President Donald Trump plans to nominate Cameron Hamilton — who was ousted in May after publicly testifying that the Federal Emergency Management Agency should not be dismantled — to formally lead the agency, according to five people briefed on the move.
The individuals familiar with the plans, along with others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
Hamilton’s potential return suggests that Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is moving away from previous efforts to undercut the autonomy of the nation’s emergency management and response system championed by his predecessor, Kristi L. Noem.
Hamilton met with the president this week about becoming administrator, according to a former FEMA official with knowledge of the situation. Hamilton, a former Navy SEAL who specialized in emergency response while working with the State Department, still does not have the five years of executive experience in emergency management required by a post-Hurricane Katrina law to lead FEMA in an official capacity.
However, the Senate could still approve Hamilton, two people familiar with the matter said.
The New York Times first reported that Trump intends to nominate Hamilton.
The Department of Homeland Security said Thursday night that it “has no personnel announcements to make at this time.”
Hamilton did not respond to requests for comment.
FEMA has lacked a Senate-confirmed leader since Trump returned to office last year. Administration officials hope to cement a permanent administrator at the agency before hurricane season, which begins June 1, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Karen Evans has been leading the agency after replacing the previous acting administrator in the fall. Evans has been in close step with Noem’s management style of FEMA and was heavily involved in reviewing nearly every grant, award and expenditure over $100,000, as well as plans to cut the agency’s staffing by 50 percent, according to current and former officials and court documents. For weeks after Noem left DHS, Evans kept most of the review process in place.
Hamilton could once again inherit an embattled agency whose future continues to be precarious and unknown. While the Trump administration has moved away from rhetoric and plans to demolish the agency as it exists today, officials still drastically want to remake how it operates and responds to disasters. The FEMA review council has yet to present the final version of its long-awaited report outlining how FEMA would become leaner and less involved in supporting emergencies and recoveries.
The agency has lost thousands of staffers, including many senior officials and dedicated veterans. It has also churned through leaders amid low morale and a partial government shutdown over DHS funding.
Mullin, who seems to be striking a different tenor than his controversial predecessor, has already rescinded policies that slowed FEMA’s ability to conduct daily operations as well as continue ongoing disaster recovery work and on Thursday approved renewing 6,500 members of the agency’s reservist staff for a two-year period, according to a current FEMA official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. Three current agency officials said they no longer need to submit memos so that employees can travel or for anything exceeding $100,000, rolling back an earlier policy that employees said caused administrative chaos and frustrating bottlenecks.
The prospect of Hamilton’s return elicited mostly positive reactions from five FEMA employees across various parts of the agency. Out of all the interim leaders FEMA has installed since Trump came into office, Hamilton stands out for trying to understand how FEMA operated, listened to employees and believed in the mission, the five staffers said.
MaryAnn Tierney, a former senior official who was Hamilton’s deputy for five months, said she “saw him grow to understand and appreciate the vital mission that FEMA performs and the dedication of the FEMA team in helping Americans on their worst day.”
“He is an honorable person and it was a privilege to work alongside him during a very trying and chaotic time for the Agency,” Tierney wrote.
Soon after coming in as the acting administrator last spring, Hamilton, who is an avid supporter of Trump, clashed with Noem’s and Corey Lewandowski’s decisions on how to quickly change FEMA. Hamilton thought the proposed changes would damage the agency and harm the American people, according to two former senior officials with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter candidly.
Hamilton still believed the agency needed to be aggressively reformed by undoing complex policy positions and cutting the agency in half, but more methodically and gradually, the two former senior officials said. He viewed FEMA as an overly bureaucratic and overly used agency tasked with too many responsibilities, such as the Shelter and Services Program, which embroiled the agency in controversy early in Trump’s second term, the two former senior officials said. Hamilton also wanted to take housing away from FEMA and hand it over to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, one former senior official said.
“The idea was to be transparent and clear, but also to give the president what he wanted,” the former senior official said.
However, Trump’s comments proposing to abolish FEMA after he visited Helene-battered North Carolina and after a devastating fire storm ripped through Los Angeles greatly influenced how Noem and Lewandowski wanted to handle the agency. It created a chaotic environment during which major decisions were being made quickly, according to three former senior officials. Staffers across the agency, including Hamilton, were accused of lying and leaking information and were given polygraph tests, and employees were leaving en masse.
Noem fired Hamilton in May after he testified to Congress that he did not agree with her direction for the agency, a move that had been in the works before that hearing, two former senior officials said
After his firing, Hamilton became much more outspoken on social media about FEMA and his views on emergency management, saying in numerous public posts that he believes FEMA is in need of major change but that Noem’s requirements have created “entirely new forms of bureaucracy.”
In an interview with The Post in January regarding plans to cut FEMA’s staff in half, Hamilton again pushed back on Noem’s handling of the agency.
“The entire framework of a reduction should be built on stronger state partnerships, not knee-jerk reactions from the federal government,” Hamilton said.
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