FEMA Chief Simply Does Not Care For Rude Disasters Impinging On Work-Life Balance
If Texans decide to have flash floods on the Fourth of July, that's their problem.
When central Texas was hit by heavy rains and flash floods the morning of July Fourth, David Richardson, the (acting) administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, was enjoying the holiday like any decent civilized person would. FEMA, as it does, spent that Friday and the subsequent days putting emergency plans into action, so as to surge help to Texas to assist with rescue operations and begin the process of helping survivors start to put their lives together again.
There was, as we’ve mentioned previously, just one itty-bitty problem: Not long after becoming Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem created a new “efficiency” measure requiring that any contract or grant of more than $100,000 be personally approved by herself before the funds could be released. CNN reported early on that several parts of FEMA’s response were delayed by the wait for Noem’s sign-off. Urban Search and Rescue teams, which can be prepositioned when extreme weather is expected, stayed put waiting for Noem’s permission, and weren’t approved until more than three days after the flooding. By the time the crews actually got to Texas on the fourth day, there was plenty of searching still to be done. But mostly no longer for living people needing rescue.
Now we know another reason for those delays, as the Washington Post reports (gift link). FEMA staffers couldn’t reach their boss, Richardson, so he could get those authorization requests to his boss, Noem.
But for about 24 hours in the early aftermath of one of the nation’s deadliest flash-flooding events in decades, key staff members could not reach FEMA’s top official, according to eight current and former officials with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they said they feared retaliation. The agency’s typical posture is to get resources to a disaster zone before state and local governments even have to ask for them, current and former officials have said, because minutes can cost lives.
“Nobody could get a hold of him for hours and hours,” said one D.C.-based senior official who coordinated search-and-rescue resources.
What’s that? Why?
Richardson rarely uses government communication and top security phones, according to several current and former officials.
He “is not a big fan of cellphones” and tries to limit his sons’ exposure to them, said a person who has worked closely with him. He usually puts his phone in a box when he gets home and rarely answers it after hours, according to two former officials who worked with him.
That’s our bold right there, because we think it ought to be bolded: The man in charge of FEMA, which can no longer do its job of managing federal emergencies unless he walks the search-and-rescue-team request down the hall to hand it personally to Kristi Noem, who then takes an additional half day to process it — and that’s for Texas! — doesn’t like to answer his cell phone after close of business, and so he doesn’t. And didn’t. And that’s why it took four days for FEMA to surge search and rescue to Texas Hill Country, where a girls summer camp full of eight- and nine-year-olds had been washed away.
There is a lot of stuff in the WaPo article that will make you grit your teeth or slap your forehead, possibly at the same time, but we aren’t going to go over every bit of it here, because you have the gift link right there and can read it yourself. Here’s what we think is important about it: It details again and again why having competent people in government matters, a point we really came to appreciate when Joe Biden was president and he appointed smart people who knew what they were doing, and even fixed longstanding problems with government programs, making them work a little better, or in some cases — like some massively fucked up parts of the student loan system — fixing decade-long problems that had been ignored by administrations of both parties.
Remember how that went? Congress created income-based loan-repayment programs that were designed to forgive the remaining balance of many loans after borrowers made payments for 20 to 25 years. But the programs were administered so craptastically (and sabotaged by dishonest private loan processors as well as Betsy DeVos) that by 2021, only 32 people actually had their debts discharged, even though 4.4 million borrowers should have qualified under the programs authorized by Congress. Under Biden, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona put the Ed Department to work on a plan to make the loans work the way they were designed to, and by the end of the Biden administration, more than 5 million Americans had seen their student debt forgiven, in accordance with the laws Congress passed.
So of course the Right took that amazing example of making a broken system actually work the way Congress intended it to, and portrayed it as a tyrannical power play, claiming that Biden had “exceeded his authority as president.” He hadn’t, but the Supreme Court decided that the laws Congress wrote weren’t good enough for the “major questions doctrine” John Roberts made up on the toilet one day.
Funny how we don’t hear the phrase “exceeded his authority as president” from Republicans, nine months into the Trump presidency.
Again, getting back to Noem, Robertson, and FEMA: Trump and his party do not want government to work well, at least not for most Americans. Republicans going back to Ronald Reagan have sought to turn government into a machine for making the rich and powerful more rich, and more powerful, and for rewarding those who help them stay in power. (We can even go back farther, since Reagan’s win marked a major step toward undoing the New Deal, the Great Society, and of course the Civil Rights revolution of the last century.)
Under Trump’s increasingly fascist rule, there’s hardly any pretense of interest in making government work at all, at least not any of the parts of government that fall outside the core missions of enriching the rich even further, and punishing all the enemies of the Great Leader, from universities to media companies, from climate scientists to public health experts, and above all, fighting with apocalyptic fury against the demographic and political changes that threaten to unseat white supremacy.
So yeah, that’s pretty much the context for why David Richardson didn’t answer his phone all weekend after the Texas floods hit. It was Monday morning before agency staff convinced him to ask Noem for a sign-off on sending a search-and-rescue team. He leads an agency the administration doesn’t consider important, and which Project 2025 targeted for elimination. No need to take a job like that seriously, particularly if you got that job because you’re good buddies with Noem’s alleged extramarital lover Corey Lewandowski, and now that we’ve put that image in your head, goodbye!
[WaPo (gift link)]
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Fuck 'em. We warned about this. Smart folks said this would be an issue. Now here it is, and dumbfucks are shocked the box of shit they bought, which was clearly marked as shit, turns out to be shit.
Pretty sure FEMA Director earns a salary of about $212,000. At the standard full-time of 2000 hrs. per year, that's $106/hr.
Phhhhttt. For those kinds of peanuts, I wouldn't answer my cellphone outside 9:00 - 5:00, M-F either.
Oh wait. That's close to my corporate rate. For that kind of cedar, I'll answer the goddam thing any time at all, and do. And all I do is stage fancy parties for corporate executives. If there's a goldang disaster going on, you'll only know I've been around by the swmnguy-shaped hole in the brick wall, like Wile E. Coyote.