunch. And so you have this inexperienced guy who's never worked at FEMA before, having to lead it through this crisis. He goes head to head with Kristi Noem and Corey Lewandowski, who really make it their mission to try to gut FEMA, to paralyze the agency, to stop it from issuing grants and contracts, billions of dollars to counties and states. And Hamilton, although he's supportive of major significant reforms to the agency, he didn't think that getting rid of it altogether was a good idea.
He's at one point polygraphed by Corey Lewandowski. Lewandowski accuses Hamilton of leaking a story to the press about abolishing FEMA. Hamilton denies that. But then, last May, Hamilton went in front of a Senate subcommittee and said on the record in his testimony that he didn't believe abolishing FEMA was a good idea, and he was fired the next day.
So when I spoke to Cameron Hamilton in December, you know, he had been out of office for a little while, but I didn't think the public had, like, a really good sense of, like, the chaos and the damage that had been done to this agency. That's why I wanted to talk to him. But I had no way of predicting that, like, five months later, he would be nominated to run the agency again now in an official capacity. And so it was wild to watch the Senate confirmation hearing last week through that lens of, like, wow, is this guy really about to make this comeback after all that?