The most important finding in a new Homeland Security Inspector General’s report isn’t the part about a crew of FEMA workers allegedly violating federal law (the Hatch Act) and FEMA policy in late September 2024 when the workers skipped 11 houses in Florida that had signs or flags promoting Donald Trump’s campaign. Only that Hatch Act claim is new. Biden’s FEMA condemned the crew’s actions at the time, fired the team lead who told her crew to skip those houses to avoid confrontations with angry assholes, sent a follow-up team to offer help to the homeowners who were skipped, launched its own IG investigation, and instituted training for all on-the-ground teams to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.
But the real news is what’s not in the report: By focusing on that single incident following Hurricane Milton (and playing it up for all it could), the report quietly acknowledges that it was the only example the IG could find of FEMA workers not helping people who displayed their support for Trump.
The report doesn’t offer a shred of evidence to support the bullshit claims by Trump, Republicans, and rightwing media that FEMA under Biden “systematically” refused to help disaster victims on the basis of their politics. Instead, that’s what Trump does out loud.
Hilariously, House Oversight Committee Republicans are now claiming the report “confirms” their claims about FEMA “withholding disaster relief,” without noting it was a single outlier case, and without mentioning the steps Biden’s FEMA took to make things right. But then, we’ve come to expect that sort of thing from Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), the committee’s chair. We sure hope Democrats on the committee can get him to say on the record that DHS’s investigation didn’t turn up more than the one incident. Good luck with that.
Unfortunately, while the report found only one instance of bad behavior by a single rogue FEMA employee, Trump isn’t likely to change his insistence that Biden politicized the agency. And he’s certainly not going to change his very explicit policy of refusing aid to blue states and cities, to punish them for not voting for him. After all, revenge must be had for the 11 Florida homeowners who were so cruelly skipped (and then contacted shortly afterward).
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Here’s a fun trivia fact: DHS’s inspector general, Joseph Cuffari, was appointed by Trump in his first term, served througout the Biden administration, and was one of the few lucky duckies spared Trump’s purge of IGs in the early part of his first term. He’s actually kind of independent, and even complained earlier this year about interference into investigations by former DHS chief Kristi Noem.
The IG report itself has to stick to a fairly limited set of facts that it tries to portray as ominous, while quietly blurring distinctions between how FEMA has operated under Biden and Trump. It’s based on a review of reports from “disaster survivor assistance” crews that went door-to-door in Florida to register people for disaster assistance.
The crews canvassed a total of 744,288 homes and other locations following Milton, out of which they didn’t/couldn’t contact 555,374 locations because they were fenced off, had signs saying “private property” or “no soliciting,” presented safety concerns like dogs running loose or debris in the way, or — by far the largest category — because nobody was home, in which case the workers left a flyer with information on how to seek assistance.
Out of all those cases, 11 houses were skipped after a team lead instructed her crew to “avoid homes advertising Trump.” The IG report really pounds on how that supposedly violated the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from politicking while on the job.
The report doesn’t mention, however, that Trump and rightwing media were, at that very moment, lying like crazy about FEMA not helping people, that some FEMA operations were actually temporarily shut down following threats to FEMA workers from militia and QAnon loons, or that social media was full of disinformation and wild conspiracy theories. FEMA was falsely accused of everything from seizing people’s property and closing off entire towns for nefarious purposes to really wacko shit like hiding evidence of “numerous” drowned babies’ bodies floating down North Carolina rivers after the human trafficking tunnels full of stolen children were flooded. (Angels told a QAnon influencer all about it.)
You know, there was a context in which the one fired team leader said — against official policy — to avoid homes with Trump signs or declarations that they were protected by the Second Amendment.
You’d never get any of the political appointees at DHS to admit it, but the report tacitly confirms what Biden’s FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told the House Oversight Committee in late 2024 about the incident. She testified under oath that it appeared to be an isolated incident involving the fired team leader, and said the worker’s actions violated “FEMA’s core values and principles” to provide aid to everyone affected by disasters.
Criswell said Tuesday in a social media message that the report “validates the actions we took at FEMA when this incident was brought to our attention. Politics should never play a role in disaster response, and even one home skipped is unacceptable.”
Yep. Criswell also pointed out that the report’s findings “reinforce my confidence this was an isolated incident and not a systemic practice within FEMA.”
What’s more, the IG report also quietly debunks, without saying so, an October 2025 DHS press release in which then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem lied that “For years, FEMA employees under the Biden Administration intentionally delayed much-needed aid to Americans suffering from natural disasters on purely political grounds.” That accusation also focused mostly on the one post-Milton incident. Noem referred the accusations to the Justice Department, which so far hasn’t found anything to charge anyone with.
The new report contains nothing to substantiate any of that.
In fact, as far as we can tell from a cursory search of DHS press releases, the agency hasn’t even issued a news release about the IG report, possibly because now that former propagandist Tricia McLaughlin is gone, the agency can’t hope to equal the frantic rhetoric of that 2025 press release headline, which read in full, “DHS Exposes how FEMA Officials Under the Biden Administration Systematically Refused Aid to Disaster Survivors on Purely Political Discrimination, Refers Case to the Department of Justice.” Whew. Remember to take a breath if you read that aloud to others.
But there is one more darkly funny detail in the new IG report: It acknowledges that while the Inspector General’s office would have liked to review whether any similar events happened after other disasters, the data simply isn’t available anymore, at least not the reports on post-disaster canvassing. That’s because in September of last year, Noem brilliantly decided not to renew a contract with the provider that maintained the database of those reports. The report whines that the contractor “abruptly” shut down the database when FEMA terminated the contract.
Of course, if Biden’s FEMA really had a “systematic” policy of refusing aid to Trump supporters, there would be evidence in memos, emails, and other internal DHS communications about it, not just in the canvassing reports.
None of this will stop Trump and crew from lying about FEMA, of course. MAGA is always the victim.
Now we’re looking forward to the eventual IG report on Trump denying disaster aid to entire states. We didn’t major in math, but we’re pretty sure that affected more than 11 houses.
[WaPo (gift link) / DHS Inspector General’s report / 2025 DHS press release / Politico / CNN / NBC News (2024)]
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Also too, here's something I posted as a comment on WaPo's story, but didn't have room for here:
For a broader look at the far-right's weird, paranoid obsession with FEMA, which started in the fever swamps of conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and then became a dogmatic belief for Trump and MAGA, check out public radio station WNYC's podcast "American Emergency: the Movement to Kill FEMA," the product of over a year of research by WNYC's On the Media team. It originally was released in May, and features a deep dive into how FEMA evolved out of the government's Cold War planning for nuclear war.
All 4 parts are here: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/american-emergency-movement-kill-fema
Last week, On the Media's midweek pod included a "behind the scenes" live event in which the producers and reporters talked about how they put the story together, which included a live interview with former FEMA official MaryAnn Tierney, who was forced out by Trump (and who was targeted with death threats for helping people after Hurricane Helene).
https://wnyc.org/browse/shows/episode/simplecast/f3994ce7-4415-4d0c-9f61-951188c4f95f
At one point when Tierney was discussing being ordered to write plans to dismantle FEMA, she said "Obviously, that was very unpleasant. Imagine if somebody showed up at your job and said, "No, we don't want that anymore."
On the Media co-host Micah Loewinger waited a beat for people to remember Trump's war on public media and said, "Yes, that happened."
Yes this is truth and all, but the point of the rightwing media human centipede is to spread the lies quickly around so the corrections come later.
Now with FEMA in shambles, nobody is going to trust again. Especially with the zombie lies about the "$750 is all you're going to get when you lose your home" that are almost certainly still circulating.
And this is why Democrats also need to cross every T and dot every I in office. Any random thing can become a scandal and a cause celebre to give Americans an excuse to give Republicans power. Any tiny excuse will do.