『Pope of FEMA Podcast』のカバーアート

Pope of FEMA Podcast

Pope of FEMA Podcast

著者： David Richardson
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David Richardson is a Marine veteran, painter, and former senior political appointee at FEMA. Author of Texas Flood: 4 July 2025 and War Story. They called him the Pope of FEMA.

www.popeoffema.comDavid Richardson アート 政治・政府 政治学 文学史・文学批評
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  • Texas got what it needed

    Texas got what it needed
    2026/10/06

    I joined John Solomon on Just the News tonight.

    Texas got what it needed on time and on target. The holdup was the $100,000 memo out of DHS. I overrode it. The greatest point of friction was in Washington, not on the river.

    The flood was a storm that stalled in the hills, not climate change. Two programs still put families in the floodplain: the National Flood Insurance Program and the flood maps.

    The fix is simple. Stop talking about the things you want to do, and only do the things you have to do.



    Get full access to Pope of FEMA at www.popeoffema.com/subscribe
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    8 分
  • The Bureaucracies of Natural Disasters

    The Bureaucracies of Natural Disasters
    2026/09/22
    The interview aired today on Cheryl K. Chumley’s Bold & Blunt podcast from The Washington Times.Transcript: Cheryl ChumleyMy guest today, David Richardson, is the former acting head of FEMA. He oversaw FEMA as the acting head during the 2025 Texas floods, and he has lots of insider information on why it takes so long to get FEMA money into the hands of those who need it most. David Richardson, I want to thank you so much for being on Bold and Blunt. So great to have you here.David RichardsonWell, Cheryl, thank you for having me. I greatly appreciate this.CherylThis is going to be a very interesting discussion because we’re going to talk about the bureaucracies of government responding to natural disasters, but you have an insider look because you were the former acting head of FEMA during the 2025 Texas floods. Start a little bit from the very beginning. What happened when this flooding first started occurring?DavidThe flooding, which is not necessarily anything unusual, was caused by a stalled-out storm in the hills of Texas. We got first word of this about noon on the 4th of July. By that time the flood had already essentially occurred, and most of the deaths had already happened, because it started sometime about four in the morning.What we immediately began to do is coordinate search and rescue. I was in contact with Nim Kidd, who was the emergency manager in Texas. I was also in contact with Sean Plankey, who was overseeing the Coast Guard at the time. Most of the immediate support came from within Texas — FEMA teams in Texas, Texas National Guard, Nim Kidd’s teams, and the Coast Guard. Last time I talked to them I think it was like 235 survivors were rescued, some out of trees.After the first day it was a search-and-rescue operation. Unfortunately for the people in Texas, primarily a search operation for the bodies. We reacted immediately on the 4th of July, then began to coordinate moving search and rescue into Texas over the next few days. I was in very close contact with Nim Kidd. There were bureaucratic obstacles we had to overcome, and we overcame them successfully to make sure the people of Texas got what they wanted when they asked for it.CherylWhat are some of those bureaucratic obstacles? Response then versus New Orleans during that hurricane was very different. What are some of the obstacles people might not be aware of?DavidWhen it comes to search and rescue, you don’t want to turn it into a pile-on sport. There’s only so many teams you can fit into the scheme of maneuver as they work down the river. Nim Kidd and the State of Texas had a plan. He wanted the teams phased in according to his plan. He needed search-and-rescue teams from Colorado and Missouri on the move by Monday morning so they could get to Texas.DavidSo I gave them a chance to relieve us of the burden of the hundred-K memo, and when they never did, I simply released the search and rescue, and we paid them as we normally would have without the hundred-K memo in place.CherylWhat is the memo? What did it state?DavidThe hundred-K memo stated that the secretary herself would sign off on all contracts over a hundred thousand dollars.We knew search and rescue and whatever else Texas needed was going to be in the millions. The operations officer at FEMA had walked me through a day in the life of a disaster — a day in the life of a hurricane — the decision points, then the graph of the money spent. An average level-three hurricane, we were spending five hundred million dollars a day. I’d done the math on a piece of paper. Nobody could sign all those contracts.CherylHow long does it take to unfreeze funding? California wildfires have fallen off the radar, but a lot of angry people didn’t get the promised funds. Is it fraud? Is it bureaucracy? What takes place behind the scenes?DavidFEMA is DHS’s pot of gold. It’s the fattest calf in DHS to be sold, slaughtered, and consumed. There’s a lot of money to be had, and with that lot of money goes a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork.There are hordes of FEMA personnel in the field, living on per diem in hotels. They report to a center each day, go downrange, and count every fence, driveway, shed, house — anything that’s had damage — and they evaluate it. Those evaluations are open to appeals, and they’re often slow. It’s not uncommon that if FEMA evaluates something at a certain cost, the state or county has hired a former FEMA employee to appeal that. Appeals go on sometimes for years. A lot of bureaucratic wrangling inside FEMA and the states, arguing and grabbing for that money.CherylIs there a better way to administer emergency funds so the people most impacted get the money quicker?DavidThere is. First: Texas got what they wanted when they needed it, and I detail that in my book, Texas Flood 2025.Instead of evaluating every fence and driveway as a bottom-up count that can be appealed — lawyers, paperwork, years — we could use block grants.[...
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    21 分
  • FEMA and Its Connection to the Deep State

    FEMA and Its Connection to the Deep State
    2026/09/20
    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 ...
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    9 分
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