GREAT news that this waste of flesh, this drippings, is out as FEMA mis-administrator as of 1 DEC 25. He has been worthless and should have never been appointed as administrator of anything. I didn't think he knows his ass from a hole in the ground except he seems to keep his head up his ass. Unfortunately the drumpf / trump-vance administration is replacing richardson with fascist fotze trunt kkkaren evans, another drippings but her tongue must reach farther than all others up fascist fotze trunt kkkristi noem's ass to get this appointment. To those who drank the drumpf / trump-vance kool-aid and then have survived a disaster I have to ask, how's this maga fema thingy working out for ya??? These from the New York Times.....
Acting FEMA Administrator Is Out, Injecting Uncertainty at Agency in Limbo
Scott Dance and Maxine Joselow
Scott Dance reported from Anchorage, and Maxine Joselow from Washington.
David Richardson has resigned as acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, injecting even greater uncertainty into the Trump administration’s plans to overhaul the federal role in disaster response.
Karen Evans, a senior political appointee at FEMA who earlier this year led an overhaul of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, will take over as acting FEMA administrator Dec. 1, according to the Homeland Security Department, which oversees both agencies.
Ms. Evans, like Mr. Richardson, lacks experience in emergency management, which is a legal requirement to lead FEMA.
Ms. Evans has played a central role in the Trump administration’s efforts to cut costs at FEMA, according to three people briefed on the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. Earlier this year, she rejected many FEMA spending requests before they could reach the desk of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who has imposed a requirement that she personally approve any expense over $100,000, the three people said.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Homeland Security Department, said Mr. Richardson was returning to the private sector and thanked him for his work “refocusing the agency to deliver swift resources to Americans in crisis.”
President Trump has suggested eliminating or overhauling FEMA, with an eye toward shifting more responsibility for disaster response to the states. The administration is expected to release a report in the coming weeks detailing its plans to reshape FEMA’s role in disasters across the country.
That report “will inform this Administration’s ongoing efforts to fundamentally restructure FEMA, transforming it from its current form into a streamlined, mission-focused disaster-response force,” Ms. McLaughlin said in a statement.
Ms. Evans, who had worked in the first Trump administration, was previously national director of the U.S. Cyber Challenge, a private initiative focused on building the country’s cybersecurity work force, and worked in information technology for her own company, according to her LinkedIn profile. She was the chief information officer at the Office of Management and Budget during the George W. Bush administration.
Mr. Richardson, who served in the Marines, was named acting FEMA administrator in May, replacing Cameron Hamilton, who was pushed out a day after telling members of Congress that FEMA was vital to communities “in their greatest times of need” and should not be eliminated.
When he was tapped for FEMA, Mr. Richardson was the assistant secretary at the Homeland Security Department’s office for countering weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Richardson maintained both jobs. His resignation was first reported by The Washington Post.
After Mr. Richardson joined FEMA, some of his employees expressed concern about his lack of experience. He told employees in June that he did not know the United States had a hurricane season, a comment that unnerved FEMA employees who heard it. The agency later said Mr. Richardson was joking.
Mr. Richardson had told colleagues that he planned to leave the agency by the end of the year, according to two people familiar with his comments who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. But Mr. Richardson resigned on Monday because officials in the White House and the Homeland Security Department were considering forcing him out of the job after the administration released its report on overhauling FEMA, the two people said.
Representatives for the White House redirected inquiries to the Homeland Security Department, which did not immediately respond to a follow-up request for comment.
Mr. Richardson had faced criticism from both Republicans and Democrats over his lack of responsiveness following the July 4 floods in Texas Hill Country after the Washington Post reported he had been unreachable in the initial hours after the disaster.
In a statement responding to Mr. Richardson’s resignation, Representative Frank Pallone, Democrat of New Jersey, said, “good riddance.”
“Americans deserve a FEMA leader with at least the most basic core competencies in emergency management, something David Richardson never demonstrated,” Mr. Pallone said.
The future of FEMA is unclear. In June, President Trump said he wanted to eliminate FEMA in November after the hurricane season ended and move emergency management efforts “back to the state level.”
After deadly Texas floods in July, when many Americans were focused on the rescue efforts, the administration’s rhetoric softened and officials spoke instead of reforming the agency.
After deadly Texas floods in July, when many Americans were focused on the rescue efforts, the administration’s rhetoric softened and officials spoke instead of reforming the agency.
Still, more than 2,000 employees have left FEMA since Mr. Trump took office, accounting for about one-third of the agency’s permanent work force. Those who resigned included some of the agency’s most accomplished leaders. A task force of local, state and federal emergency managers has been studying reforms to the agency that could raise the threshold for a disaster that warrants federal intervention, change how disaster aid is paid to states, and end FEMA’s role in the long term recovery of disaster-struck communities.
The panel, known as the FEMA Review Council, was required to release its recommendations by Sunday under an executive order Mr. Trump issued in May. An administration officials said the report is expected by the end of this year.
Emergency management officials around the country are eager for its release to understand what they can expect from FEMA in the future.
“We’re all anxiously waiting to see what it says,” Bryan Fisher, director of the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said Saturday at a resource fair for victims of Typhoon Halong, which hit Southwestern Alaska last month.
Since the Texas floods, there has not been a major test of the agency’s evolving disaster response strategy, under which FEMA has added new hurdles to some grant programs and stretched the limits of a dwindling pot of money used to pay for disaster aid. In recent months, Mr. Trump has declared federal disasters in Alaska, where remnants of a typhoon devastated coastal villages, and across the Plains, where severe storms and tornadoes damaged communities.
But the wildfire season has been calmer than expected in the West. And it has been a relatively mild Atlantic hurricane season in the East, with the most destructive storms avoiding landfall in the United States.
Scott Dance is a Times reporter who covers how climate change and extreme weather are transforming society.
Maxine Joselow covers climate change and the environment for The Times from Washington.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 18, 2025, Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Acting FEMA Chief Is Out, Injecting Uncertainty at an Agency in Limbo.
How FEMA Is Forcing Disaster-Struck Towns to Fend for Themselves
Life is inching back to normal in the town of Cave City seven months after a tornado slammed into its corner of northeastern Arkansas. The only grocery store is about to reopen. Crews are starting to dig the foundation for a rebuilt funeral home.
But the town — like so many others facing daunting recoveries from recent disaster — has had to go it alone, Mayor Jonas Anderson said.
The Trump administration denied Cave City’s requests for Federal Emergency Management Agency money to help it recover. Mr. Anderson was forced to forge ahead anyway, racking up a bill of about $300,000 he said could end up eating 15 percent of the small town’s annual budget.
Some of the nearly 2,000 residents have gotten federal help. FEMA agreed to cover repairs to the more than 50 homes damaged or destroyed when 165 mile per hour winds struck in March. The state pledged relief money, too. But Mr. Anderson said Cave City is carrying more of the burden of recovery than expected.
“We’re making a really good recovery not because of some big FEMA reimbursement we got, but in spite of not getting it,” Mr. Anderson said. “People here are super resilient.”
This could be the future for more communities across the country, based on Mr. Trump’s vision for emergency management in the United States: one that would transfer responsibility for disaster recovery from the federal government to the states in all but the largest catastrophes. For many places, it is already the reality.
FEMA has been delaying disaster declarations and aid payments to communities, adding new hurdles to access some grant funds and cutting off the flow of money intended to boost resilience and prevent future disasters from causing so much damage.
Emergency managers and elected officials across the country are adjusting to a system in which they can no longer count on the sort of disaster aid they typically expect from FEMA, which was established in 1979 to coordinate and professionalize disaster response. They are figuring out how to prepare for future disasters without key FEMA grants, raising private funds to replace federal aid and turning to state governments to beef up their preparations. In some places, volunteer disaster recovery squads have sprung up.
In an emailed statement, the FEMA spokesman Daniel Llargues said that the agency has held back some disaster relief funding, saving it for the future. For example, a monthly report on the agency’s spending this summer showed it withheld $11 billion for projects tied to a coronavirus pandemic disaster declaration that states had expected to receive by Sept. 30. Agency officials said those payments are not canceled, but rather deferred into the new fiscal year to ensure the solvency of the government fund used to pay for disaster aid.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, FEMA remains committed to supporting disaster survivors,” Mr. Llargues wrote. He said the agency is managing disaster funding “in a way that prioritizes immediate needs and long-term recovery efforts.”
Still, the consequence of such delays could be that communities find themselves less prepared when disaster does strike, critics said.
“They’re making good on their promise to shift the burden onto states without giving the states any runway to prepare for that,” said Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who tracks disaster recovery spending across the country.
Slower-than-expected hurricane and wildfire seasons have meant few recent tests of the evolving emergency response system, allowing FEMA to stretch its disaster relief fund further than it might otherwise. The fund had been forecast to run out of money by now but as of the end of September, it was projected to contain more than $2 billion, down from a routine $22.5 billion infusion from Congress in March.
Since January, Mr. Trump has approved 32 federal disaster declarations, which make available a variety of federal aid programs to communities and individuals. That’s far fewer than the average of more than 60 declarations per year from fiscal years 2015 through 2024, according to the Congressional Research Service. Mr. Trump has rejected nearly a dozen state requests for FEMA aid so far this year, on par with the numbers of rejections during his first administration as well as President Joe Biden’s term, according to FEMA data.
A steady backlog of pending disaster aid requests has persisted this year, sitting at a dozen as of Tuesday. Under previous administrations, there have rarely been more than a handful of outstanding requests at any given time. It is up to states to request FEMA’s help; they take the lead in evaluating what kind of aid is needed and where.
Normally, Congress would appropriate tens of billions of dollars to refill the disaster aid fund at this time of year. Amid a government shutdown stretching into its third week, there has been little discussion of disaster funding on Capitol Hill. A bipartisan group of members is supporting a House bill that would make FEMA a Cabinet-level agency, removing it from the Homeland Security Department while streamlining its payment process and speeding up agency investments in disaster resilience around the country.
Representative Frank Pallone, a Democrat from New Jersey, said a strong FEMA is important for coordinating among states that may have differing capabilities when it comes to handling a crisis.
“These disasters tend to be multistate,” Mr. Pallone said. “If you have to do everything yourself, it’s not going to work because you don't have the expertise.”
Proponents of a trimmed-down FEMA, on the other hand, argue that too much federal aid can prevent communities from investing in their own preparedness. State and local governments are more closely attuned to communities’ needs, and should be equipped to handle the most common and predictable types of disasters, said Dominik Lett, a budget policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a right-leaning research organization.
But in places still recovering from historic disasters, slow and unpredictable support from FEMA demonstrates the limits of those ideas. In western North Carolina a year after Hurricane Helene — and four years after an earlier bout of devastating flooding from the remnants of Tropical Storm Fred — the town of Canton is still operating out of trailers and waiting for federal money it expected for a new town hall and police station, Mayor Zeb Smathers said.
“We should not have to count on recovery like it’s raffle money,” Mr. Smathers said. “It should be streamlined, efficient, dependable. It’s not.”
Camille Rivera, president of La Brega Y Fuerza, a nonprofit group focused on connecting the diaspora of Puerto Ricans spread across the United States, said that if FEMA shifts more responsibility to states and territories, poor communities will suffer. That is already evident in Puerto Rico, where blackouts are common and damage remains from storms going back to Hurricane Maria in 2017. Many residents are turning to crowdfunding websites like GoFundMe instead of waiting for FEMA, Ms. Rivera said.
“We have people who still have tarps on their roofs who haven’t been able to rebuild,” she said. “A lot of communities aren’t even relying on the federal government anymore.”
At the same time, the Trump administration has either paused or canceled grant programs designed to help communities improve their resilience to disasters.
Erik Thorsen, chief executive of Columbia Memorial Hospital on the Oregon coast, said that as construction continues on a $300 million expansion that could withstand a powerful earthquake and tsunami, he is scrambling to replace a $14 million FEMA grant that is no longer coming.
A lawsuit filed by 20 states is seeking to reinstate the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, saying that since it was established in 2018 during Mr. Trump’s first term, its roughly $4.5 billion in investments have prevented $150 billion in disaster damage.
In Cave City, where plans for a new park and community center are on hold because the town has to devote its tax revenue to tornado recovery, Mr. Anderson said he understands why President Trump would want states to handle more disasters. They know their residents’ needs best, after all.
But when that shift happens seemingly overnight, it creates uncertainty that makes it harder for local officials to make decisions, and can leave livelihoods hanging in the balance, Mr. Anderson said.
“It’s definitely going to have to be an adjustment,” he said. “Nobody has the resources that the federal government can have.”
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