Trump FEMA Administrator Is Polite To Democrats In Hearing, Immediately Fired

Now here is something you don’t see very often: an appointee of the Trump administration who seems to have had somewhat relevant experience that qualified him to oversee the agency he was appointed to lead on an acting basis. Not only that, but he also seemed to believe at least somewhat in the agency’s mission.

So of course the Trump administration, and specifically Secretary of Homeland Security and collagen-stuffed dog murderer Kristi Noem, shit-canned said appointee this week after less than four months on the job because he had the nerve to say in a congressional hearing that this agency has some actual value to the American people. Whoa, buddy! Who told you that working for Donald Trump allows you to have an opinion about things?

The appointee was Cameron Hamilton, who had been named the (acting) head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) a couple of days after Trump was inaugurated in January. In the hearing with the House Appropriations Committee, he was asked by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) if he agreed with Noem and Trump that FEMA has failed the American people and needs to be eliminated. For a Trump guy, he had a surprisingly reasonable answer. You can see it a little past the 01:08:00 mark in this video:

“As the senior adviser to the president on disasters and emergency management and to the secretary of Homeland Security, I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

Hold up there, my man! Did you just suggest that a) our God-King Donald Trump’s determination to end FEMA might be misguided, and b) that Congress is some sort of co-equal branch of government that Trump should discuss his decisions with, and not just a bunch of yutzes who are required to rubber-stamp every single item on his agenda? Are you sure you’re a Republican?

Then, in a fit of modesty in which he seemed to recognize his position, he even deferred to Trump and his big brain:

“Having said that, I’m not in a position to make decisions and impact outcomes on whether or not a determination as consequential as that should be made. That is a conversation that should be had between the president of the United States and this governing body.”

Frankly, Hamilton’s answer was about as mild as we can imagine coming from a Trumpist talking to Congress. Therefore, we might as well have started the countdown clock on how long he had left in his position.

It turns out he had roughly 24 hours. On Thursday, the administration fired him and replaced him with some asshole named David Richardson, a man with zero experience in emergency management who immediately set about telling FEMA employees that from now on they will shut up and do what he says:

“Obfuscation, delay, undermining. If you’re one of those 20% of people and you think those tactics and techniques are going to help you, they will not, because I will run right over you,” Richardson told the meeting.

We’re sure it was very exciting for FEMA employees to be told that they must meekly roll over and allow their life’s work to be eliminated altogether because a couple of sub-mediocre intellects like Trump and Noem say so. It’s great to have a leader who will start his tenure by immediately shredding whatever scraps of morale might have remained at the agency.

Something that will have good government types tearing out what’s left of their hair is that Hamilton started out as your typical Trumpist schmuck who wanted to destroy the agency he led. POLITICO reported on his appointment in January by analyzing his X feed, and he sounds as paranoid and misinformed and downright dumb as every other MAGA nut:

Besides promoting inaccurate criticisms of the agency he’s now in charge of, Hamilton’s many posts about politics, international affairs and national security included slams on diversity, equity and inclusion; his dismissal of Trump’s hush-money conviction as a “sham”; and an unflattering photograph of former U.S. health official Rachel Levine, who is transgender. […]

One post repeated misinformation that FEMA had diverted $1 billion in disaster aid to help *“illegals” entering the U.S. from Mexico. As FEMA itself notes, Congress gave the agency $1 billion specifically to help detained migrants.

Despite all of that, the former Navy SEAL does seem to have come around. He was pushing for changes to FEMA, as he told DeLauro, and was committed to find ways that the agency could be more efficient and focus on priorities, even if he also wanted to reduce the scope of FEMA’s mission. When he threatened to quit a couple of months ago over his clashes with the administration, senior staff even talked him out of it.

And Hamilton at least had some qualifications to lead FEMA. He had previously spent five years, including all of Trump’s first term, working as something called a supervisory emergency management specialist for the State Department. Then he spent a couple of years overseeing 4,000 emergency medical technicians on the southern border for the Department of Homeland Security.

Shoot, by the “Michael Brown during the Bush era” standard, Hamilton was a downright expert in emergency response.

By contrast, his replacement is a former Marine combat officer who had recently joined Homeland Security’s office of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, which works to stop the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The Trump people have apparently learned their lesson about hiring people who might actually know what they are doing. They tried it this one time and it didn’t work out.

There was never a good time to fuck up FEMA, but this is a particularly bad moment. Hurricane season in the Atlantic starts in three weeks and runs through the end of November. Experts think activity will be slightly above average. The Trump administration has been busy gutting all sorts of weather monitoring functions the federal government performs, which means that it will be harder to come by accurate hurricane forecasts.

The upshot is that America will be less able to both plan for hurricanes and surge emergency resources to help devastated areas recover from them. And the Trump administration has already been denying help to areas that have been hurt by natural disasters. Trump in recent weeks has refused to approve aid to help Arkansas recover from a string of tornadoes and is dragging its feet approving help for Mississippi for the same issue. And that’s how he responds to emergencies in states that are his friends! The Trump theory is that the states should be able to handle problems like this.

Of course, he is ignoring the fact that FEMA was specifically created because individual states don’t have the disaster relief infrastructure to handle the ever-larger natural disasters that keep hitting America, and they don’t have the money to fund building that sort of infrastructure. But hey, Trump needs every penny of the $90 million or so that his giant birthday parade is going to cost. Tough luck, people who have lost everything!

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[POLITICO / Reuters / YouTube]

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