Senate Republicans are unsettled by the Trump administration’s decision to fire Cameron Hamilton, the acting director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), for speaking out against Trump’s plan to shutter the agency.
Hamilton testified to lawmakers on the House Appropriations Committee earlier this month that closing FEMA would not be in the best interest of the American people. The next day he was escorted out of FEMA’s headquarters after losing his job.
The swift retaliation against an administration official over testimony before a congressional panel is jarring to Republican lawmakers, who worry that it could chill the willingness of officials to answer questions candidly at future hearings.
And the move signals that the president is serious about eliminating FEMA, something that many Republican senators strongly oppose.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), whose home state was hit hard by Hurricane Helene in September, said it was a mistake to fire Hamilton over his testimony.
“I think so,” he said. “I think he was giving his honest opinion and in some respects he had an obligation to do that because he was under oath.”
Tillis said that Hamilton made “the right decision” by giving lawmakers his candid opinion when asked about the elimination of the high-profile agency.
“I think Cam was a good, solid director and I regret that he got terminated,” he said.
Tillis says he’s open to making reforms at FEMA, but he argued that simply eliminating the agency would hamstring future efforts to respond to hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters. Helene caused nearly $60 billion in damage in North Carolina.
“Storms have a nasty habit of not honoring state lines and so it almost requires a regional response. What better case for federal coordination?” he said. “I’m open to the idea of getting it out of [the Department of] Homeland Security, for example, but to say that there’s not a core [federal] function there betrays a lack of understanding of how storms and storm responses work.”
Gov. Josh Stein said last month that the needs in western North Carolina, such as for debris removal and home and road building, remain “immense.”
FEMA last month denied the state’s request to continue matching 100 percent of state spending on rebuilding from the hurricane.
A Republican senator who requested anonymity to comment on Hamilton’s firing said the incident is “troubling” and voiced concern about how it would impact congressional testimony from other executive branch officials.
“While I understand the importance of the team, there ought to be an ability to testify in Congress and certainly have conversations with members of Congress about what an official thinks of a position on an issue,” the lawmaker said.
The senator said the retaliation against administration officials who have veered somewhat off the White House’s talking points has become too “commonplace.”
“It’s too frequent,” the senator said. “This is one more.”
The lawmaker described FEMA as a vital agency.
“It’s important to us,” the lawmaker added.
CBS News reported last week that Department of Homeland Security senior advisor Corey Lewandowski and Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Troy Edgar fired Hamilton after an in-person meeting at department headquarters.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that her understanding of the matter was that Hamilton “testified saying something that was contrary to what the president believes.”
Some Republican lawmakers were surprised by the harshness of the punishment.
“I understand that appointees of the president have an obligation to support the president’s proposals that affect their agencies or resign. At the same time, they also have an obligation to Congress to answer questions truthfully, which is what I think happened in his case,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins (R-Maine).
“There’s a natural tension there and I think it’s very difficult, particularly for someone in an acting capacity, who hasn’t been confirmed,” she said.
Collins said she doesn’t support eliminating FEMA.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a member of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees Homeland Security and co-chair of the Congressional Hazards Caucus, said that getting rid of FEMA is a “bad idea.”
“What you hear is, ‘Well, just kick some of this to the states,’” she said, acknowledging that while it might work in some states, it doesn’t make sense for Alaska.
“It might be easier in one of the square states in the center of America where you have neighbors on all sides of you, where they can come in and different states can offer their support. We don’t have that in Alaska,” she said.
“We’re one-fifth the United States of America. It’s an average fire year if we have a couple million acres of land that is burned” by wildfires, she said. “We’re more seismically active than any other part of North America. We’re seeing coastal erosion at an unprecedented rate. So you’re just going to tell us to go out and solve all these problems on our own?”
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said she didn’t know the circumstances of Hamilton’s dismissal but argued “you need a federal response to disaster.”
“The states have varying capabilities here,” she said.
She said while she could support restructuring FEMA, making it more responsive to Congress and the states and pushing more of its responsibilities to the states, eliminating the agency “presents challenges.”
One big question is who would take charge of directing disaster relief to hard-hit communities in FEMA’s absence.
“Maybe we rename it and it’s not the same thing. It definitely needs work. There has to be a federal mission. Some of these disasters are just too big,” she said, citing the wildfires that destroyed swaths of Los Angeles.
Hamilton was fired from his job after telling lawmakers just that.
“As the senior adviser to the president on disasters and emergency management, and to the secretary of Homeland Security, I do not believe it is in the best interest [of] the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” he told House lawmakers this month.
Trump accused FEMA officials of bias last year, claiming the agency passed over homes hit by hurricanes if they displayed yard signs supporting his campaign or displaying slogans such as “Make America Great Again” or “Don’t Tread on Me.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general announced in January that his office had begun an audit of FEMA in response to those allegations.
A FEMA investigation into bias against pro-Trump homes in Florida found “no evidence that this was a systemic problem, nor that it was directed by agency or field leadership,” according to a Justice Department email in a court document.
Some fiscal conservatives in Congress favor shifting more of the responsibility for disaster relief to the states as a strategy to reduce federal spending.
Senate Homeland Security Committee Chair Rand Paul (R-Ky.) says that states need to take up more of the financial burden in responding to disasters, but he declined to comment on whether he would support eliminating FEMA without a specific proposal offered by the Trump administration.
“I think that FEMA like almost every other shared program, the states need to pay more of their fair share,” he said. “From a fiscally conservative point of view, you’d want much more to be paid by the state government because the state governments have to be more wise with what they spend.”
Paul noted that state governments can’t run up huge budget deficits like the federal government does because they can’t print money.
“There would be less of an incentive to declare every catastrophe as a disaster,” he said. “Every time there’s a major weather event in any state, there’s always the pull to have the federal government come in because the money’s free.”
Paul declined to comment on Hamilton’s termination, explaining he doesn’t know “all the details.”
