Then Musk and DOGE stepped up to the challenge. They swung hard. DOGE cut USAID to a shadow. It shrank the Department of Education, Health and Human Services, the Internal Revenue Service, and others. Roughly 144,000 federal workers took the deferred-resignation offer. There was much rejoicing among Americans who understand that a bigger government means a smaller citizen. For that alone, Musk should be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom because, more than Russia, China, or Iran, the massive federal bureaucracy is the enemy of the common American. Large corporations, those who want to make a legacy, and think tanks tend to identify such countries as great threats. But it is the federal bureaucracy, backed by coercion, that bewilders many Americans and sucks the paychecks and profits dry as its tentacles grow. DOGE fought what the common man views as the enemy.

Then DOGE ran into the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

FEMA is a hard target. The agency wraps itself in the flag and the funeral. Cut FEMA and you are vilified for letting grandma drown, or at least that is what those at FEMA contend. Sitting atop the fattest cow in the DHS herd, FEMA’s fiscal 2025 request was $33.1 billion, set against a Department of Homeland Security discretionary request of $62.2 billion. As I point out in my book, Texas Flood 4 July 2025, FEMA’s mission is helping people before, during, and after disasters. The word helping is purposely used to obfuscate the expenditure of funds through contracts. DOGE faced a hurdle when it began to identify which help it was to cut and discovered help could be used to justify any expenditure in a budget of that size.

DOGE began its efforts at FEMA by looking at contracts. A reasonable place to start if time and resources are unlimited.

DOGE flagged tens of millions in FEMA money flowing to New York City hotels, real waste reflecting FEMA’s brazen disdain for the average person. DHS fired four officials responsible, including the chief financial officer. An army of lawyers got involved. New York City sued to recover the money. The clock ran out on DOGE. The limited special-government-employee appointments expired, and FEMA began returning to normal behavior, exposed but not defeated.

In their valiant effort, I suggest DOGE picked the wrong aiming point at FEMA. They chose contracts. They should have focused on the law to trim the obese agency to a healthy size.

When Musk’s colleague Steve Davis and the DOGE team came to my office at 500 C Street, where my team was planning the drastic reduction in size or even the elimination of FEMA within six months, I did not hand him a hit list of contracts as exhibits of my plan. Why? Because there are thousands of them. Instead, I showed them a list of the laws that govern FEMA and the associated specified tasks held therein. “Start there,” I explained, “then eliminate any contract or sub-office that does not trace to law. Apply your judgment there; FEMA can be gone or transformed in a few months by doing that.” Davis approved of my approach, in part because I had just been successful setting up DHS’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office for shutdown without any of DOGE’s help. Start with the law and cut every associated contract, and every box on the organization chart that the statute does not specify. I showed Davis the agency’s headquarters as I found it, about 6,100 full-time employees, and then the fewer than 2,000, as a straight reading of the statutes will support. I explained that left about 4,000 in a federal jobs program. Those 4,000 would be more successful at Dairy Queen or the DMV.

Like the United States, which got mired in state capacity building in Afghanistan rather than killing an enemy, DOGE got caught in the time trap of culling through contracts and arguing with FEMA, whose bureaucrats did indeed often remind me of the illiterate Afghan tribesmen I dealt with in a futile war to change their culture. As a nation, we watched the American effort in Afghanistan implode. The paper military and government we helped build fell within a week of the ignominious pullout. Due to the sheer number of contracts and the size of its budget, and like certain Afghans who understood the U.S. effort was doomed, FEMA bureaucrats understood DOGE lacked the time and the numbers to withstand a litany of petty arguments, obfuscation, and the game of contract hide-and-seek. The statutes are the place to begin. They tell you what the agency is required to do. Subtract from that all offices, personnel, and contracts that do not tie directly to the law.

Programs that wander into compensation for family heirlooms, faith-based initiatives, and lawyers and clerks hired to defend federal employees from each other can be chopped back to whatever the statute actually requires. The Individual Assistance program, intended to help people hit by disasters, could be cut to a handful of personnel offering up-to-date technology. Instead, FEMA pays contractors to staff call centers, four of them across the country, with up to 1,200 seats of phones and headsets and a stack of 18 documents to fill out. That is 20th-century telethon technology, the equivalent of the dial phone. The only people benefiting are those profiting from the disaster industry, a revolving door for the people who fill the top slots at FEMA.

So, who will act on FEMA? Nobody. Congress is beholden to FEMA’s $30 billion. The flow of money to large disaster-industry companies helps sponsor campaigns. It is that simple. Of course, there are those in Congress who do understand FEMA is part of a rotten system, but it is better to leave the rotten apple cart alone, lest the cart full of good apples not favor you. FEMA insiders have no incentive to change FEMA. The people who run FEMA rotate back to the disaster industry with a keen sense of how to access the $30 billion, and they cash in on favors. The inertia is there to maintain an agency that ill serves the people, just as Afghans resisted American efforts to change their culture. Machiavelli saw it five centuries ago: the people who profit from the old order fight like cornered animals, and the people who would benefit from the new one, the taxpayers, are distant, distracted, and silent.

DOGE was the great hope. Unlike RG3, I foresee a version of DOGE returning with a handful of lessons learned, so at last, an agency as ineffective and wasteful as FEMA can be corrected.

Originally published in the Washington Examiner on October 16, 2026.

By all accounts, Florida’s response to Hurricane Isaias, a Category 2 hurricane, was picture perfect. Congratulations to Governor DeSantis and all the emergency managers and first responders in Florida and those who joined from elsewhere. If you watched the footage, you saw state and local first responders moving into action before and during the hurricane. What you didn’t see, though, and it’s a good thing, is FEMA. Why? You’re not supposed to.

Picture a FEMA employee. A windbreaker with the FEMA logo. A flooded street. A boat lifting a family off a rooftop. Bulldozers clearing debris, hard hats everywhere, the cavalry coming over the hill. That’s what most Americans think when they think of FEMA. But that’s the wrong perception.

I ran the place, a job I never sought, and I’ll tell you plainly: the cavalry isn’t coming. Saving you—regardless of what FEMA employees claim—was never FEMA’s job. The gap between what people think FEMA does and what it actually does is wide. Let me walk through it.

Disasters, the agency says, are “locally executed, state managed, federally supported.” FEMA is the federal part. Despite FEMA-emblazoned shirts and jackets, cargo pants, and near-military-style shoes constituting the faux uniform worn by the standard headquarters-bound FEMA employee, FEMA is not a boots-on-the-ground agency.

Strip away the eye-catching windbreaker and the agency does six things:

Coordinate.

When a governor relays to the president through FEMA that the state is overwhelmed, they appeal to the President for a disaster declaration. If approved, FEMA turns on the federal dollar spigot, synchronizes other agencies, and eventually sends a horde of FEMA employees into the hinterlands and fringes of America to have a look at what’s happening and then report back to D.C. FEMA HQ. In the first few days of a disaster, FEMA has a very small footprint at the disaster site assisting with this coordination. Back in D.C., FEMA orchestrates the federal response for disasters at the National Regional Coordination Center (NRCC), largely a Washington D.C. television stage prop. It looks impressive, but what it does could be done out of the back of a mobile command center or a facility only 20% its current size and staffing. In short, the NRCC, like FEMA writ large, is mainly a jobs program.

Write Checks.

This is the big one. Through Individual Assistance, FEMA cuts checks to survivors who are required to navigate antiquated call centers and a pile of paperwork. Through Public Assistance, FEMA reimburses state and local governments for their payouts. Through the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), it underwrites federally subsidized flood insurance policies. NFIP is wealth distribution, transferring money from all Americans to the ones living in coastal communities and who experience flood damage, much of it repetitive loss. In short, FEMA is functionally an insurance company — it writes checks, reimburses claims, and adjusts disputes. Coordinating, writing checks, and insuring is done by six thousand FEMA employees housed at 500 C Street doing this. Fifteen years ago, this was done by around a thousand federal employees.

To feed the check-writing and insurance beast at FEMA, there are somewhere between eight and ten thousand FEMA people deployed across the country engaged in the paper churn of bickering over 80,000 open FEMA projects. This horde of FEMA employees live in hotels and collect per diem as long as there are open projects; some FEMA employees have even sold their homes, choosing to live, Jack Kerouac style, “on the road” for years at the expense of the American taxpayer. These vagabonds offer the hope of money but there is little incentive for closing projects. Some projects are two decades old, going back to Katrina. Nearly all projects are trapped in a loop of appeals, audits, and contractor reconciliations. This is a gravy train.

Run Logistics.

FEMA stages and moves commodities — water, meals, generators, tarps — through its distribution network. That is real, tangible work and is affected through four logistics centers around the country; the facilities are state-of-the-art and, unlike the overstuffed HQ building in D.C., staffed by fewer than 200 logistics professionals. Logistics is trucking and warehousing, not search and rescue.

Sponsor Rescue Teams and Emergency Managers.

FEMA pays for and partially trains roughly 28 Urban Search and Rescue task forces in the national network. Yet every one of those task forces is part of a local agency and staffed by local firefighters; nobody on the task forces is a FEMA employee. They wear FEMA patches because they are in part trained and equipped by FEMA. FEMA also pays up to 50% of the salaries for state emergency managers—giving states incentives to encourage the gravy train.

Offer Continuity of Government.

FEMA is responsible for continuity of government in the case of an incident where the capability of executive government needs preservation. During the Cold War, this was the mainstay of FEMA. In the past twenty-five years, as FEMA has become more of a social services agency than a civil defense one, Continuity has taken a backseat role and rarely garners any attention, even at the FEMA table.

Promote a False Narrative.

Although not part of its official mission, when personnel or budget cuts are planned anywhere at FEMA, FEMA employees approach the press and deliver a specific narrative. That narrative is: people will die if the cuts are made. That makes great headlines, but it’s not true, even if people at FEMA, people with very limited perspectives, know that.

Most of the behind-the-scenes talk FEMA engages in is about federal dollars being delivered to the disaster industry, which FEMA pays out slowly—very slowly. The Department of Homeland Security’s own Inspector General has found that weak FEMA oversight dragged out the closeout of Public Assistance projects for years.

Nearly everything you picture FEMA doing, somebody else does. Most FEMA personnel are engaged in the paper churn of writing checks. The churn is massive, roughly $30 billion worth of checks. FEMA employees don’t pull people off roofs, swing hammers, or handle chain saws. Swift-water and air rescues are done by the National Guard, the Coast Guard, state game wardens, and volunteers dubbed the Cajun Navy. Even the search and rescue federal task forces are local firefighters under a federal banner. FEMA doesn’t command any responders. The mayor, the county, and the governor run the response. They do that.

FEMA doesn’t clear your debris or turn your lights back on. The Army Corps of Engineers, large debris removal companies with sub-contractors, and others who handle temporary power, emergency roofing, and housing — FEMA pays for it.

The myth that FEMA is a first responder endures because it serves a narrative and a purpose. Senior FEMA personnel can appear at press conferences in a faux uniform and stare at the crowd. They aren’t there to do anything besides ensuring the checks start flowing, regardless of the appearance.

Now that the hurricane has passed, hordes of FEMA personnel will move into the area, burrow in, and begin the paper churn that will last for years.

Originally published in Human Events on October 14, 2026.

Richardson explains why FEMA’s flood maps are actuarial tools, not safety tools, and how the National Flood Insurance Program — in place since 1969 — turned a limited backstop into a nationwide subsidy for coastal and floodplain development. Taxpayers far from the water pay so premiums stay cheap. Developers make billions. When the flood hits, the loss is someone else’s problem. He ties that system to places like North Topsail Beach and to the July 4, 2025 Guadalupe River flood that killed more than 130 people, including children at Camp Mystic.

He also gives his account of the response: coordinating with Texas emergency manager Nim Kidd, Coast Guard rescues, why he stayed in Washington, and his decision to override DHS’s $100,000 contract rule so aid could move. They close on what would actually change the incentives — private insurance, a blended model for people already there versus new construction — and why FEMA, Congress, and the FEMA Review Council keep pointing at each other instead of fixing it.

Transcript

David Webb:
But let’s get a little bit more into the weeds. FEMA’s outdated flood maps and FEMA’s billion-dollar gravy train. David Richardson, former acting FEMA director, joining me now. And David, as we hear, the late storm of late storms about to come on shore in the Gulf seems an appropriate title and topic. But thanks for joining me this morning.

David Richardson:
David, thanks for having me. I love your show, by the way. You’re doing great things for the American people.

David Webb:
I appreciate that. With guys like you to help me and what you’ve sent me, that’s how we help people. And I really mean that. Let’s dive in because your recent op-ed on FEMA’s billion-dollar gravy train exposes so much right down to the outdated flood map. So help us understand this more.

David Richardson:
Yes, so I’ll talk about the flood maps first because the flood maps are tied to something called the National Flood Insurance Program. And the National Flood Insurance Program is designed to essentially rebuild structures in the floodplain after they get flattened or really from flood damage by hurricanes or any other type of flood. And essentially, it’s a subsidized program. And by subsidized, I mean everybody across the country is paying so that people living in the coastline and in floodplains can have cheap insurance. It’s changed a little bit over the years. But in general, it’s the same program we’ve had since I think it’s 1969. And it was never intended to do that. So it was never intended for communities to pop up in places like North Topsail Beach, North Carolina. Where I lived for a while, which is essentially a sandbar. And every time there’s a hurricane, the structures get knocked down and the National Flood Insurance Program assists in rebuilding them. All of these coastal communities, for the most part, have popped up since the National Flood Insurance Program. And here’s the deal on the flood maps. The flood maps support the National Flood Insurance Program. And the way they do that is there are lines drawn in these Floodplains, and they dictate how high the premiums are. And FEMA will tell you that the flood maps are for actuary purposes only, and they are not predictive. They have nothing to do with safety and precaution. So that’s kind of how the flood maps work. They’re not ideal. There’s better ways to do it. But FEMA chooses to stick with the old way of doing it, and that’s partially—I know you’re familiar with the Camp Mystic and the children that died there and the children that died along the Guadalupe River. Between the National Flood Insurance Program and the flood maps, we’re allowed to build in the floodplain because of that. But the key point is they have nothing to do with safety or precaution. It’s all actuary information for insurance. So that’s kind of the story on the flood maps.

David Webb:
Yeah, so the name doesn’t really fit the reality, I guess. And by the way, David’s book is Texas Flood, Power, Money, Politics, History, Bureaucracy, and Tragedy. Picture the Texas flag on there. I’m reminded, David, and it was a tragedy in a sense. I remember when the Trinity flooded in the 90s in Houston. There was a house floating down the river on fire because it was on the banks of the Trinity. You know, just one of those areas that you didn’t think till you saw the news roll of it. But these areas that are being built up, infills and, you know, all of this. I mean, people are making, I don’t know, I call it bad decisions. Am I wrong?

David Richardson:
No, you’re not. Number one, people are making billions of dollars by building in the floodplains and selling condominiums and what have you. It’s not a prudent decision, and it wouldn’t be allowable—not allowable, it wouldn’t be feasible unless you had the National Flood Insurance Program that started in 1969. And by the way, one of the architects of the program, there were some senators at the time that said this is going to backfire. Instead of simply insuring the structures that were currently in the floodplain, it’s going to cause a building boom in the floodplain because when the floods do come, the damage is going to be, ding, ding, somebody else’s problem. And that’s exactly what happened.

David Webb:
Oh, God. You know, the minute you say Senate, I just—something I read—the hairs on the back of my head raise up. My guest, David Richardson, former acting FEMA administrator. Let’s dive into more of the topic areas that we want to hit on here. And again, the book Texas Flood, it’s available wherever books are sold. It’s an inside account of disaster response, the bureaucracy, the leadership decisions made. As you put it, under extraordinary pressure. And it is pressure. When these events, these tragic events fold out, communities are uprooted in so many ways. Not just people, not just property, even animals. Agriculture, wild animals, so much is in this mix. And yes, we often think of that scene, the reporter, the storm, the wind blowing. We see that. But what’s really going on here is the destruction of so many lives in so many ways. Let’s go into that a little bit more. What happens? And, you know, Texas, Texas flood. Use Texas as that example.

David Richardson:
Yeah. So in Texas Flood for July 2025, I describe that. The conditions that caused that flash flood. And there have been five or six of those in American history. And what happened there was a storm settled over the hills of Texas. And it got stuck there for reasons that we don’t need to get into, but it’s not climate change. The primary cause was the storm that stalled over the hills of Texas. And then what happened was there was potentially some failed warning systems. And there was also some talk about the weather predictions never being perfect. Well, I’m not telling anybody anything new, but warning systems are never perfect. And the weather forecast is never perfect. And in that case, there’s a bill right now on the president’s desk. I think it’s HR 7022. Called the Camp Mystic Alert Bill. It addresses one of the proximate causes, but it does not get into the deep cause, as we just discussed, of actually building in the floodplain, which is allowed by two FEMA programs, the National Flood Insurance Program, as well as the flood mapping. So what happened there was I got a call about 12 in the afternoon on 4 July while I was driving to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania with my two boys. And it essentially outlined that what had happened about somewhere between 1 and 4 in the morning, that flood had—correction, thunderstorm stalled out and was causing mass flooding. I think it was like three months’ worth of rain fell within like 72 hours. So it was massive flooding. And they were in the floodplain. And partially the reason they were there, as I’ve said three times now, were because of FEMA programs. So immediately, the emergency manager for Texas and myself, Nim Kidd, began to coordinate search and rescue teams to get to Texas. Unfortunately, and this is kind of tough to talk about, most of that would be search teams. The Coast Guard was already on the ground. That was Sean Planky and his crew. There were already FEMA teams or FEMA-trained teams from Texas, and Nim was coordinating the search and rescue, and he had a very tight schedule that he was coordinating with. You don’t want too many people on the ground in one place because otherwise it turns into a pylon sport. So with my small team, and I excluded a lot of people from that team, and they were angry and they went to the press and said I couldn’t be reached. That was false. That’s simply because I excluded them because they didn’t have the emergency management experience in a crisis to handle it like me and them and a few other folks did. So Nim and I coordinated the search and rescue. And the search and rescue that came from out of the state, Nim didn’t need that until Monday. And that’s when they arrived. And once again, unfortunately, that was mostly a search effort. There was a lot of rescuing going on. I think the Coast Guard got somewhere around 250 people from whether on the ground or out of trees. So it was a very successful operation in a very unfortunate situation. And as President Trump said, that’s exactly how FEMA should work. One thing I never did was I didn’t encroach on Nim Kidd’s turf. He’s the emergency manager for Texas. He’s the person closest to the problem, and he was best equipped to handle it. The major problem we had during the 4th July, Texas Flood 2025, it had to do with something called the 100K memo that DHS had put in place. Probably not everybody knows about it, but essentially the secretary said that she was going to sign off on any contract over $100,000. Well, in a disaster, you get into the millions very, very quickly. So at some point, because I had done my homework on what happens during a disaster, I coordinated with my team and I realized that I was probably going to have to override that hundred thousand dollar memo because it put a whole other layer of bureaucracy in place. So I think it was on Sunday, the 6th of July, I made the decision to override it so that the people of Texas could get what they needed from out of state on that Monday. It was a tragic event. I mean, over 130 people got killed. I flew over the next week. Once again, I stayed in Washington, D.C., because that’s where the greatest point of friction for me was. That’s where I was needed, so I could override the memo if needed. The next week, I went to Texas, and I flew, and it was—I’ve been in a war zone. Some people say it looked like a war zone, which always makes me scratch my head, because most people haven’t been in a war zone.

David Webb:
You’re a former Marine. You certainly understand that.

David Richardson:
Yes, and I understand crisis management, emergency management, what to do in a bad situation, how certain people have to be cut out because they don’t provide any necessary input. And so that was a small, tight operation that we did to make sure they got what they needed. I never encroached on Nim’s territory. I stayed in Washington, D.C. because that is where the greatest point of friction was. And weeks before that, because we had war-gamed similar situations, I knew that the $100,000 memo was likely going to get in our way because the level of bureaucracy it put over us. So I stayed in D.C. and made sure that the people of Texas got what they needed on time, on target.

David Webb:
My guest, David Richardson. The book, again, is Texas Flood, the date for July 2025, part of that title. There are many questions, David, many, many questions I have about this, but also another aspect of this, and I think in terms of solutions and forward-looking steps, broader question, what are some of the actions that should be taken to deal with the very real-world effects of this insurance program? In that vein, would something or some change that brings the private insurer back into the picture more, which would bring more of a market and realistic assessment, the insurer would assess risk before authorizing, would that help?

David Richardson:
It’s interesting because part of solving this problem is asking the right questions. And David, you’re asking some of the right questions. And by the way, I’ve been writing articles with a few other folks, and you can see the articles at the popeoffema.com or popeoffema.com at Substack where we outline a lot of this. So to directly answer your question, whether or not private insurance can handle this is up for debate. So the president appointed the FEMA Review Council, and one of the recommendations they made was that private insurance take over where the National Flood Insurance Program is working now. There’s a challenge there, and this is the challenge, and this is something that your viewers are kind of aware of, but they don’t really understand the impact. To build in most of the floodplains where structures are now, or for private insurance to take over, the premiums would be so high that likely the people living there now could no longer live there.

David Webb:
Can you just hit pause there for a second? Let me add a little more to this because kind of expected that because that’s the very real assessment of it. In that case, and from a property and casualty approach for the private insurer, and I know we’re getting a little weedy here, folks, but you need to understand this because some of you live there. What about a blended model, a protection for the people that are there? There has to be some cutoff point to a degree, but then new build and new development coming in. If you have to meet the private insurer, the property and casualty insurance stack to get that done, would that help limit the build where, frankly, it shouldn’t be built?

David Richardson:
David, the answer is yes. And if you and me and 10 of your listeners all sat down on the table, we could figure this out. If we asked the question why enough, if we really decided what the problem the insurance is solving, we could come up with a blended solution that would address the issues and would also find a better solution for the flood maps. The challenge is FEMA has been trying to do this for years, and they can’t get out of their own way to do it. FEMA points at Congress. Congress points at FEMA. Now there’s a third party to point at, which was the presidential council on reforming FEMA. And I can tell you, none of the reforms will happen because FEMA—the schedule was two to three years and National Flood Insurance Program was something on the agenda, but they asked for a two or three year period for it to be addressed. And as you well know, David, a two to three year period is might as well be a century in Washington, DC, because things are going to change. Different people are going to come into place with their own interests, and the recommendations of the FEMA Council will never be realized because FEMA can’t figure it out.

David Webb:
If they ever get their act together, I literally will do this. I will send them four books written by my father, Property and Casualty, used to teach insurance, still used today, four textbooks. The guide map for the private market, the risk assessment, frankly, and the answer that a lot of people don’t want, you shouldn’t do this. Is what the private market will say sometimes. This blended model can lead us down a path. The discussion doesn’t have to be one or the other. You have to take care of the people that are there to the degree that they’re stuck or whatever. Costs are there. But also, sometimes you have to reduce the use of what is a bad decision or a bad area. I don’t know. I’m just a realistic guy.

David Richardson:
A little bit of history. There was a great flood of 1927 on the Mississippi River, and essentially 700,000 people were displaced. My father was one of them. Many of them joined the Great Migration and went north. There used to be private flood insurance, but the great flood of 1927 on the Mississippi River ended it. So they all went bankrupt. So for about 40 years, we tried to engineer ourselves out of the problem. And then once things like waterborne diseases like cholera, malaria, and others were cured, suddenly the coastlines and the river lines were available for development. And that’s how you and me and the rest of us that are not so well-heeled are paying for the property losses of the well-heeled living on the coastline. So it’s a little bit more insidious than appears on the surface. And I guarantee your father—because what he knew about insurance could have predicted exactly what has happened. All of us are paying for the coastal living style because of the National Flood Insurance Program and flood maps. The worst thing about flood maps, however, and you alluded to this, is that they have nothing to do with safety and precaution. And most of us reasonably would think that they do, but they don’t.

David Webb:
It’s the misnomer. That’s what it is. Texas Flood, 4 July 2025. Great read. Power, money, politics, history, bureaucracy, and tragedy. And out of this, what David and I are talking about, there needs to be a… David, that’s to you and all of your listeners. Thank you. And keep going. Texas Flood for July 2025.

David Richardson:
All right.

David Webb:
You got it, my friend. Available wherever books are sold. All right. 866-95-PATRIOT, 957-2874. I’ll be right back.

Texas got what it needed on time and on target. The holdup was the $100,000 memo out of DHS. I overrode it. The greatest point of friction was in Washington, not on the river.

The flood was a storm that stalled in the hills, not climate change. Two programs still put families in the floodplain: the National Flood Insurance Program and the flood maps.

The fix is simple. Stop talking about the things you want to do, and only do the things you have to do.

Since WWII, there were touchstones on the journey to Trump. JFK and Reagan are two. My family was in the early wave of the working class’s shift of the Republican brand. In his time, Reagan was vilified as an extremist; he was mild compared to Trump. Ronnie’s quips and offhand remarks sound folksy and canned next to those Trump uses to crush his cellophane detractors.

Yet there is one Reagan quote I believe should be carved on the backdrop of his statue that graces the entrance to Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. To me, it was his most profound statement because it captures perfectly the essence and spirit of an American attitude many simply don’t understand: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Reagan said that in Chicago after a morning at the Illinois State Fair. The quote captures the idea that precise language is necessary to keep government in check and out of your business, even in our Orwellian world of constant surveillance and forever wars. Ronnie likely used the word help purposely; he knew how insidious the word can be and how, under the banner of help, the proverbial camel gradually nudges its nose under the tent.

In our day, bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., send hordes of underlings to roam the heartland and fringes of America, engaging in busywork that gives them job security and a license to meddle in the name of help. Under the banner of help, thousands of bureaucrats are living in hotels across the country, collecting per diem for months and years on end. They hail from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Mostly due to disaster threshold levels that have not kept pace with inflation, major disaster declarations have climbed from about 25 a year in FEMA’s first decade to more than 60 today, and the agency has been handed missions that have nothing to do with hurricanes: migrant surges, Afghan refugees, even the pandemic. Give a word like help no boundary, and it will always find more work to do.

In my book Texas Flood: 4 July 2025, I mention help or helping a lot. It appears when I’m about to be sent to FEMA to nurse the agency through hurricane season and then shut it down or radically transform it. Prior to going, my team analyzed the laws outlining FEMA’s purpose. The volumes we sifted through didn’t mention help, yet it’s featured prominently in FEMA’s mission statement: “Helping people before, during and after disasters.” Somehow, FEMA had managed to reverse-engineer Reagan’s statement.

When I first read the mission statement, I was silent, wondering if it was a parody of Reagan’s statement, the Deep State of Incompetency, prone to the Left, making fun of Ronnie. My team stood by as I read it. Finally, I asked, “What the f*** does that mean?” Nobody at FEMA, the news networks, think tanks, or anywhere else has been able to answer that question.

In short, it could mean anything. All words are open to interpretation, some more than others. Help falls on the far end of open-ended.

Helping people before, during, and after disasters. This is the tone of a mission statement one expects to see at the Department of Motor Vehicles, Dairy Queen, or the Unemployment Office. Help encourages the encroachment of the federal government on state and local responsibilities and allows FEMA to intervene as it sees fit. Disaster recovery and response become a pile-on sport, a morass of aimless and uncoordinated actions.

Go to any FEMA location nationwide, peek through the window, and that’s what you see inside: aimless action and paper churn. That’s one reason you can’t get in without a badge. They don’t want you to know.

The word help also encourages state and local authorities to rely on the agency as the first defense during disasters. By helping, FEMA gets to be Sugar Daddy.

There is a real mission statement in the law, and it does not mention help. In law, 6 U.S.C. § 313, FEMA’s primary mission is “to reduce the loss of life and property and protect the Nation from all hazards … by leading and supporting the Nation in a risk-based, comprehensive emergency management system of preparedness, protection, response, recovery, and mitigation.”

By now, you may be discouraged and warily looking out the window, trying to spot FEMA employees strolling over the grass and toward your front door, dressed in not-so-uniform uniforms that are not really uniforms but commercially branded apparel purchased from FEMA gift shops. FEMA likes to look official to the naive public.

But let me suggest what a real mission statement should look like. I was trained to write them by other Marines who were masters at it, despite the fact the United States hasn’t won a protracted shooting war in 80 years. Come to think of it, that’s likely part of the reason Marines and Army Rangers become masters of concrete statements that mean something. They keep us alive in wars nobody else takes seriously.

For agencies such as FEMA, vagaries work, though. But I digress. Consider the following: FEMA provides assistance to state and local authorities when state and local authorities are overwhelmed by disasters.

There is a legal basis for this mission statement. Note the guardrails: provide assistance. I concede assistance and help are similar, but assistance implies something defined and quantifiable. Help is much broader. Yet the second half of the statement is the qualifier: when state and locals are overwhelmed.

Currently, states justify reaching out to the federal government for relief before they have adequately applied state funding. As a helper, FEMA has little recourse. In fact, FEMA, to get in on the action and justify its existence, often rushes to disaster sites, reveling in the effort to make it a pile-on sport. Everybody wants to be a hero.

While running FEMA, I proposed the aforementioned mission statement to replace the help banner. The few I showed it to at FEMA or in the political appointee ranks couldn’t distinguish the difference between what I proposed and the one emblazoned on the basement of FEMA featuring the word help.

They likely still can’t. The nation remains strapped with a mission statement encouraging gangs of FEMA types to roam the country, collect per diem, reside for months and years in hotels, and seek out the American equivalent of the peasant to offer help, all while stirring the pot of the disaster industry gravy-train confusion.

Resolved to this reality, I appeal to them: first do no harm, the corollary to Reagan’s statement.

Originally published in the Washington Examiner on October 4, 2026.

Apparently, the state flagged flash-flood potential on July 2. The National Weather Service put Kerr County under a flood watch on the afternoon of July 3. The first flash flood warning for Hunt and Camp Mystic went out at 1:14 A.M. on July 4. Some heeded them; others didn’t. Warning systems and evacuation plans were in place. Some of them worked; some of them may not have. Investigations regarding the warning systems and evacuation plans continue.

Contributing to the tragedy is the false sense of security two federal programs, both housed at FEMA, give to people occupying floodplains. These programs are flood mapping and national flood insurance.

I’ve discussed before the insolvent National Flood Insurance Program. In short, it’s a wealth-redistribution program moving money from all Americans to the ones living in coastal communities — many of them bearing the tell-tale markers of the well-heeled and erected since the inception of NFIP — where artificially low insurance premiums don’t cover the damage caused by natural disasters. The damage is often repetitive. Yes, your beach house can get knocked down by a storm, and you can build it again with NFIP reimbursement. The low premiums and repetitive losses cause the program to be in perpetual debt. Going into 2025, NFIP already owed the Treasury $20.5 billion. In February, it borrowed another $2 billion after Helene and Milton, and the tab sat at $22.5 billion. Congress has cancelled NFIP debt before — $16 billion after Harvey, Irma, and Maria. NFIP rests on the back of another federal program at FEMA: the flood mapping program.

In all my time at FEMA, I never found anyone who could explain to me in a single sentence what problem flood maps solved. When I asked, I was told by the most senior personnel at FEMA responsible for flood maps that the maps are not predictive; they are used as actuarial tools for insurance purposes. After the flood, the agency said the same thing in public:

“Flood maps are snapshots in time designed to show minimum standards for floodplain management and the highest risk areas for flood insurance. They are not predictions of where it will flood, and they don’t show where it has flooded before.” — FEMA, quoted by AP, 12 July 2025

Naively, I expected to hear something regarding public safety and precaution. I did not. I suspect the parents who lost their children the night of 4 July 2025 thought the same. Like me, they are likely aghast to find out the federal government’s main concern for flood mapping has nothing to do with safety or precaution.

Flood maps are developed by FEMA in coordination with local communities. The responsibility for the marks on the maps is diffuse; no single person or organization can be held accountable for what is or is not delineated on a FEMA flood map. That’s not by design; it’s simply how bureaucracy works. It’s survival. From what I saw working in the federal government and leading two separate federal agencies, survival is paramount. I’ve never once heard a single federal employee mention the best interests of the American people. I’ve heard hundreds, if not thousands, speak of the necessity of increased funding, expanding the scope of their mission, and adding to the size of their agency.

FEMA flood maps are subject to challenge and appeal. It happens often. The process of changing the maps is a collective effort; therefore, when tragedy strikes, it’s difficult to determine at what point too great a risk was assumed and by whom. Afterward, it’s easier to place blame on proximate causes such as failure of emergency warning systems and evacuation plans. But short of a scream, there is no failsafe emergency warning system, and even the scream can be too late or a false alarm. Warning systems sometimes fail due to human error, such as failure to pass the warning, heeding the warning, or not realizing a warning should be passed at all. The deeper cause of fatal flooding is the series of decisions that lead to building in the floodplain; both NFIP and flood maps influence these decisions.

While at FEMA, I found many solutions where the problem to be solved by the solution was not well understood. Therefore, the solution often missed the mark. What problem flood maps solved was an item on my list left unfinished when I resigned. Since I never got that chance for flood mapping while at FEMA, today I would suggest: Without flood maps, there is no tangible analysis to base approval or denial for building in floodplains.

If that’s even close, then FEMA needs the most up-to-date flood map capability available; it’s not apparent they have it. What’s worse, my problem statement confirms flood maps have nothing to do with safety or precaution. No federal spokesperson, especially not FEMA’s frightening talking head, will tell the public that. Instead, they will simply repeat the mantra: flood maps are not meant to be predictive; they are actuarial tools for insurance purposes. With the program as it is, accountability for mistakes and errors resulting in fatalities cannot be determined, since when disaster strikes, safety and precaution are not the concern of flood mapping at FEMA. Even if safety and precaution were problems to be solved by FEMA flood maps, the accountability for FEMA flood maps is so diffuse that no single person or office at the agency can be held responsible; if enough people are guilty, nobody is guilty. Lack of accountability is a government-wide problem. Yet I suggest, until that problem is solved, and it’s unlikely it ever will be, using FEMA flood maps is perilous.

Camp Mystic has been on site beside the Guadalupe River since 1926. FEMA put the camp in a Special Flood Hazard Area on the 2011 Kerr County flood map. People associated with the camp then challenged that line. FEMA granted the appeals: 15 buildings came off the map in 2013, another 15 in 2019 and 2020, most of those at the Cypress Lake expansion. It took bureaucrats at the federal, state, and local level to review and approve those maps along the Guadalupe. No single office or person is guilty. Once again, that’s not by design; it’s survival. Because of federal programs such as national flood insurance and flood maps, development in floodplains will continue; there will be more fatalities regardless of the warning systems put in place.

When I testified before Congress regarding the tragedy in Texas, nobody asked me about flood maps and why the lines on the maps had been changed to accommodate more buildings at Camp Mystic, and what problems flood maps solved if they could not solve the problem of a catastrophe such as the 2025 Texas flood. Instead, they focused on gotcha questions which, for the most part, I outmaneuvered. I was waiting for them to home in on the right target. My answer was in my notes. Their line of questioning about the tragedy told me they didn’t know enough to be asking questions, or they were more focused on stumping me for a news headline.

In paying respect to the children and all others who died during the Texas flood of July 2025, we should look beyond the culprit of warning systems and address the deep causes of such a tragedy. Otherwise, what happened in Texas Hill Country will happen again.

Originally published in Town Hall on October 1, 2026.

After the floods killed more than 130 people—many of them children at Camp Mystic—the Federal Emergency Management Agency said its flood maps are “snapshots in time” that establish minimum floodplain standards and identify areas of highest insurance risk. They are not predictions of where flooding will occur.

That statement may be technically accurate. From my seat as the senior political appointee running FEMA at the time of the floods, I found it profoundly unsatisfying. I called it bureaucratic obfuscation. I wanted to know how so many people had ended up in a river’s path.

There was no single cause. In the early hours of July 4, 2025, a storm stalled over the Texas Hill Country. Rain rushed down limestone hills into creeks and rivers. The Guadalupe surged. Water swept away structures, vehicles, and people. No flood map could stop that storm.

But the storm alone does not explain the death toll. Questions about forecasts, warnings, and evacuation plans deserve rigorous answers, including in the Camp Mystic investigation. I will not prejudge its findings.

Running FEMA taught me how frequently flash flood warnings are issued across the country. When warnings are common and catastrophe is rare, people can grow accustomed to the alarms. A warning is useful only if it reaches people in time and they can act on it. In Texas, the worst flooding struck while many were asleep. Evacuation plans must be prepared and practiced before that moment arrives.

There is an even deeper problem: People occupied the floodplain.

Rivers are beautiful, and waterfront property is valuable. Rivers in hilly terrain can also turn deadly with frightening speed. In 1987, flooding near the Guadalupe killed 10 young campers. Other American communities have learned the same lesson at terrible cost.

Two federal programs help perpetuate the risk: the National Flood Insurance Program and floodplain mapping.

Congress created the National Flood Insurance Program to provide insurance and encourage prudent local management of floodplain development. Yet federal insurance also makes it easier to maintain and build property in risky places. When floods destroy those properties, taxpayers bear much of the cost.

Flood maps compound the problem when people mistake an insurance boundary for a safety boundary. Lines on a map can influence premiums, development decisions, and the public’s sense of danger. They cannot tell a family that a particular building will be safe when an extraordinary storm arrives.

At Camp Mystic, FEMA removed dozens of buildings from the mapped 100-year floodplainafter appeals in 2013, 2019, and 2020. Reporting by NPR and ABC News after the disaster also showed that official maps did not capture the full flash flood risk. A building’s position outside a mapped zone did not move it away from the river.

The underlying issues here are present far beyond Texas. When a map changes, the underlying terrain does not. When insurance becomes available or cheaper, the water does not become less powerful. Yet both can make continued development seem reasonable.

Local officials approve land use. Property owners make choices. Congress sets the terms of federal insurance. FEMA administers the program and produces maps. Responsibility is spread so widely that each institution can point elsewhere when disaster strikes.

That diffusion of responsibility cannot become an excuse for inaction. Congress should examine whether flood insurance encourages new development in dangerous areas. FEMA should make the limits of its maps unmistakable and improve how it communicates risks the maps do not show. State and local officials should treat historical floods and flash floodpotential as real hazards, even when a federal boundary suggests otherwise.

None of this absolves anyone whose decisions may have contributed to deaths at Camp Mystic—the Rangers’ investigation should follow the evidence wherever it leads. It also should not distract us from the conditions that placed people in harm’s way in the first place.

Storms will stall over hill country again. Forecasts and warnings will improve, but we can never make them perfect. We can, however, stop treating floodplain maps as promises of safety and taxpayer-backed insurance as permission to keep building in a river’s path.

Originally published in The Daily Signal on September 27, 2026.

Transcript:

Cheryl Chumley

My guest today, David Richardson, is the former acting head of FEMA. He oversaw FEMA as the acting head during the 2025 Texas floods, and he has lots of insider information on why it takes so long to get FEMA money into the hands of those who need it most. David Richardson, I want to thank you so much for being on Bold and Blunt. So great to have you here.

David Richardson

Well, Cheryl, thank you for having me. I greatly appreciate this.

Cheryl

This is going to be a very interesting discussion because we’re going to talk about the bureaucracies of government responding to natural disasters, but you have an insider look because you were the former acting head of FEMA during the 2025 Texas floods. Start a little bit from the very beginning. What happened when this flooding first started occurring?

David

The flooding, which is not necessarily anything unusual, was caused by a stalled-out storm in the hills of Texas. We got first word of this about noon on the 4th of July. By that time the flood had already essentially occurred, and most of the deaths had already happened, because it started sometime about four in the morning.

What we immediately began to do is coordinate search and rescue. I was in contact with Nim Kidd, who was the emergency manager in Texas. I was also in contact with Sean Plankey, who was overseeing the Coast Guard at the time. Most of the immediate support came from within Texas — FEMA teams in Texas, Texas National Guard, Nim Kidd’s teams, and the Coast Guard. Last time I talked to them I think it was like 235 survivors were rescued, some out of trees.

After the first day it was a search-and-rescue operation. Unfortunately for the people in Texas, primarily a search operation for the bodies. We reacted immediately on the 4th of July, then began to coordinate moving search and rescue into Texas over the next few days. I was in very close contact with Nim Kidd. There were bureaucratic obstacles we had to overcome, and we overcame them successfully to make sure the people of Texas got what they wanted when they asked for it.

Cheryl

What are some of those bureaucratic obstacles? Response then versus New Orleans during that hurricane was very different. What are some of the obstacles people might not be aware of?

David

When it comes to search and rescue, you don’t want to turn it into a pile-on sport. There’s only so many teams you can fit into the scheme of maneuver as they work down the river. Nim Kidd and the State of Texas had a plan. He wanted the teams phased in according to his plan. He needed search-and-rescue teams from Colorado and Missouri on the move by Monday morning so they could get to Texas.

David

So I gave them a chance to relieve us of the burden of the hundred-K memo, and when they never did, I simply released the search and rescue, and we paid them as we normally would have without the hundred-K memo in place.

Cheryl

What is the memo? What did it state?

David

The hundred-K memo stated that the secretary herself would sign off on all contracts over a hundred thousand dollars.

We knew search and rescue and whatever else Texas needed was going to be in the millions. The operations officer at FEMA had walked me through a day in the life of a disaster — a day in the life of a hurricane — the decision points, then the graph of the money spent. An average level-three hurricane, we were spending five hundred million dollars a day. I’d done the math on a piece of paper. Nobody could sign all those contracts.

Cheryl

How long does it take to unfreeze funding? California wildfires have fallen off the radar, but a lot of angry people didn’t get the promised funds. Is it fraud? Is it bureaucracy? What takes place behind the scenes?

David

FEMA is DHS’s pot of gold. It’s the fattest calf in DHS to be sold, slaughtered, and consumed. There’s a lot of money to be had, and with that lot of money goes a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork.

There are hordes of FEMA personnel in the field, living on per diem in hotels. They report to a center each day, go downrange, and count every fence, driveway, shed, house — anything that’s had damage — and they evaluate it. Those evaluations are open to appeals, and they’re often slow. It’s not uncommon that if FEMA evaluates something at a certain cost, the state or county has hired a former FEMA employee to appeal that. Appeals go on sometimes for years. A lot of bureaucratic wrangling inside FEMA and the states, arguing and grabbing for that money.

Cheryl

Is there a better way to administer emergency funds so the people most impacted get the money quicker?

David

There is. First: Texas got what they wanted when they needed it, and I detail that in my book, Texas Flood 2025.

Instead of evaluating every fence and driveway as a bottom-up count that can be appealed — lawyers, paperwork, years — we could use block grants.

[Thinner stretch: block grants and aerial photos; then his uncle’s 2012 Arkansas individual-assistance case.]

In 2012 his house was built inside the levee in Arkansas. He got some FEMA money. I paid for a third of the house to be rebuilt. He was flabbergasted at the amount of work it took just to get individual assistance.

The corollary to the block grants — I had a plan to do this before I left FEMA — they could make an app. I spoke to Steve Davis, Elon Musk’s right-hand man, about a streamlined way for Americans to apply for individual assistance. There are ways to reduce it. There’s no push to get it done.

Cheryl

Your book is Texas Flood. I imagine you wrote it in part from the frustration, and to give people a better way forward.

David

The book is titled Texas Flood 2025, because if you search Amazon there are other Texas floods. David Richardson, Texas Flood 2025. Shameless plug.

I wrote it for the children of Camp Mystic and the other people who died, because I had to get to the bottom of the why.

The immediate cause was a stalled storm in the hills of Texas. It had nothing to do with climate change, regardless of what institutes, PhDs, and everybody else will tell you. The storm moved in and couldn’t get over the hills.

[Thinner stretch: immediate / proximate / deep cause.]

Building in the floodplain is the deep cause of the tragedy in Texas. It’s fostered partly by NFIP and flood maps.

FEMA will tell you flood maps are for actuarial purposes and they are not predictive. That’s true. They inform the National Flood Insurance Program. What they won’t tell you is they have nothing to do with safety and precaution. Immediate cause, proximate cause, deep cause. There is no one cause, and that one cause is definitely not climate change.

Cheryl

From local zoning coverage: environmentalists expanding flood maps and floodplains as a way of halting development. Response?

David

The flood maps are a weapon. You can use them to keep people from building in the floodplain. You can also appeal to FEMA to alter them so you can put more buildings in the floodplain, or cut the already-low premiums. That’s what happened at Camp Mystic.

Between 2011 and 2020, Camp Mystic and associated personnel appealed to FEMA to change the lines so they could either build more or reduce premiums on the ones already in the floodplain. FEMA works with locals. Could be the environmentalist. Could be people who want to expand into the floodplain. The levels just get deeper.

Cheryl

If you yourself were hit by a flood, would you wait on FEMA, or take other measures?

David

I would move on. FEMA doesn’t respond immediately. That’s mostly the state. FEMA is the wagon train that comes in and burrows in at the state and local level so they can collect per diem and sift through the bureaucratic mess. I would take matters into my own hands and stay free from anything FEMA had to offer. I witnessed that with my uncle. I footed a third of the bill. We built nothing more than a shack on a small hill that passed state and federal housing inspection.

Cheryl

That’s a hard truth to stomach, given the tax dollars. David Richardson, your book is Texas Flood 2025. I hope people read it.

David

Thank you, Cheryl. I appreciate it.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Mark Wayne Mullin talked about the need for overhaul over there at FEMA. Listen to him this week.

Mark Wayne Mullin (clip): It’s a constant battle of figuring out how we can cut the red tape and allow local authorities to have the ability to go out, respond, and get refunded faster. I think that is the number one conversation we have with the president. Every time we talk with him is about FEMA and how to reorganize it to get it back to what it was intended for.

Grant: Look, it’s basically a lose-lose proposition. They can never get there fast enough, right? They can never be fully prepared. There’s always something that’s going to come up, but you do the best that you can. But when it gets like this, when it becomes so political, you know the agency has a problem. Who could forget this?

FEMA employee (Fox News clip): And someone feels uncomfortable, we can’t go to that home. If you have loose dogs and someone on the team is comfortable with dogs and another person is not, we can’t go to that home because of safety precautions.

Fox News host: So you fear the Trump houses—the people on FEMA were fearing the Trump houses like they were fearing people with vicious dogs in their backyard.

FEMA employee: Exactly.

Grant: Oh my gosh. Well. I want to bring in now to discuss all of this former acting Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator and author of Texas Flood. He was in charge of the response to that Texas flood back on July 4th a year ago. David Richardson is with us. David, welcome to the program.

David Richardson: Thank you, Grant. Glad to be here.

Grant: All right, it’s a pleasure to have you on. Let me ask you—you get into FEMA. What was it like, as far as, you know, we say the deep state, but the ruling class of bureaucrats, career politicians, whatever you want to call it—what was that like in that agency?

David: Well, I gotta say this first. President Trump keeps his promises, and I know he wants to either radically transform FEMA or shut it down, and I know he will keep that promise.

So what it was like for me when I arrived at FEMA: the first day, I walked around the seven floors at FEMA, kinda chatting with the folks, and what I heard was, “We are not ready to do our mission, and our morale is low.” And I’ve heard that in every federal organization I’ve worked with, but particularly at FEMA. So there was much fear. I arrived when it was in tatters, and I immediately began to orient them on their mission and being prepared for what they needed to do by writing a hurricane strategy and doing a few other things to tighten them up, to get them ready. And I’m glad I did because, as we’ll shortly discuss, there was a tragedy in Texas that we addressed. But between the time I arrived, which was mid-May, and that tragedy, I had a lot of work to do making sure that we had a strategy in place.

Grant: Look, David, I don’t need to be some big-government bureaucrat to know that FEMA, you’re supposed to respond to hurricanes and wildfires and all these things. A hurricane strategy? FEMA didn’t have a strategy in place? I mean, who’s responsible ultimately for those failures?

David: You know, my predecessor—I’m not sure what they were doing. They were very… they were busy doing stuff, but the first thing I asked when I got there was, “Do we have a strategy?” Now, a caveat to that: we did write the strategy. I sent it up to DHS headquarters, and they never approved the strategy. But here’s the deal. The plan is one thing, but the planning is everything. So we did the planning. We had it in place, even though it was never signed off by DHS headquarters. I still had the plan.

So no, they weren’t ready for hurricane season when I got there, and I quickly brought them up to speed from them claiming that they weren’t ready and that they had low morale and they couldn’t do their job.

Grant: Yeah, yeah. Amazing. Which brings us to the Texas floods. Now, I broadcast from Dallas. Sadly, there were many families that I know that lost children in those floods. This was the summer camps that were just devastated. So many kids losing their lives there. You had to organize response there. What was that like? Take me through it, and was FEMA ready?

David: So we were ready when that came. When that happens. And there’s something to point out: there are actually FEMA programs that contributed to that tragedy in Texas. And they are the National Flood Insurance Program and the Flood Mapping Program. Both contributed to that disaster and the horrific things that happened there. But since I had planned with my team—

Grant: Oh, wait, hold on, David. We need to—how did those things, the flood mapping and the flood insurance program, contribute to it? If you can briefly, but I’m curious about that.

David: It’s easy. So the National Flood Insurance Program was never intended to encourage people to move into floodplains, but it did because of the low insurance premiums that the National Flood Insurance Program offers. Structures could get run over by water or whatever have you, and they could be replaced with somebody else’s money.

And as FEMA would tell you, the flood maps that support the National Flood Insurance Program—the flood maps have nothing to do with safety and precaution. The flood maps are non-predictive, and they are for actuarial purposes only. FEMA will tell you that, but what they won’t tell you is they have nothing to do with safety and precaution. So that’s how those FEMA programs contributed to that tragedy in Texas.

Grant: All right. So after everything you went through, what is the number one piece of advice you would give FEMA today as they quest to reform this agency?

David: So first of all, they should take their numbers down to about half, and then they should focus on closing out—listen to this—the 80,000 projects across the country. There are 80,000 FEMA projects. In states like Florida and Tennessee, almost every county has open FEMA projects in them. But because those FEMA projects are jobs programs for FEMA people who are on per diem in those states, living in hotel rooms, they don’t want to shut those projects down because they are job security.

So shut the programs down. Reduce the FEMA workforce by about 50 percent. And that’s easy to do. I had the plan in place. Wouldn’t have been a problem. However, because I refused to work with the leadership at DHS at the time, I resigned.

Grant: All right, and that was Kristi Noem at the time, and now she’s gone as well, and we could get into all of that as well. David Richardson, I urge people to read your book, Texas Flood. We appreciate you coming on the program today, and thank you for your service to this country as well.

David: Thank you, Grant. Thanks for having me.

Grant: Absolutely.

Like many at FEMA, Andy takes himself seriously, but not what he does. That’s a recipe for failure. FEMA has proven this repeatedly. Now Andy has. Consider his clownish critique of Texas Flood 4 July 2025:

Andy tells folks he’s read my book, so they don’t have to. That’s probably because anyone who reads my book will know far more about managing disasters and what FEMA is supposed to do than Andy does. Andy has a PhD in something having to do with disasters and works for one of the stumps in the swamp in Washington D.C. called a think tank. In other words, Andy profits from the confusion at FEMA by talking about it. As far as I know, Andy has never witnessed firsthand any history worth mentioning except for a battle for a parking space or who sits where in the cubicle jungle at the office. I have, and my book details what happened in Washington D.C. during the Texas flood. As even Andy admits, it’s a success story.

Andy calls me misogynous and shallow thinking. Indeed, Andy picked from my book the humorous quips and barbs and interpreted them as any academic who has spent too much time reading the manual on acceptable speech might. In short, he took the bait. Mission accomplished. I didn’t realize it would be so easy to snare the humorless. As far as asserting the solutions I propose in my book are shallow, Andy likely has no experience tackling complex problems and simplifying mission statements so they can be understood by those who require crystal-clear guidance to carry out operations. Like most academics, Andy mistakes simplicity for shallowness. Andy likely prefers big words, long sentences, and prolonged speeches that delay action and obfuscate intent. If you read my book, you will know exactly what FEMA is supposed to do by law and why for years it has operated in a muddle of half-baked mission statements and a gaggle of federal employees who can’t get out of each other’s way. Also, if you read my book, you will be able to do Andy’s job.

Yet, somehow, at the end of his screed, Andy sees fit to concede my actions in July 2025 were the right ones. He admits the DHS $100K procurement memo acted as a bureaucratic tourniquet during the emergency, and that by bypassing DHS headquarters I pushed search-and-rescue assets from Colorado and Missouri into Texas on time. Indeed, Andy goes as far as confirming for the record that Nim Kidd, the top emergency manager in Texas, responded, “Damn right we did” when I asked him if the state received critical assets without delay. Yes, my book is a story of success, and Andy acknowledges that.

Furthermore, Andy attempts to dismiss my policy critiques—critiques I developed side by side with those at FEMA willing to tackle their basket full of problems—by claiming they are nothing new. I agree, the problems I uncovered are not novel; they’ve been discussed for years, and no solution was found. I offered solutions; at FEMA, that’s definitely new. Nobody denies there are certain programs at FEMA that are bankrupt and require bailouts from Congress. Rather than admiring the problem further, I walked those at FEMA through the process of providing solutions other than taxpayer bailouts and Band-Aids. It wasn’t Jesus turning water into wine, but it provided clearly articulated solutions. Andy’s motto, like many at FEMA, is likely something akin to, If you’re not part of the solution, there is job security in prolonging the problem. Andy doesn’t solve problems; he talks about them. He fits well with his kindred spirits at FEMA. I don’t.

Andy cites a Netflix show, comparing me to someone playing a police officer. I’ve never watched a Netflix series, so I’m not qualified to comment on the accuracy of his comparison. But he also somehow suggests I believe I’m of Ulysses S. Grant caliber. Far from it. Yet, like many with my background, I know the necessity of understanding how people respond under duress, so I read Grant’s memoirs; I learned Grant understood that effective command requires moving toward the point of greatest friction, cutting through ambiguity, and doing more with less. It would well serve the country if FEMA learned these lessons rather than turning disaster relief into a pile-on sport of bureaucrats, endless paper churn, and job security. But, regardless of any recommendation I make, Andy will probably not read the general’s memoirs to glean leadership lessons. Netflix shows will have to suffice.

And, finally, Andy says, “The debate requires participants who understand what FEMA does and respect the people who do it.” Indeed, it does. But at the think tanks of Washington D.C. and FEMA, few exist that do understand FEMA’s mission and the laws that inform it. That is why the problems at FEMA have been admired for so long and nothing has been done. If you read my book, you will see solutions. If you read the Op-eds I am providing the public, you will see more of them. Also, if you read my book you will laugh—sometimes directly at the white-collar welfare recipients at FEMA who you are paying to do nothing more than talk about problems. Be assured, the folks at FEMA never intend to solve problems because there is job security in the resulting circular discussions. These are people who deserve derision.

Hosts: Dr. Michael Scheuer and “Colonel Mike” · Guest: Lt. Col. David Richardson

Editor’s note. This is a cleaned-up transcript prepared from the show’s auto-generated captions. Mis-heard names and terms have been corrected (e.g., Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, Camp Leatherneck, Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, DOGE, Guadalupe River), repeated words and verbal stutters have been smoothed for readability, and station promotions and advertisement reads have been removed and marked. The substance and wording of the interview itself are preserved. Because both hosts speak throughout, a few host attributions are best-effort and may need correction.

SEGMENT 1

COL. MIKE: Welcome back to another episode of The National Security Hour on America Out Loud Talk Radio. Today we have a really big show — like Ed Sullivan used to say — and I’ll tell you why. We have with us Dave Richardson. He’s got a new book coming out. What was he doing? He was working with the government. So what could possibly go wrong working with the government, right? Dave, welcome to The National Security Hour. We want to discuss this new book, and we want to tell people how screwed up FEMA is.

RICHARDSON: Thanks for having me. I greatly appreciate it. I’m really glad to be here to speak with you two gentlemen.

COL. MIKE: So, Dave, why were you chosen to lead FEMA? What qualified you?

RICHARDSON: Number one, I’ve got a background in strategy. I was a ground combat officer in the Marine Corps in a couple of different theaters of war. I went to the Marine Corps schools and essentially learned how to plan, build strategies, and do things like mission analysis. After I got out of the Marine Corps — partially due to what I did in Korea — I got into the countering weapons of mass destruction business. Eventually I was appointed by President Trump in 2020 to be the Assistant Secretary for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction. When Trump didn’t get back into office, I spent four years doing similar work. When he came back into office, I returned as the Assistant Secretary at the Department of Homeland Security for Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction — and I was immediately told they were going to shut it down. Look, I’m a small-government guy, partially because, as you said, the government can be a mess. The smaller the government, the smaller the mess. So I turned to shutting down Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction. I’d done a mission analysis on it. It’s simple: you go to all the laws, figure out what you should do by law, do only that, and match the people to the law and the capabilities. As I was shutting that down, the President had expressed a desire to do the same at FEMA — like had been done at the Department of Education, and then USAID. Since I was having success systematically shutting down Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction — and that wasn’t happening to the President’s approval at FEMA, which he wanted shut down or drastically reduced and rebranded — they removed the person running FEMA and sent me over. I made no bones about it when I got there. There was much howling and gnashing of teeth the day I told them I intended to carry out the President’s intent, because they knew what that was: shut it down, or drastically reform and rebrand it. I lay all this out in my book, Texas Flood 2025.

COL. MIKE: So hang on — what did you find when you got to FEMA?

RICHARDSON: As I say in my book, I found people wandering around the seven floors at 500 C Street SE, essentially saying their morale was low and that they couldn’t do their mission. I immediately turned to addressing both. A note on federal employee morale: it’s a perennial problem. It’s always low, because they have a sneaking suspicion their work doesn’t matter — and in some cases they’re right, because they’re stuck leaderless, with no one pointing out the mission and driving them toward it. So they wander around and complain. And even if one person is cut, they’ll go to the press and say, “We can’t do our mission — of 18,000 of us, there are only 17,999 left.”

COL. MIKE: This almost sounds like Voice of America when they started cutting VOA — “You don’t understand, we need to check the birds in Ghana, the ones with that special whistle, we just can’t report anymore.” So you had a plan to shut it down. Mike and I both lived in Northern Virginia; you’re in Northern Virginia. We understand the morale — every year when the government’s going to shut down, the world ends. It’s War of the Worlds. So what was your plan?

RICHARDSON: My plan was very similar to the one I did at Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, and it’s simple. The military calls it “troop to task.” What do you have to do — your mission — and what are the subtasks? You figure out your specified tasks and subtasks and align the people to them. That tells you what your org chart should look like. Most government people, when told to reorganize or reduce, immediately go to the org chart. That’s 100% the wrong answer. You go to the law, figure out exactly what it tells you to do, figure out how many people you need to do it, and then build your org chart. Otherwise you’re just stirring the pot — which is what I think my predecessor did, because I don’t think he had a strategic-level understanding or knew how to do mission analysis. When I walked through the door, I’d already had my team at Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction do a mission analysis on FEMA, and we redrew the org chart. There were 6,000 people at FEMA headquarters. I quickly discerned we only needed about 2,000 of them. There are another 12,000-plus FEMA people in what they call “the field” — which always makes me scratch my head, because as a ground combat Marine, “the field” means living in the woods. Instead, many of these field offices are living in hotels on per diem, overseeing a bureaucratic process for handing out FEMA money that goes on for years. So there were two pots. At headquarters, they needed maybe 2,000 people to do what 6,000 were doing. It took me the summer to figure out what to do with the roughly 17,000 to 18,000 in the field. I started from what the law requires, matched people to it, and my plan was to cut FEMA — headquarters down to 2,000, and eventually the field down to about 4,000. Keep in mind, during Hurricane Katrina FEMA was about 4,000 people. It’s grown to the behemoth it is today — around 18,000. Right about the time I got there, the FEMA Review Council stood up. I collaborated with them as much as I could, because they were moving the same direction, but it was a committee — and I don’t lead by committee. I knew it would be slow. My plan was to have it down by about half by the end of October 2025, and to cut more over the next six or seven months. If I’d stayed, it would be no more than 8,000 people, not 20.

COL. MIKE: Let me ask you — what was your budget at FEMA?

RICHARDSON: Get ready for this one. About $30 billion. And keep in mind: a million seconds is 12 days; a billion seconds is 31 years. I’d managed a budget at Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction of about $400 million. Now I’m dealing with a pot of gold. The money at FEMA is DHS’s largest calf to be slaughtered. Thirty billion dollars. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to the Department of Defense, but for DHS it’s the pot of gold for anybody who can hand it out and get the credit.

COL. MIKE: So what’s the DHS budget itself?

RICHARDSON: I don’t know the total — I’d be guessing. Anybody could do a quick search. I imagine it’s probably double FEMA’s, so maybe $60 billion, but I don’t know.

COL. MIKE: Michael, let me ask you — back when you were at the Agency, what was the budget?

DR. SCHEUER: I have no idea.

COL. MIKE: You don’t remember?

DR. SCHEUER: I don’t know if I even asked. I wanted to know how much money I had to run my operations.

COL. MIKE: How much did you have?

DR. SCHEUER: The most I ever had was about a million and a quarter. If it was a terrorism problem, you’d get all the money you needed. But most years I came to the end of the year and they had money to give away — instead of returning it to Congress, they’d give it to the Pakistanis or the Thais or some other friend around the world. So it’s waste incorporated, in some ways.

COL. MIKE: By the way, I just looked it up. FEMA’s budget is about double, as I said — DHS is somewhere between $60 and $65 billion. So FEMA was about half the DHS budget.

DR. SCHEUER: Wow. That’s a lot of money.

COL. MIKE: We’ve got to take a break. We’re on with Dave Richardson, talking about FEMA — another one of these boondoggles. We’ll be back in two minutes.

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SEGMENT 2

COL. MIKE: This is how bad the government is. You want to know how we got to $40 trillion — besides sending money overseas, paying off everybody around the globe, throwing money in the street? You have an agency like FEMA, an agency like DHS. Remember, DHS came into being right after 9/11 — and last week was the 25th anniversary of 9/11. So, Dr. Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden hunter — where are we 25 years later in the world of terrorism? Anyway — Dave, how did Secretary Kristi Noem’s “$100K memo” impact your mission? What was that all about?

RICHARDSON: First, let me say — I remember when Osama bin Laden was killed. I was sitting on my rack in Afghanistan on Camp Leatherneck, listening to the BBC on a radio I’d carried out of Iraq. I’ll never forget it. Anyhow — the $100K memo. What Secretary Noem did was try to solve the problem of the American taxpayer’s dollar being squandered. A noble problem. But I don’t think her solution was ideal: she said she would personally sign all contracts over $100,000. Normally that’s something you delegate — something reasonable would be around $20 million. Remember the magnitude: a million seconds is 12 days, a billion is 31 years. Nobody — even with an autopen — could sign every contract on a $30 billion budget. Oversight of contracts is key, but you’ve got to make sure the contracts still get out the door. If you owe people money, it’s got to go out. Put that kind of bureaucracy on top of the system and you can’t pay people in time. To her credit, she was trying to solve a real problem — but she only came up with one solution when there were others. When I got to FEMA, I immediately asked about hurricane season, because I was sent there three weeks before it started on June 1. I cracked a joke once — “Huh, who knew it was hurricane season?” Everybody knew it was a joke, but somebody ran to CNN and said I didn’t even know.

COL. MIKE: Oh my gosh — these wimps you worked with. What wimps.

RICHARDSON: It didn’t bother me. The truth eventually comes out; I know how history works. When I got there, I knew my mission was to shut down or radically transform FEMA — but I also knew it was hurricane season. So I had the operations officer walk me through a series of war games where I saw exactly what happens during a disaster historically — three or four days before a hurricane makes landfall, and ten days after — with a graph of the money spent. In a Category 3 hurricane, which we used as a model, I recognized quickly that the $100,000 memo wasn’t going to fly, because by day two of a disaster we were spending $500 million. I wasn’t going to be able to sign all the contracts — we’d have to delegate. Leaders reduce ambiguity and then go to the greatest point of friction. So I did war games for hurricane season with all the states that would be majorly impacted. When the floods came in Texas, I already knew the $100,000 memo would be a problem, because we’d start having to write checks for four and five million dollars to get search-and-rescue in place. On July 4, when the tragedy happened at night, I was on my way to Gettysburg the next morning. I got a call telling me to phone the congressman in Kerr County, Texas. Then I immediately called Nim Kidd, the emergency manager in Texas, and asked what he needed. He said “nothing right now,” because Texas already had search-and-rescue with the Coast Guard and FEMA-trained teams, plus the National Guard. But he said that by Monday he’d need the release of search-and-rescue folks from Colorado and Missouri. That’s when I began sounding the alarm that we’d need a waiver on the $100,000 memo, because that runs into the millions.

COL. MIKE: Dave, one second — let me bring the listener up to speed. This flood in Texas — did it have a name? What time of year was it?

RICHARDSON: It was July. Anywhere you have hills, a river, and people living in the floodplain, it’s prone to flash floods. It hadn’t rained all spring in Texas, and they estimate a couple of months’ worth of rain fell over three or four days in the Hill Country. The Guadalupe River originates in the Hill Country, so all that water ran off into tributaries, piled up, and caused a major flash flood. When I flew over a week later, I saw huge cypress trees dragged down, many houses stripped to the concrete slab, semi-trucks — the water just carried it all away. What I did was override Noem’s $100K memo. I signed the relief Texas needed and sent it downrange. I gave the process its chance, but the bureaucracy got in the way, so I did it myself.

COL. MIKE: How hard were you hit? How hard did the congresspeople or committees come after you?

RICHARDSON: It wasn’t hard at all, because they were going after the wrong things. They asked me where I was on July 4. I was on my way to Gettysburg when I found out, and I continued, because my greatest point of friction was in DC, where I had to kick down the doors of bureaucracy — the bureaucracy DHS put in place to handle the $100K memo. They also asked why I didn’t go to Texas. First, I didn’t want to be seen on stage with Secretary Noem. She wanted to run down to Texas; my job was here, making sure they got the relief they needed. I talked to Nim Kidd that Saturday and asked where he needed me. He said, “I need you there to make sure the emergency declaration gets to the President on time, and that we get the search-and-rescue we need.” Those were the pieces of bureaucracy I had to outmaneuver. Had I gone to Texas that weekend, it wouldn’t have made any difference — I’d only have gotten in the way of people doing their jobs.

DR. SCHEUER: The thing about bureaucracy in DC is that if you’re a successful officer doing the right thing, you can sometimes tell people to go stick it and just get on with it, because they see you’ve been in a place where you were successful. Otherwise it’s a nightmare — the ability to stop important things for idiot reasons. In the intelligence world, you get quizzed by lawyers about what mask you’d put on Osama bin Laden if you captured him, so you don’t pull his beard. There’s enough stupidity in the system to sink more than one country.

RICHARDSON: The bureaucracy gets in the way so much because everybody’s trying to preserve their five years. As I say in my book, a leader’s job is to reduce ambiguity — through training and exercises, being clear about intent and mission — and then, when things hit the fan, you go to the greatest point of friction, whether it costs you your life, your job, or your reputation. When the flood happened, there was no doubt in my mind I needed to be in Washington, so I could kick down any doors of bureaucracy and get Texas its emergency declaration and search-and-rescue. I’m glad I did — I wouldn’t have understood the immediacy of having to override Secretary Noem had I been on the plane with her.

COL. MIKE: You said $500 million — that’s a big number.

RICHARDSON: In that case it wasn’t $500 million, but it was in the millions — far more than $100,000.

COL. MIKE: Before the break — let’s talk about the relationship between FEMA flood maps and national flood insurance. Our neighbor, southern West Virginia, floods every year. What’s the relationship?

RICHARDSON: Number one: flood maps have nothing to do with safety or precaution. The most senior people at FEMA who handle flood maps will tell you they’re not predictive — they’re for actuarial purposes, to inform the National Flood Insurance Program, which started in the late 1960s. There was no flood insurance, public or private, between the late 1920s and the 1960s — because of the Great Flood of 1927 on the Mississippi, which bankrupted private flood insurance. From the late 1920s to the late 1960s, we tried to engineer our way out of the problem. Then the government created the National Flood Insurance Program, which spread the cost of premiums across the country. It was intended to insure structures already in the floodplain, but it backfired: because the burden was spread nationwide, construction companies and others began building in the floodplains — because if wind or water ruined something, it was somebody else’s problem, and the premiums were artificially low. That’s why you have coastal communities all down the coast, popping up on sandbars — when the structures blow down, the premiums stay low because somebody else is paying for them.

COL. MIKE: We’re going to the break. Go visit our sponsors — this is the only place you get freedom of speech. We’ll be back in two minutes.

— Advertisement break omitted —

SEGMENT 3

COL. MIKE: Welcome back to the final segment of The National Security Hour. Let me ask you — you knew Kristi Noem, you met her; she was head of DHS at the time. In your honest opinion, was she really competent to run this thing?

RICHARDSON: I told Congress she did a good job during the Texas flood, and here’s why: she essentially got out of my way. In that sense she led well — but only because she got out of my way. I was glad she flew to Texas so I didn’t have to deal with her here. In my book I call her “the main act,” because it seemed to be the Kristi Noem show, and I don’t think that’s the appropriate thing for a leader to do. The $100K memo was very short-sighted. So I kept her at arm’s length. I didn’t go to the parties at her house, because it just wasn’t the type of leadership I’d grown up with in the Marine Corps.

COL. MIKE: This isn’t coming from you, Dave — I just have to throw in a little satire: it was “The Kristi Noem Show,” starring Corey Lewandowski. Okay, continue.

RICHARDSON: I had to tell a buddy one day, “Whatever rumors are out there, they’re probably just rumors — I’ve got bigger fish to fry.” I never really paid attention. I was focused on shutting down Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, radically transforming FEMA, and dealing with the disasters. Back to the connection between flood mapping and flood insurance: the flood maps aren’t about safety or precaution — they’re there to inform insurance, and the premiums are set artificially low because we’re all paying for them. That’s encouraged building in the floodplains. If my uncle — whose house was ruined when the Black River in Arkansas overflowed because he lived on the wrong side of the levee — had ever seen Camp Mystic or the places along the Guadalupe that got destroyed, he’d have said, “David, it might not be today, it might not be tomorrow, but I know a lot about rivers, and someday there’s going to be a flash flood here, and a lot of people are going to suffer.” Instead, we’ve built these communities on the artificial back of national flood insurance, because it’s a federal program and it makes us feel like we have top cover. It’s not top cover at all — it’s cheap insurance made artificially low because someone in Iowa, Washington State, or Arkansas is paying for it. That’s the truth behind the flood maps: they’re actuarial tools, and they’re not predictive.

COL. MIKE: Similar to property tax — it’s all actuarial. They tell you you’re paying to build schools, and then they tell you they haven’t built a school in 20 years, so where’s the money? Anyway — continue. Great conversation.

RICHARDSON: As far as overall leadership, I wasn’t impressed — but I didn’t pay much attention, because I had my own work. In the Marine Corps we laughed a lot, played a lot, but in the end we were doing serious business — killing an enemy and keeping our Marines alive in a very tough environment. As I look at it, America hasn’t won a protracted shooting war in 80 years. Michael tested this out — right, Mike?

DR. SCHEUER: I think it’s closer to the last hundred years.

RICHARDSON: Well, it’s since the end of World War II — 80 years.

DR. SCHEUER: Yes, exactly right.

RICHARDSON: If you were a Dane who’d gone Viking, it was important to win — when you won, you got gold, silver, and plunder, and more men joined your command. As soon as you started losing, they found other jarls to follow. In our case, we haven’t won a protracted shooting war in 80 years, and it’s very difficult to lead Marines in some of those situations. I never felt DHS headquarters was up to serious business, so I kept them at arm’s length and did what I had to do. I didn’t get to shut FEMA down or radically transform it, because somehow that magically got handed over to a committee.

DR. SCHEUER: And as soon as something’s handed to a committee, it’s not that serious anymore. Imagine President Trump running the country with a committee — he’d never do such a thing. Once a committee is established, that form of bureaucracy is normally the death knell of whatever it’s supposed to do.

RICHARDSON: That’s absolutely the case.

DR. SCHEUER: Colonel, I have a question our listeners would be interested in. There were stories — I think it was the hurricane that hit North Carolina — that FEMA field officers were stealing, preventing people from reaching their houses, even killing people. Did you run into any of that?

RICHARDSON: I heard about those things. I don’t think the killing is true, but I’ll tell you what has come out — just in the last month, we finally determined, after two and a half years, that there were indeed FEMA people passing up houses that had Trump signs in the yard. That was just wrong. When folks suggest criminality, I always look first for sheer incompetence — it’s normally not by intent, just plain stupidity. I hadn’t heard the other cases, but I do know we’ve recently concluded that FEMA personnel were passing up houses with Trump signs.

COL. MIKE: Dave, how did you get appointed to your position?

RICHARDSON: I knew a few key people already in the administration, in the Trump circle. I never really cared to hang out at Mar-a-Lago — I like smoky bars. There’s a place called the 219 club in Alexandria with live music and wild people; that’s more my crowd. Some people in the administration recruited me. But look — becoming a political appointee isn’t that hard; you just have to know somebody. Leading is hard. You get a lot of political appointees in these positions with no leadership experience at all. So they’re dealing with the federal government — already a bureaucratic mess — and they walk in with no leadership experience, which only makes it worse. It happens on both sides. That’s reflected in a lot of the buffoonery in the political ranks, and combined with the buffoonery already in the federal government, you get a nuclear explosion of buffoonery.

COL. MIKE: Let’s talk about fentanyl. Are you really the guy who did the legwork on fentanyl?

RICHARDSON: Yeah, I’m the guy who did the legwork on fentanyl. Because of my position at Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, I had the authority to call a working group. It took two weeks, and we came to a conclusion. The problem we were trying to solve was that the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 45 was overdose from illicit fentanyl and other synthetic opioids. We concluded that at DHS we were already doing everything we could — so it needed to go to the national level. I got all 17 components to agree, with Tom Homan’s help. We kicked it up to headquarters, and I never heard anything. Since I know what silence means, I made a hard copy and handed it to Tom Homan. He eventually took our recommendation to the White House and the President. In December of last year, I got a call saying the legwork I did on having fentanyl declared a weapon of mass destruction helped convince the President to make that the policy.

COL. MIKE: Was that Tom Homan who called you?

RICHARDSON: It was somebody with a very similar name — looks a lot like him. I love Homan — he was the only guy at DHS with more Neanderthal blood in him than I have. He’s short, gruff, big head, always laughing, and really serious about what he does. A good dude.

DR. SCHEUER: He’s the honest broker.

COL. MIKE: A couple more questions — we’ve got five minutes. Why did you resign, and what do you think FEMA will look like in two years?

RICHARDSON: I resigned for two reasons. Number one, I wasn’t allowed to radically transform or get rid of FEMA — that had been turned over to the FEMA Council. At that point all I was there for was to get DHS through hurricane season. Number two, I refused to work for Kristi Noem. Had I stayed and been given the authority to shut down or radically transform FEMA, it would be at least half its size today, if not mostly gone. I’d have laser-focused them on their mission and gotten rid of the fat. I was dealing with an obese government agency I wasn’t able to put on a diet. I had the plan in place and the people around me willing to do it — some of them were FEMA people who know what FEMA’s problems are and were ready to help — but the Council took it over. I’ll say the Council’s recommendations will likely never come to fruition, because the entrenched bureaucratic mentality at FEMA is in no way capable of carrying them out. I was fond of DOGE, and DOGE liked me — they liked what I did at Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction. I met with Steve Davis, one of Elon Musk’s right-hand guys, and showed him what I’d planned for FEMA. He liked it. I’d have executed it, and it would be radically different today. Instead they’re in a go-along-to-get-along situation. There’s great fear at FEMA, because anytime you remove even one person, they run to the media and say they can’t do their mission. Most people there are captives of FEMA — it’s a kind of Stockholm syndrome. There’s nobody at DHS with the intestinal fortitude or the know-how to carry out even the Council’s recommendations, which pale in comparison to what I would have done.

COL. MIKE: That’s amazing. I think we can both agree Homeland Security Investigations — HSI — is a great organization. These guys bring cases up, and back when I was working with that, Eric Holder dropped every case. Today one of our biggest problems in HSI is all these fraudulent H-1Bs and the L-4s that follow. We talk about the open border and what comes over from Mexico, but we don’t talk about the fraud that comes in legally. So, Mike, I’ll give you the final word — we’ve got to cut it off.

DR. SCHEUER: I don’t know what you found, sir, but I found in my career an extraordinarily un-adult workforce — in the sense that a lot of people got discouraged if they didn’t have someone who could take the blame for them when something went wrong. I managed in a way that said, “I’ll take the blame, as long as you weren’t screwing up or doing something illegal.” But at all levels — from operators to analysts — we’re not raising adults anymore. They’re childlike. What they want is to never be blamed for anything, so they can keep their job. Federal employees are always howling about some imaginary wolf, so that if things go wrong, they can say “I told you so.” But the wolf is only a thimble with hair on it.

COL. MIKE: All right — Dave Richardson, thank you for coming on The National Security Hour. Terrific guest, and thanks for being patient.

RICHARDSON: Thank you.

COL. MIKE: And thank you for joining us — the listener — on the mission of The National Security Hour, the tip of the spear in the epic battle to defend the United States of America. Send it to your friends when it goes to podcast. We’ll see you next week.

I also discuss how the federally funded National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) unfairly transfers wealth from around the country to scenic coastal communities along river and ocean shorelines.

If you have ever heard the song “When the Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin, then you’ve heard the echo of history that ended private flood insurance. The song was written by Memphis Minnie, not long after the Mississippi River breached the levees holding it at bay. That was 1927, and the flood damage bankrupted private flood insurance. After the Great Flood, as it became known, an estimated 700,000 people were displaced; many joined the Great Migration and moved north to places such as Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit.

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From the late 1920s until the 1960s, insurance firms would not issue policies for structures built in floodplains; it was actuarially deemed too costly and, therefore, bad business. Then, in the late 1960s, the federal government created a subsidized flood insurance program. From the start of this program, insurance companies could issue flood insurance policies at low premiums because the federal government subsidized the cost. In short, the burden of paying for flood damage shifted to all American taxpayers, not only the ones living in floodplains.

Eventually, the program landed at FEMA with the title National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP. Since then, NFIP has influenced decisions to place buildings closer and closer to riverbanks and shorelines around the country.

Gilbert White, architect of the National Flood Insurance Program, wrote (1966): A flood insurance program is a tool that should be used expertly or not at all. Correctly applied, it could promote the wise use of floodplains. Incorrectly applied, it would exacerbate the whole problem of flood losses.

The original intent of taxpayer-subsidized flood insurance was to encourage insuring existing structures in areas at high-risk for flooding; it was to be phased out eventually. State and local governments were expected to couple NFIP with increased floodplain and land use management — think engineering projects like levees and local land use restrictions — to reduce flood risk and development in high-risk areas. Just the opposite happened; a building boom crowded high-risk flood areas with structures because taxpayer-subsidized flood insurance was available. Flood damage and associated damage cost ballooned. When storms knocked structures down or ruined them with water, it was somebody else’s problem.

In 2025, NFIP was $20,000,000,000.00 (that’s billion) in debt and working with Congress for another taxpayer-funded bailout. In the past, Congress relieved NFIP of similar inevitable debt because the low premiums paid by the insured did not cover the damage caused by storms. There have been modifications to NFIP, such as the opaque 2023 reform Risk Rating 2.0 — it’s FEMA’s own secret of how the rates for Risk Rating 2.0 are set, which increases premiums on a relatively few very high-risk structures. The reform has not solved the insolvency issue.

In short, the insolvent NFIP distributes wealth from areas less prone to floods to those having a greater propensity for floods. NFIP makes a specific type of lifestyle possible, a lifestyle for the well-heeled and situated along scenic coastlines, the epitome of what Gilbert White warned against. In these communities, very costly water damage is inevitable when storms brew in the Atlantic or Gulf and make landfall. Repetitive loss claims due to hurricane damage are not infrequent.

I once lived on a sandbar referred to as North Topsail Beach, North Carolina. In the ’80s, after a bridge spanning the intercoastal seaway was built, a community popped up where there had never been one before. It was made possible by NFIP — nobody in their right mind would build there without insurance. In the late ’90s, two minor storms, Category 2 or 3, hit the island; I watched wind knock down buildings and piers, but flooding caused most damage. Through NFIP, American taxpayers across the country footed recovery bills. This was not the intent of NFIP when it originated.

As “the Pope of FEMA,” a sobriquet I was tagged with during my tenure at the agency, I chaired several complex problem-solving sessions at the agency. In one of them, I asked, what is the root cause of NFIP’s insolvency? With the participation of senior people at FEMA overseeing and interacting with NFIP for years, we concluded: The unintended consequence of establishing NFIP separated the financial risk of flooding from those responsible for land use choices.

In other words, the people receiving help from NFIP were not the people paying for it; the cost is spread-loaded, and all American taxpayers are paying for coastal community living, not just those living there. Gilbert was correct. NFIP encouraged floodplain encroachment, and the burden to pay was transferred. Indeed, NFIP has never been applied expertly at all. We discovered Gilbert’s quote after we came to our conclusion.

The course of action we recommended to DHS to address the insolvency of NFIP was threefold: (1) Those at most risk pay premiums equal to that risk; (2) Garner and apply updated flood mapping; and (3) Scrutinize taxpayer dollars spent on mitigating flood risk. That is not good news for those living in high-risk areas. High premiums are the answer to living in a high-risk floodplain and coastal communities. This is commonly referred to in English as fair.

Inherent to the recommendation is the admission by the most senior people at FEMA in charge of NFIP that Risk Rating 2.0 can’t rescue NFIP from insolvency; NFIP will remain insolvent and continue to incur debt.

In its report, the presidentially chartered FEMA Review Council recognized the need to reform NFIP. It won’t happen. Why? One, the FEMA Review Council and its recommendations are no match for confusion and entrenched federal bureaucrats at FEMA. FEMA folk can read what to do, but they can’t figure out how to get it done. It’s too complicated for them. Then, up the street from the FEMA building that houses 6,000 or so FEMA HQ personnel, there are those in Congress who simply want to revert to the original Risk Rating because their constituents living the coastal lifestyle don’t like the minor 2023 reform that is gradually increasing a small number of premiums.

And, finally, at DHS, there are no leaders with the intestinal fortitude and the know-how to implement the Council’s Recommendations on NFIP or any other of the 10 or so Council recommendations for that matter. Minor changes will likely be made and recorded in a lengthy ChatGPT-crafted, jargon-ridden memo and then hailed as evidence of reform, but NFIP will remain an insolvent program of big government wealth redistribution — money going from the not-so-well-heeled to the well-heeled.

David Richardson served as the Senior Official Performing the Duties of Administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). He is the author of Texas Flood: Power, Money, Politics, History, Bureaucracy and Tragedy*.*

Texas Flood is out now on Amazon.

We compiled these numbers from the Office of Inspector General semiannual reports to Congress during DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari’s tenure. We then compared those numbers to those of other agencies. From fiscal 2019 to fiscal 2025, the Office of Inspector General’s Whistleblower Protection Division reviewed 3,144 retaliation complaints. It confirmed just 11 — a validation rate of 0.35%.

Other federal watchdogs corroborate 3%–8% of retaliation cases. In the private sector, the rate is 20%–25%.

That makes the Office of Inspector General between ten and 25 times less likely to confirm retaliation than comparable federal offices and 50 to 70 times less likely than the private industry. No statistical model explains a gap this extreme. It reflects institutional posture, not case quality.

The same pattern appears in waste, fraud, and abuse complaints. Even using the most generous reading of its semiannual reports, the Office of Inspector General acted on only 1,070 out of 140,344 complaints — a rate of 0.76%. Peer agencies average 2%–10%. The Office of Inspector General is not an outlier; it is the floor. This is not a rounding error, but rather an institutional fingerprint.

Inspectors general are supposed to function like umpires: impartial, with a bias toward protecting whistleblowers and an arm’s-length relationship with those they oversee. This is not the case at the DHS. Here, the cozy relationship between the Office of Inspector General and the departments it oversees enables and provides cover for misconduct.

Cuffari’s ineptitude is well known. Two GOP congressmen, multiple Capitol Hill staffers, and watchdog groups such as the Government Accountability Project and Project On Government Oversight all warned us: avoid Cuffari’s office! They have seen credible disclosures vanish into the Office of Inspector General black hole. At a whistleblower conference, a panel devolved into a two-hour discussion on the futility of using the Office of Inspector General.

Our cases comprised two of those rare 11. Our prime contractor, ATCS PLC, was found to have retaliated against me and a team member. They account for roughly one-fifth of confirmed retaliation cases, repeat offenders in a system designed to find none. Their misconduct was so blatant that even a 99.65% dismissal rate couldn’t hide it.

The WPD report completely ignored the retaliation and sabotage by colluding FEMA employees. When we asked for an appeal, WPD head Rohan Prashad ignored us and passed the buck to Office of General Counsel lawyer Rina Martinez. She was so dismissive when I spoke with her that I hung up. My lawyer finished the call. Case closed. Even though the report was 900 days late, slipshod, and failed to hold FEMA accountable, we were supposed to be grateful.

The strategy was obvious: sacrifice a pawn (ATCS) to protect its bishop (the corrupt FEMA employees), hoping we would go away. But we didn’t.

Even after proven retaliation, Karley Hoyt, a contracting officer representative who mismanaged the contract from the start, has still not downgraded ATCS in the Contractor Performance Assessment Reporting System.

We took evidence directly to FEMA acting administrator David Richardson, who initiated debarment against ATCS, citing records falsification, whistleblower retaliation, collusion with FEMA officials, intellectual property theft, knowing Anti-Deficiency Act violations, overbilling, and the loss of the $70 million Digital Site Inspection Tool that would have shaved years off Puerto Rico’s recovery. He also terminated FEMA employees who sabotaged our program. Our end-run proved it: ATCS was only held accountable after we circumvented the Office of Inspector General.

This wasn’t simply understaffing; it was institutional design. During our investigation, the WPD had only two full-time investigators. The unit was inundated with 300 to 400 complaints per period, most of which were declined.

For the fraction that did enter the system, the two investigators shared an active caseload of 45 to 50 retaliation cases. Occasionally, they borrowed Justice Department staff, but that support was sporadic. WPD refused to incorporate work from other DHS offices, including the Office of Professional Responsibility, even when covering the same facts and personnel. The goal was not to get it right, but to appear to have gotten it right. A Potemkin village of oversight: under-resourced, structurally hobbled, and indifferent to justice.

The Office of Inspector General rarely meets reporting deadlines, taking four months instead of two to provide the statutorily required semiannual report to Congress. This is dereliction disguised as delay.

This culture of suppression and indifference, set at the top, filtered down.

Over the course of three months, we provided multiple opportunities for Prashad, Martinez, Hoyt, and lead field agent Jose Acosta to respond. ATCS was also offered the opportunity. But they all declined.

These structural failures were mirrored by personal misconduct at the highest levels.

In October 2024, an independent inquiry found Cuffari guilty of “substantial misconduct.” The findings confirmed he misled the Senate during his confirmation and abused his authority by spending $1.4 million in taxpayer funds on a retaliatory internal investigation against three whistleblowers on his staff.

Separately, his office paid a $1.17 million settlement in a whistleblower retaliation case, one of the largest such payouts for a federal employee.

The corruption ran so deep that it triggered a mass exodus and an anonymous plea to the president. Thirty of 60 attorneys, half of his legal staff, resigned during his tenure, fleeing a toxic and retaliatory environment. Those who remained wrote former President Joe Bidenan anonymous letter calling for his removal, saying they could not identify themselves “for fear of retaliation.”

Signed by “concerned DHS OIG employees representing every program office at every grade level,” the letter said, “He has permanently damaged the reputation of DHS OIG … He no longer has the support of his workforce. Staff do not trust IG Cuffari and his senior leadership to make the right decision.”

The ultimate irony: Brian Volsky, former head of the WPD, filed a whistleblower complaint against Cuffari for mishandling legitimate cases. At the Office of Inspector General, the protectors have become the persecutors. It’s a rendezvous of Joseph Heller, George Orwell, and Michael Scott at dysfunction junction.

We experienced this toxic culture firsthand.

When we met with Office of Inspector General agents in April 2019, including Acosta, we gave them everything: evidence, documentation, and witness lists showing fraud and retaliation at FEMA. This evidence detailed widespread malfeasance in Puerto Rico, on our contract, and the broader recovery. They made clear they were only interested in readily provable fraud.

We reported $1.5 billion in fake fixed cost estimates meant to mislead a delegation of 60 congressmen. The response: “Did anyone take the money?” We explained they had not, but lying to Congress should matter. But they just shrugged.

We warned about a $4 million purchase being bypassed for a $46 million lease. They dismissed it because it had not occurred yet.

We warned FEMA that a faulty Guidehouse model used poor sampling that overstated water tank losses and risked wasting millions. ATCS, our contractor, falsified reports to protect its partner, Guidehouse. A field agent asked, “Has anyone gotten sick from unsafe drinking water?” “No,” we replied, “but the fraud was fixable.” They were uninterested.

That April 2019 meeting could have been a turning point. Instead, the system failed. The game was rigged, a fact proven by what it took to get even a single case validated.

The persistence of this impotent oversight at the third-largest department is hardly a mystery. Within 100 hours of his second term, President Donald Trump fired 17 inspectors general (even axing the top three judge advocates general in the first month — a preemptive strike on military oversight). He spared only two: Cuffari and DOJ’s Michael Horowitz.

Trump eliminated effective watchdogs while protecting Cuffari, an inspector general renowned for inaction and incompetence, who even retaliated against whistleblowers within his own office. The preference was clear: perimeter cleared, effective watchdogs fired, bad inspectors general retained.

Retaining an inspector general notorious for inaction is not oversight; it’s institutional self-protection.

This purge was not isolated, but part of a consistent pattern of silencing oversight. The administration also removed the head of the Office of Special Counsel, the key agency responsible for protecting federal whistleblowers, and has moved to strip whistleblower protections from up to 50,000 senior government employees. The message is unambiguous: The entire accountability system is being dismantled.

The message is clear: Trump doesn’t want oversight. But does Trump know the full story? The administration wants loyalists feeding it the answers it likes. This preference for a neutered watchdog had immediate consequences.

Richardson lasted only months before being forced out. The same toxic stew that crippled whistleblowers, a symbiotic relationship between colluding DHS employees and protected contractors, unceremoniously destroyed a reformer.

When Richardson sought a briefing, I was banned from FEMA headquarters. It took four months, including back-channel DHS non-FEMA emails, code names, and a Starbucks in Dupont Circle, to finally meet off-site. The system doesn’t just bury evidence, it neutralizes leaders who try to act on it.

The revolving door spun freely. A former ATCS partner became FEMA’s top official in Puerto Rico, shielding his former company until he was removed for unrelated misconduct. The contractors are still there. The other officials who enabled them are still there. No one faces consequences for the core corruption.

Trump and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem want to disband FEMA, citing incompetence and waste. They are right, but they are unaware of the legitimate grounds because Cuffari’s Office of Inspector General has suppressed that evidence for six years.

When one of us, Barry Angeline, finally briefed Richardson at DHS headquarters, his team mentioned malfeasance uncovered by the Department of Government Efficiency.

“That’s the tip of the iceberg,” we responded. “We have evidence of everything you described and a lot more.” They prepared an independent investigation because they did not trust the inspector general. “No need,” we said. “We have it all.”

Trump kept Cuffari to protect the administration from oversight. But in doing so, it is protecting the very bureaucratic rot it claims to want to eliminate. The evidence of FEMA’s systemic failures — the $1.5 billion in false reports to Congress, the $70 million lost tool, and hundreds of millions in waste and fraud — sits buried in Office of Inspector General files while DOGE scrambles for justification. The watchdog Trump kept is guarding the evidence that would vindicate his agenda.

Meanwhile, FEMA’s “Puerto Rico Problem Solving Group” is unaware of our work and will likely reinvent the wheel, wasting time in identifying problems that we have already documented.

It is protection, all right, but not for Trump. It is protection for the swamp.

The Office of Inspector General’s systemic failure to validate whistleblower claims, whether of retaliation or of fraud, waste, or abuse, creates a culture of impunity and signals that speaking up is futile.

These numbers should warn would-be DHS whistleblowers: don’t do it. If the urge continues, lie down until it passes. When the watchdog retaliates against its own while ignoring thousands of complaints, when the administration protects the most corrupt inspector general, the system is not broken; it’s working as designed.

Evidence won’t matter. Moral clarity won’t protect you. The offices created to safeguard whistleblowers have been weaponized against them. At DHS, filing a complaint isn’t courage; it’s insanity.

This is not about bad math; it is about Office of Inspector General inaction: letting $2 billion in documented fraud and waste fester, a $70 million tool be erased, training vanish, and lawsuits pile up.

Every day it continues, the message to corrupt insiders grows louder: commit fraud and retaliate at will; the watchdog has been defanged.

A watchdog that confirms retaliation in only 11 of 3,144 cases is not failing. It is executing its true mission, performative oversight. Being toothless and neutered isn’t a bug; it is THE feature. The DHS swamp is well guarded under Cuffari.