Grant Stinchfield: Now, let’s talk about FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This agency is, I don’t know, it’s ripe with fraud. Why? Because the bureaucracy is so big. The contracts can be huge, and quite frankly, people take advantage of 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.
