A top official at the Federal Emergency Management Agency who had come under scrutiny for a series of unexpected claims — including that he had once teleported to a Waffle House in Georgia — has gone on leave, according to an agency spokesperson.
The official, Gregg Phillips, was appointed by the White House in December to lead FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, the agency’s largest division. The office, with more than 1,000 employees and a budget of nearly $300 million, is central to FEMA’s mission of responding to disasters like hurricanes, floods and wildfires.
In an emailed statement, FEMA said Mr. Phillips was taking a leave for personal reasons and that David Arnold, a senior official who left the agency this year, would return to step in as acting associate administrator for the office.
Before joining the agency, Mr. Phillips was known as a leading proponent of election fraud conspiracy theories, including the false claim that millions of noncitizens voted in the 2016 presidential election. Those claims were later amplified by President Trump.
Mr. Phillips came under further scrutiny in March after CNN reported on a series of assertions he had made on various podcasts, including stating that on multiple occasions he had found himself mysteriously transported from two different starting points in Georgia. In one incident, Mr. Phillips said, he had suddenly found himself inside a Waffle House in Rome, Ga., a city of 39,000 people northwest of Atlanta.
“Teleporting is no fun,” he said in January 2025 on the podcast “Onward,” which is hosted by a conservative activist.
A New York Times reporter later queried roughly two dozen employees at three Waffle House locations, but no one could recall any such incident.
Mr. Phillips later clarified on social media that the episode took place while he was heavily medicated as part of a cancer treatment. “The word ‘teleportation’ was not mine,” Mr. Phillips wrote. “It was used by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe something with no easy name. The more accurate biblical terms are ‘translated’ or ‘transported’ — not new ideas for people of faith.”
Before joining the agency, Mr. Phillips worked in state human services agencies in Texas and Mississippi, but his LinkedIn profile made no mention of professional experience in emergency management.
The move is the latest shake-up at FEMA, which has seen considerable upheaval over the past year as the Trump administration has sought to slim down the agency and shift more of its responsibilities for disaster response to the states.
Last month, President Trump nominated Cameron Hamilton, a former member of the Navy SEALs, to lead the agency. Mr. Hamilton had previously served a brief stint as acting administrator last year but was ousted days after he testified to Congress that FEMA should not be eliminated, an idea that Mr. Trump and Kristi Noem, who was homeland security secretary at the time, had floated early last year.
The Trump administration has since stepped back from calls to eliminate FEMA, though an administration task force last month recommended a major overhaul of the agency, with changes that it said would speed the flow of federal aid while limiting that assistance to the most severe disaster scenarios.
The post FEMA Official Who Claimed He Once Teleported to a Waffle House Is Leaving appeared first on New York Times.
