Cameron Hamilton will probably be an asterisk in the history of President Donald Trump’s second term.
But the former Navy SEAL, whom Trump hired and fired as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is writing his own chapter by highlighting what he says was administrative dysfunction following Trump’s assertion in January that FEMA should be abolished.
In a podcast interview, Hamilton revealed that he had a “very hostile relationship” with the Department of Homeland Security as officials pushed to shutter FEMA.
“The relationship with DHS and myself really became adversarial in a way that was really unnecessary,” Hamilton said Wednesday on the Disaster Tough Podcast in his first interview since being fired in May. Hamilton said he warned DHS officials that their comments about abolishing the agency was “really divisive language” and “extremely unwise.”
“That’s when the divide started to happen between myself and DHS leadership, [which was saying], ‘No, we don’t want it. We want it cut, shut down,’” recalled Hamilton, a conservative supporter of Trump. “My argument was, ‘This is extremely irresponsible.’”
Neither DHS or the White House answered questions about Hamilton’s comments. In a statement, DHS repeated its refrain that “FEMA has been transformed into a lean, deployable, disaster force that both prioritizes the American people and protects their hard-earned tax dollars.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said, “President Trump is committed to right-sizing the Federal government while empowering State and local governments.”
Trump assailed FEMA within days of entering office over its response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Helene last year in North Carolina. Since then, he has thrown the nation’s disaster agency — and state leaders — into turmoil by threatening to close the agency. He established a council comprised of Cabinet members to make recommendations about the future of FEMA.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who has echoed Trump’s rhetoric, oversaw the elimination of 10 percent of the agency’s workforce and of popular FEMA grant programs that allocated billions of dollars a year to communities for projects that could protect them against natural disasters. DHS oversees FEMA.
In late August, a group of nearly 200 current and former FEMA employees warned in a public letter about the “cascading effects” of cuts to agency employees and programs.
Hamilton did not name Noem during the hourlong interview, but he implicitly assailed her. Noem gave Hamilton a lie detector test in March to determine if he had leaked information about a private meeting between senior officials to POLITICO’s E&E News.
“They said in their statement my character, my judgment, my stability, my ethics were all in question,” Hamilton said of the DHS press office. “I wanted to choke some people, that’s for sure.”
“When my character started being attacked, and I was polygraphed … it became a very hostile relationship,” Hamilton said, adding that he passed the test “and there was no apology.”
Hamilton was fired on May 8 after publicly contradicting Trump and Noem on their efforts to abolish FEMA. He told podcast host John Scardena, who worked for FEMA in the late 2010s, that he knew before he made the comments to a congressional committee that he would be fired.
“The day of my testimony, actually, they notified my security that my access was terminated,” Hamilton said, laughing at the memory. “Before my testimony, I knew it was coming. And I knew it was coming weeks in advance. I had somebody tip me off that this is sort of already in the works, just be prepared.”
“I didn’t think they were going to let me testify, but they did,” Hamilton recalled, adding that he had drafted a letter to the House committee that had called him as a witness to say he would not be able to testify. “So, before I go to the testimony, I pack up my whole office.”
Hamilton told the House Appropriations Committee on May 7, “I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.” He was fired the next day.
‘White House was shocked’
Hamilton’s interview is the first public account of the machinations that led him to be one of the first Trump appointees fired in Trump’s second term — and of the dissonance inside the Trump administration over FEMA.
“What I identified early on, was that there is a disparity between the information I’m hearing from the White House, from the president’s inner circle, to what I’m hearing from the department,” Hamilton said, referring to DHS.
“The White House was shocked,” Hamilton said, to learn that FEMA programs “have been shut down or they’ve been frozen.”
Hamilton said after extensive conversations with White House officials about Trump’s objections to FEMA, he came to understand that “the president doesn’t like … how lengthy and expensive these long recovery missions are.” He recalled responding, “‘Oh, 100 percent. That’s a bipartisan issue. … We can do this. We can totally tackle that problem.'”
After months of public silence following his firing, Hamilton is emerging as a vocal and potentially influential supporter of FEMA, which provides tens of billions of dollars a year in disaster aid. Hamilton posted a link to the podcast on his personal X account and publicly supported bipartisan legislation that would preserve FEMA while trying to streamline the agency.
“As a strong constitutional conservative and lifelong Republican, this is an excellent step in the right direction for the Administration and the American People,” Hamilton wrote Friday on X, two days after a House committee overwhelmingly approved the 222-page measure.
On Aug. 26, Hamilton wrote on X and his LinkedIn account that “new forms of bureaucracy” are “delaying the deployment” of disaster aid — and that FEMA, in a recent statement about efficiency improvements, could be “lying to the American public to prop up talking points.”
Hamilton’s account confirms previous E&E News reporting about the lie detector test, his disillusionment with DHS and his firing.
The Trump administration has not taken a public position on the bill to reform FEMA, named the Fixing Emergency Management for Americans Act, sponsored by House Transportation and Infrastructure Chair Sam Graves (R-Mo.) and the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Rick Larsen of Washington.
But Hamilton recalled resistance to his suggestions that “legislative changes could make us better, faster, more responsive, more capable” by in part downsizing FEMA by shifting some functions to other departments.
“DHS became very hostile to that narrative,” Hamilton said on the podcast.
“I tried and appealed to them about how the dirty secret is, nobody wants FEMA to go away. You can talk to the reddest of the red states, it doesn’t matter. No emergency managers across the country want FEMA to go away,” Hamilton added.
Trump in recent months has said he intends to weaken FEMA and shift disaster response to states starting in 2026.
‘I was not hired to abolish FEMA’
Hamilton was a Republican congressional candidate in 2024 who worked in the departments of Homeland Security and State from 2015 to 2023. His lack of emergency management experience drew instant opposition from some Democrats when Trump named him as FEMA’s acting administrator.
“There was a lot of skepticism around my appointment, and I totally understood the concern. I did not come from a conventional emergency management [background],” Hamilton said. His lack of disaster experience prevented Trump from naming Hamilton as the agency’s permanent administrator, a role required by federal law to be held by someone with expertise in emergency management.
“When I was hired, there was zero discussion about abolishing FEMA,” Hamilton said. “I was not hired to abolish FEMA. That was never part of the conversation, and that’s never something I would have agreed with.”
Hamilton said he wanted to “cut wasteful spending,” downsize FEMA and make the agency less bureaucratic — goals for which other FEMA leaders have expressed support.
“I think most of those things could be done wisely,” said Hamilton, who last month became a managing director at Longview International Technology Solutions of Virginia, which provides disaster consulting. “We needed to give the states some time to see what that entails and respond accordingly, not just, ‘Hey, the water’s shut off, you’re on your own.’ That’s not wise.”
“The cause of most of the problems at FEMA is because we keep putting too much crap in FEMA’s rucksack that never should have been there,” Hamilton added.
Asked by Scardena, the podcast host, about Trump’s cuts to weather-forecasting operations, Hamilton replied, “I didn’t agree with all of them.”
“NOAA and some of the other resources that are there, they’re really crucial. Yeah, we could be more efficient. … Across the government, in every sector, there are ways to be more efficient,” Hamilton said.
“Look at DOD,” he added, referring to the Department of Defense, which Trump has proposed to rename the Department of War. “Good lord. Talk about fraud, waste and abuse — there’s so much there you could go after.” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Noem co-chair the FEMA Review Council created by Trump to recommend changes to the agency.
Hamilton showered praise on his FEMA colleagues and former agency officials, particularly Peter Gaynor, who ran FEMA during Trump’s first term and became a close adviser to Hamilton.
“Best job of my life. Some of the most amazing people I’ve ever worked with. So it was absolutely an honor,” Hamilton said at the end of the podcast. “And if I had to go back and do it again and say the same thing again, I would because it was the right thing to say and the right thing to do.”
