Cameron Hamilton was appointed to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency when the second Trump administration began in January 2025.

From the start, there were reasons to feel like Hamilton’s tenure was fraught. There were reports that Hamilton had drafted a memo for his bosses titled “Abolishing FEMA.” But there were also reports that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem forced Hamilton to get a polygraph after news about the whole abolishing FEMA thing leaked to the press.

Congress had questions about all this and called on Hamilton to answer a few, and he ended up being publicly fired. After he left, there were two more acting FEMA administrators. One just left—not exactly a sign of strength at an agency that you might not think about at all until you really need it.

A year later, Hamilton is having a comeback. He has been nominated to lead FEMA permanently.

“Now that Kristi Noem is gone, he seems to want to jump right back in there,” says Micah Loewinger, who co-hosts the podcast On the Media, which is in the middle of a whole series on FEMA.

But the agency Hamilton would be expected to run is having a disaster of its own. On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Loewinger about what the Trump administration has done to FEMA and what it still wants to do. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Last week we got this look at what Donald Trump wants to do to FEMA. It was a report by this council of experts picked by Trump. It outlines recommendations to overhaul FEMA. The big ones are raising the threshold for the federal government to get involved in disaster recovery and shrinking the National Flood Insurance Program. It really makes clear that the responsibility for fixing a natural disaster is mostly going to fall on the states. Could we end up in a situation where, even if FEMA’s........

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