The Chaos At The Top Of FEMA Is Putting Americans At Risk
SOS Scorecard Finds Agency Leadership Failing as Hurricane Season Opens in 12 Days
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Just 12 days before hurricane season begins, the Trump administration's answer to 18 months of leadership chaos at FEMA is to nominate the man it fired a year ago for defending the agency's existence — a nominee who may not meet the legal bar Congress set after Katrina. A recent Sabotaging Our Safety scorecard finds the agency earning an “F” on leadership, and the nomination of Cameron Hamilton does nothing to change that verdict.
“When a hurricane makes landfall, no one on the ground cares who got fired or rehired in Washington,” said Sabotaging Our Safety Advisory Council member Davante Lewis. “They care whether help is coming. Right now, the answer to that question is genuinely unclear — and that should terrify every governor, every emergency manager, and every American living in a flood zone. Cameron Hamilton is walking into a 47% vacancy rate, no strategic plan, and an agency that was shadow-run by a contractor for months. A nomination is not a recovery plan.”
Is Hamilton Prepared to Lead FEMA?: Hamilton was fired as acting FEMA administrator in May 2025 after he told Congress he did not believe eliminating the agency was "in the best interest of the American people" — a statement that put him at odds with Donald Trump.
Critically, Hamilton has never served as a state or local emergency management director and has not led a federal disaster response operation. Federal law — enacted specifically after the failures of Hurricane Katrina — requires the FEMA Administrator to have demonstrated emergency management expertise and at least five years of executive leadership in the field. Hamilton does not meet that bar. His Senate confirmation process should demand answers.
Three Leaders in 18 Months — and Counting: Hamilton's nomination is the latest chapter in a leadership story that has left the agency functionally leaderless for more than a year. FEMA has cycled through three acting heads since January 2025. The most recent, Karen Evans, was removed just 19 days before hurricane season. Her replacement, Robert Fenton, came from the administration's own FEMA Review Council — the body that recommended gutting the agency he now leads. The SOS’s scorecard documents the scope of the vacancy crisis:
No Senate-confirmed FEMA administrator throughout the entire Trump administration
Nearly half of all executive positions — 47% — are vacant.
The agency is missing around half of its top officials, including the FEMA Administrator, Deputy FEMA Administrator, four out of seven deputy associate administrators, and 40% of its regional administrators.
The two offices most directly responsible for planning and preparedness have no one in charge at all.
Just three of the 10 regions have both a regional administrator and a deputy regional administrator.
The region covering Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, New Mexico, and 68 Tribal Nations has neither a regional administrator nor a deputy, weeks before hurricane season.
Three of the top four leadership positions sit vacant.
Leadership Chaos Opened the Door to Corruption: The vacancy crisis has enabled a breakdown of accountability that went all the way to the top of the agency's chain of command. Court documents filed in a federal lawsuit confirm that an unvetted outside contractor, Kara Voorhies, effectively ran the nation's disaster agency for months under President Trump and then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's watch — with no emergency management experience and no accountability to the public.
The Bottom Line: The nomination of Cameron Hamilton is not a plan. It is a recycled personnel decision from an administration that fired him for the wrong reasons, is now rehiring him for the wrong reasons, and has done nothing to address the 47% vacancy rate, the gutted workforce, or the corruption that flourished in the leadership void.
Read the full SOS FEMA Readiness Scorecard here.
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