Comment: FEMA flooded by incompetent leadership
Published 1:30 am Monday, December 15, 2025
By Mark Gongloff
Bloomberg Opinion
Otto von Bismarck allegedly once said, “God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America,” which is funny but of course not true. You could fill several libraries with the names of all the fools and drunkards who came to bad ends, and luck even seems to be running out for the U.S. of A. Although in at least one key way it was fortunate this year, despite some deeply foolish policy. It seems bound to test that luck again in 2026.
For the first time in a decade, the U.S. dodged landfall by a hurricane this year, with several Category 5 monsters wreaking havoc just offshore in the Caribbean or spinning harmlessly out to sea. The nation thus avoided a Hurricane Katrina-like catastrophe at a time when the Federal Emergency Management Agency was basically on autopilot. Also, that autopilot was Hal 9000.
President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly said FEMA shouldn’t exist, tapped a blustering absentee, David Richardson, to run the agency just ahead of hurricane season. Richardson is a war veteran, novelist and aspiring comedian, but had zero experience in natural-disaster management. He artfully compensated for his lack of qualifications by just not bothering to manage much of anything, which may help explain why he left the job after six months.
FEMA Chief of Staff Karen Evans is now running the agency. Like Richardson, she lacks disaster-management experience, contrary to the requirements of federal law that Trump has circumvented by naming a series of “acting” directors. And soon her de facto second-in-command, running the vitally important Office of Response and Recovery, will be conspiracy theorist Gregg Phillips, independent journalist Marisa Kabas reported this week.
Phillips is best known for claiming millions of illegal votes were cast for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and backing the debunked documentary “2000 Mules.” His primary qualification for his new job appears to be animosity toward FEMA, automatically setting him apart from Richardson’s predecessor, Cam Hamilton, who was promptly fired for the grave error of telling Congress he thought FEMA should exist.
Phillips claims years of experience working with religious groups to deliver disaster relief to places like western North Carolina and Haiti, and he has called for a “Christ-centered approach” to catastrophe management, whatever that means. But none of this makes him qualified to run the ORR, an agency that spends billions of taxpayer dollars to quickly deploy resources after disasters and deliver relief to stricken homeowners and businesses.
“This is not a game,” an anonymous FEMA staffer told Kabas. “Americans will lose their lives because this administration refuses to put in competent leadership.”
We may have luckily avoided a full Katrina moment this year, but we did get a preview of one with the deadly floods in Texas in July. Along with Richardson reportedly being unreachable in the early hours of that disaster, FEMA’s response was sluggish and inadequate for several critical days, partly because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had ordered that any spending over $100,000 needed her personal OK. As happened in Katrina, FEMA leadership failed when Texans needed it most.
Of course, Katrina happened 20 years ago, a hint that not all of FEMA’s problems are new. The Texas disaster exposed some that pre-existed either of Trump’s presidencies and still linger. For one thing, its badly outdated flood maps didn’t foresee several buildings being inundated in Texas Hill Country. Millions of homeowners use those maps to determine whether they need flood insurance, and the vast majority of those affected by the Texas floods lacked it.
But the answer is to bolster FEMA, not starve and smother it as Trump and Noem have long expressed a desire to do. Congress and/or some future president should expand the National Flood Insurance Program, demand a full update of FEMA’s flood maps and make the job of running FEMA a cabinet-level job requiring Senate approval and real expertise.
Nor is the answer to cancel FEMA’s program for helping communities strengthen themselves against natural disasters as Trump did in the spring. Resilient communities are ones that need less federal-government relief after a disaster, and that program saved $6 in future relief for every $1 it spent, FEMA (under previous management) estimated.
A Trump-appointed panel studying whether to end the disaster-relief agency has instead called for strengthening it, which is apparently not the answer Trump or Noem wanted. Noem, the panel’s co-chair, has been trying to make other members change their minds before their report is due later this week, the Washington Post has reported. We can only hope our luck holds out a little while longer and she fails.
Mark Gongloff is a Bloomberg Opinion editor and columnist covering climate change.
