WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Monday nominated Cameron Hamilton to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency, a former acting chief who was fired in 2025 shortly after he told a congressional panel FEMA should continue to exist.
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will likely schedule a hearing in the coming weeks for Hamilton to testify about his goals for the agency as part of the confirmation process.
The panel will then schedule a vote on whether to send his nomination to the floor, where Hamilton will need to secure approval from a majority of senators before he would become FEMA administrator.
Taking on that role will be no easy task, especially since Trump has spoken repeatedly during his second administration about reducing the size and scope of the agency.
“We want to wean off of FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump said in June. “We’re moving it back to the states so the governors can handle it. That’s why they’re governors. Now, if they can’t handle it, they shouldn’t be governor.”
The FEMA review council that Trump created to review the agency submitted its report last week recommending states shoulder more of the cost and responsibility of disaster relief.
Not ‘in the best interest’ to kill FEMA
The previous disconnect between Trump and Hamilton about whether FEMA should continue led to Hamilton being removed from his role leading the agency last year.
Hamilton testified before a House panel in May 2025 that he personally did “not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”
“Having said that, I’m not in a position to make decisions and impact outcomes on whether or not a determination, such as consequential as that, should be made,” he said at the time. “That is a conversation that should be had between the president of the United States and this governing body on identifying the exact ways and methodologies, in which, what is prudent for federal investment, and what is not.”
One day later he was ousted as the senior official performing the duties of the administrator at FEMA.
David Richardson has been the senior official performing the duties of FEMA administrator ever since. He was previously the assistant secretary of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office at the Department of Homeland Security.
Podcast tell-all
Hamilton detailed his time leading FEMA on an episode of the “Disaster Tough” podcast that aired in September, saying he had developed a plan to address that the agency had “become too bureaucratic.”
“I was very clear and poignant that the cause of most of the problems in FEMA is because we keep putting too much crap in FEMA’s rucksack that never should have been there,” he said.
Hamilton then spoke about the Shelter and Services Program, which provides grant funding to organizations that help to house, feed and assist migrants released by the Department of Homeland Security.
He argued that isn’t an “emergency management requirement” and that “FEMA has become a functional multi-tool.”
Housing was a “prime example” of where another federal department, like Housing and Urban Development, could take over some of the tasks that FEMA currently handles, he said.
“I said, we need to aggressively talk to HUD about them having a larger stakehold in that particular missions field because they are more uniquely suited,” he said.
But Hamilton insisted he was not supportive of plans to completely eliminate the agency.
“I was not hired to abolish FEMA. That was never a part of the conversation and that’s never something that I would have agreed with,” he said on the podcast. “And I was very clear, I wanted some reform. I wanted to cut wasteful spending. I wanted to downsize the agency. There’s no denying that. And I think most of those things could be done wisely and properly.”
Any offloading of responsibilities from the federal government to states, he said, would include “a gradual phasing out.”
“We needed to give the states some time to see what that entails and to respond accordingly,” he said. “Not just, ‘Hey, the water is now shut off. You’re on your own.’ That’s not wise. That’s not being a good partner.”
‘I wanted to choke some people’
Hamilton also discussed what happened before and after he testified in front of a House subcommittee a year ago, including that he was polygraphed in March.
“One of the more difficult things for me to deal with was when my character was being attacked, and when I was being accused of being a liar and a leaker, and I was polygraphed for it,” he said. “DHS requested that I be polygraphed. And they said in their statement, you know, my character, judgment, my stability, my ethics were all in question.”
Asked by the podcast host if he wanted to put on his “Navy SEAL hat” when that was happening, Hamilton responded, “I wanted to choke some people, that’s for sure.”
Hamilton said he knew that he was about to be fired and that on the day he testified before Congress, officials “notified my security that my access was eliminated. So before the testimony, I knew it was coming, and I knew it was coming weeks in advance.”
Later in the episode, Hamilton said he knew he would be asked during the hearing about Trump’s comments regarding FEMA and spoke with former FEMA Administrator Pete Gaynor to work through how best to answer the question.
The two then “came to the agreement” that Hamilton would say, “it’s not in the best interest of the American people.”
“I cannot get behind this position that abolishing FEMA is the answer,” he said. “There are so many things that we can do before we go that extreme and put the American people at what I believe to be extreme risk unnecessarily.”
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