The acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency Cameron Hamilton was fired on Thursday morning, according to reporting from Politico, Marisa Kabas, and others. His sin, apparently, was testifying to a House committee the day before that the agency offering relief to Americans from disasters should not, in fact, be chopped up into digestible pieces and fed to a pack of wolves.
“I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” he said in response to a question from Democrat Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut. Less than a day later, he was summoned to the Homeland Security headquarters and shown the door. According to Kabas, Homeland Security’s assistant secretary of the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office David Richardson will take over the top job, at least for the moment.
This and the overall attempts to dismantle FEMA are not funny, of course, especially with various disaster seasons likely ramping up shortly — what is funny, at least sort of, is that Hamilton was more or less toeing the Trump line on FEMA, not speaking truth to power against the ravages of an evil administration. “It has strayed far from its core mission and evolved into an overextended federal bureaucracy,” he said in his prepared remarks to begin his Congressional testimony. There is lots of this — the agency has “fostered a culture of dependency, waste, and inefficiency,” and all the “Red tape, bureaucratic inertia, and top-down micromanagement have turned disaster recovery into a slow, costly, and frustrating process.”
There is the requisite ass-kissing as well: “Thanks to President Trump and Secretary Noem, we are now empowered to restore accountability and federalism to disaster relief,” Hamilton said. A major realignment of FEMA priorities will be “consistent with the President Trump and Secretary Noem’s vision.” And so on.
It didn’t matter. Nothing but full-throated compliance with whatever the president’s whim may be is demanded — that’s how you get absurd tariff defenses all over cable news, clearly illegal defiance of judicial orders, and the like. Even the death blow of a quote itself has some further context that might have placated a lesser tyrant: “Having said that [FEMA should not be thrown into a vat of sulfuric acid], I’m not in a position to make a decision,” he said during the hearing. “That is a conversation that should be had between the president of the United States and this governing body.”
The start of that conversation, clearly, was Hamilton’s firing — no more FEMA boosters, no matter how tepid their support. Hurricane season begins in 24 days.
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