Nearly one week after flash floods devastated the Texas Hill Country and killed at least 119 people, it appears the acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency isn’t acting much at all to lead his agency’s response to the disaster — and the media isn’t bothering to ask why he is missing in action at such a critical time.
Acting FEMA Director David Richardson was appointed by President Donald Trump to lead the agency in early May after Cameron Hamilton, the former acting chief, was ousted one day after breaking with the administration. While testifying at a congressional hearing, Hamilton admitted that he did not support eliminating the agency, a priority of Trump — and a recommendation outlined in Project 2025. In his second day on the job, Richardson issued a clear directive to agency staff.
“I, and I alone in FEMA, speak for FEMA. I’m here to carry out the president’s intent for FEMA,” Richardson said. A former Marine artillery officer and combat veteran with no experience in managing natural disasters, Richardson most recently served as assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office. According to Reuters, he informed FEMA staff after he took over in May that he planned to “split his time” between the two roles.
“I will run right over you…I will achieve the president’s intent.”
“Don’t get in my way if you’re those 20 percent of the people,” he said. “I know all the tricks.” He continued: “Obfuscation. Delay. Undermining. If you’re one of those 20 percent of the people and you think those tactics and techniques are going to help you, they will not because I will run right over you…I will achieve the president’s intent. I am as bent on achieving the president’s intent as I was on making sure that I did my duty when I took my Marines to Iraq.”
Two months later, and following at least two serious natural disasters, this was the last time Richardson was quoted in a media report.
Last Friday’s floods were located across six counties in central Texas, home to a flood-prone corridor known as “Flash Flood Alley.” In Kerr County — the heart of the devastation that included Camp Mystic, a popular summer camp — 56 adults and 28 children have died. The search for at least 161 others continues following the deadliest floods the Lone Star state has seen since 1921.
The U.S. media tends to forget about disasters roughly one week after there are no longer any riveting videos of homes floating down river or people being rescued. But the Trump administration’s baseline of incompetence, dishonesty and callousness uniquely allows them to escape the typical scrutiny other administrations have routinely received. Last weekend, while residents of Kerrville, Tex., were being rescued and searching for their loved ones, the president went golfing, an outing that has apparently escaped any kind of outrage among the mainstream press.
During Joe Biden’s presidency, the media’s magnifying glass was laser-focused on FEMA for months after numerous natural disasters. Right-wing media blasted Biden’s handling of the 2023 Maui fires for weeks. Many media outlets were more than willing to cover the false stories of FEMA’s absence after Hurricane Helene hit North Carolina and Tennessee ahead of the 2024 election. In January, many were also willing to publish Trump’s false blame game during the Los Angeles fires.
But so far, while the mainstream media is reporting on how Trump’s efforts to dismantle FEMA appear to have hampered the recovery effort in Texas, those same stories often uncritically swallow the DHS’s assertion that Secretary Kristi Noem is now in charge of FEMA, which is overseen by the department. NBC News, for instance, reported Wednesday afternoon that “FEMA officials created a task force to speed up the process of getting Noem’s approval” in Texas and “staff are confused about who is in charge of FEMA on a day-to-day basis.” The report followed up by quoting DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin’s spin that any confusion is “silly.” Several other reports don’t even mention Richardson by name.
As independent journalist Marisa Kabas noted of recent reporting from the New York Times and the Associated Press, the outlets don’t “even acknowledge the existence of an acting FEMA administrator. They’ve unquestioningly accepted the premise that Kristi Noem is the one in charge.” Kabas explained to Salon that “even though FEMA falls under DHS, it’s never been the case that they’ve been controlled by the DHS secretary entirely.” The idea of a “FEMA figurehead just going along with what the DHS secretary says is unheard of,” she said.
As of Wednesday, Richardson had not visited the state. Instead, Noem went to the remains of the Camp Mystic site on Saturday. On Wednesday, she told Trump’s council of cabinet members, governors and emergency management experts — which included Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — who are tasked with recommending changes to FEMA that “this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it existed and remade into a responsive agency.”
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The job of his cabinet appointees is to incapacitate the agencies they supervise. Some 2,000 FEMA employees have accepted incentives to leave or were terminated since the start of the Trump administration. In June, the president said that FEMA will provide less disaster-related funding to states overall. Currently, the agency spends about $45 billion each year on disaster relief nationwide. He has already refused to deploy FEMA and turned down several requests for major disaster aid in other states following recent disaster declarations. This year, FEMA has also canceled $600 million in its Flood Mitigation Assistance funding to impacted communities, including those in North Carolina that were impacted by Hurricane Helene last October. Twice during Trump’s first term, the state of Texas denied Kerr County access to millions in requested federal funds for hazard mitigation to protect against such flood devastation. A request from Abbott to authorize additional FEMA mitigation resources in the wake of Friday’s flooding remains pending.
Kabas, an independent journalist who is one of the few paying close attention to the destruction and hamstringing of our formerly highly-skilled federal workforce, first broke the story that FEMA had deployed just 86 staffers to Texas’ Hill Country by Monday. According to CNN, 311 staffers had been sent to the region as of Tuesday night. “We are doing a lot less than normal,” a FEMA staffer told Kabas.
“We, as a federal government, don’t manage these disasters. The state does,” Noem said Wednesday. “We come in and support them. ”
Richardson, who has called FEMA an “unwieldy beast,” has also echoed Noem’s calls for the states to assume more of the cost burden.
According to a leaked transcript of Richardson’s May speech to FEMA staff, he touted the ability of states like Texas to assume more responsibility for disaster management even as he admitted to agency staffers that just “the other day” he learned from his “girlfriend” that “Texas is bigger than Spain.”
“You know, some states are pretty good at this. The other day I was chatting with my girlfriend, she’s from Texas. She’s got like huge red hair. Like, she’s from Texas. And I said something and she said, well, you know, oh, I know what it was. I said, how come it takes so long to drive 10 hours from Galveston to Amarillo? And she said, well, you know, Texas is bigger than Spain. I didn’t know that. So I looked at the map. Texas is huge!”
Texas’ Republican leadership is publicly backing the Trump administration’s demand that they pick up the slack. “The state needs to step up and pay,” said Lieutenant Gov. Dan Patrick on Monday. “The governor and I talked this morning at length about it, and he said, ‘We’re just gonna do it.’” On Wednesday, Abbott announced an emergency session starting July 21. Along with his top priority of redrawing the state’s congressional districts ahead of the 2026 midterms, the governor has scheduled overtime legislative sessions on natural disaster preparation and relief funding.
“The fact of the matter is that a lot of the states that get hit by really bad disasters are Republican-led states,” Kabas said of FEMA’s record under Trump. “And so there’s a sort of cognitive dissonance that allows FEMA to underperform and not get called out for it.”
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Right-wing media is also playing its part to obfuscate and distract on behalf of negligent GOP governance. Charlie Kirk bizarrely resurrected the DEI boogeyman to suggest that a fire department nearly two hours away is responsible for the delayed response to Friday’s floods. As Texas is such a staunchly conservative state, it’s hard to follow the argument that it allowed DEI to misdirect its fire department resources.
On Saturday, GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia resurrected a conspiracy theory she originally floated last year in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. Taking to X, she announced her plan to introduce a bill banning “weather modification,” which she defined as “the injection, release, or dispersion of chemicals or substances into the atmosphere for the express purpose of altering weather, temperature, climate, or sunlight intensity.” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was forced to deny, “to the best of my knowledge,” that the flooding in his state had been caused by weather modification.
Twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina laid bare the myth of the so-called Serious Republican concerned with efficient and effective governance. Now, FEMA’s absent acting director manages to make Michael Brown, the agency’s former head who bungled its response to Katrina, look competent by comparison.
As residents of the Texas Hill Country grieve the lost and pray for the missing, it’s never been more clear that the Trump administration’s response to natural disasters is “you’re on your own” — and the mainstream media seems to allow them to get away with it every time. How many scandals and crises need to happen before the press says, “Hey, is it weird that the country is consumed with chaos?”
