[RADIOLAB INTRO]

LATIF NASSER: This is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser. And to state the obvious, we here at the show are normal human people—mostly. Even occasionally civically-minded people. So there are stories and topics, especially newsy sorts of things, that we think are important and that we care about, but they're just not the kind of thing we usually cover. And when something is going on that we feel that way about, often our friends over at On the Media are covering it, and then we realize, "Oh, this is even more interesting and strange and tricky than we thought." And that was the case recently with a series of episodes they did about the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which under the current administration has been fighting for its very existence.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Trump: I'll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA, or maybe getting rid of FEMA.]

LATIF: The series they put together is a deeply researched and reported dive into the agency's origins, its troubled history over the last few decades, and it's also a prescient peek into its uncertain future.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Trump: It just complicates it. I think we're gonna recommend that FEMA go away.]

LATIF: The series sprung from the mind of On the Media co-host Micah Lowinger.

MICAH LOEWINGER: Okay, here I am.

LATIF: Congratulations!

MICAH: Thank you.

LATIF: God, you've been working on this for a really long time.

LATIF: So today we're gonna play some excerpts from that series. We're gonna talk to Micah about his reporting, because it feels like a very American, very now story about, on one side, the idealism and promise of good government. On the other side, the frustration with bureaucracy and mismanagement. And under it all, a profound distrust in government power. It's also just an impressive, compelling and immersive bit of journalism that we'd like to share with you.

MICAH: Thank you.

LATIF: Which kind of at its heart, I think, is like an agency to help people.

MICAH: Yeah.

LATIF: But then it's like to kind of watch the swirl of this money, all this power, all these politics, all these moves around this very simple, very pure drive: Americans wanting to help Americans.

MICAH: Yeah. And that was the kind of—the thing that caught me off guard about diving into FEMA. You take that mission, and then you kind of compare it to, like, the stories that have been told about FEMA.

LATIF: Right.

MICAH: And it's like, how did we get to a place where the agency that's supposed to, like, be the backstop between you and, like, financial and literal ruin, how did that become, like, one of, like, these—these villains of the internet?

LATIF: The series basically takes on that question: How did FEMA become so hated by so many people? It's four episodes long, but I want to start by playing you some of episode one, which details the origin of FEMA as an agency. Turns out all the conspiracy theories that plague it today were there from the very beginning.

MICAH: Yeah, the conspiracy theories about FEMA that date back to this era of the agency that no one thinks about or talks about anymore, when it was hiding things from the American public.

LATIF: And it all starts, as you'll hear in the piece, with a plane wreck.

MICAH: On December 1, 1974, heavy rain and fog rerouted a passenger plane over northern Virginia, some fifty miles from Washington DC. On its descent, the aircraft dropped into the forest below, shearing off the treetops and crashing into the side of Mount Weather. The two pilots were killed first, lanced by trees that burst through the cockpit. The rest of the aircraft crumbled into pieces, a mangle of shrapnel and the body parts of the 92 passengers and crew members. There were no survivors.

MICAH: One woman, whose parents were on the flight, said it seemed like the mountain had "jumped up and bit the plane." News coverage of the day quickly turned to the blame game and the miscommunication from air traffic control amidst a violent storm. But our focus is something that was buried in the reports. When TV crews arrived at the crash site they discovered, rather ominously, that Mount Weather had already been sealed off on the orders of Federal security agents.

[NEWS CLIP: The quick action was taken because the big jet had landed almost a mile away from a super secret government installation, an underground complex of emergency offices set up for federal officials in the event of nuclear war.]

MICAH: The crash had inadvertently uncovered a tightly guarded Cold War secret: Inside Mount Weather was a massive covert facility. And somehow, that undersells it. Through a tunnel that burrows into the mountain, and behind a 34-ton blast door, lies a subterranean Strangelovian lair. A freestanding city with a hospital, a crematorium, an emergency power plant, and even a broadcasting studio. Everything that the White House, and thousands of federal workers, would need to run the country underground while millions melted on the surface.

"I expect your people to save our government." That's what President Dwight Eisenhower told the first director of Mount Weather after it was built in 1955.

MICAH: It's still operated by FEMA today, it's actually being renovated as I speak, but back in the 1950s, Mount Weather was run by FEMA's predecessor, the Federal Civil Defense Administration, the FCDA, which poured billions into making America nuke-proof, or at least lulling people into the belief that with enough preparation they might survive atomic hellfire.

MICAH: The FCDA was behind this delightful if slightly morbid PSA, instructing schoolchildren to hide under their desks during bomb drills.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: [singing] There was a turtle by the name of Bert, and Bert the turtle was very alert. When danger threatened him, he never got hurt. He knew just what to do. He'd duck and cover, duck and cover.]

MICAH: For adults, the FCDA organized Operation Alert, a series of dramatic exercises where millions of people acted out the day of their likely demise, emptying the streets of America's biggest cities.

[NEWS CLIP: While the sirens wail their grim warning, hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers scurry for shelter against the attack. Riders and drivers taking cover in a realistic drill for a day all Americans pray will never come.]

MICAH: Operation Alert was also the first time that Mount Weather saw action.

[NEWS CLIP: As soon as the alert sounded in Washington, President Eisenhower reached for his hat and strode to a waiting limousine to be driven to an emergency base of operations in the mountains outside Washington, exact location kept secret.]

MICAH: Kept secret until that terrible plane crash in 1974. Fortunately, nuclear obliteration never came and Mount Weather was never truly put to use. But there's something ironic—and revealing—that a single storm brought more death and destruction to the base than 30 years of the Cold War. By the 1970s, it had become clear that the nuclear preparations had done little to protect America from an arguably greater threat—Mother Nature.

GARRETT GRAFF: We just didn't have that many nuclear wars, which is great. but we do have a lot of natural disasters.

MICAH: Garrett Graff is a journalist and author of a book about the origins of FEMA titled Raven Rock: The Story of the US Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself While the Rest of Us Die. Before the agency was created, America's disaster response system was, well, barely a system.

GARRETT GRAFF: It didn't make sense for every state to be developing its own totally independent ability to respond to a hurricane, because in any given year, most states don't get hit by a hurricane.

MICAH: Which became a big problem in the '60s and '70s, when the country was rocked by a series of record-breaking disasters.

[NEWS CLIP: No one knows the full size of the disaster yet. In Betsy's wake, there's only darkness, confusion, and death.]

[NEWS CLIP: After suffering one of the most serious earthquakes in history, Alaska had to undergo the further ordeal of over 40 severe earth tremors. Imagine being there as the streets reared up around you like the scene of some terrible biblical retribution.]

[NEWS CLIP: They called her Camille. Born of the sea, she turned like a woman scorned. She screamed and ripped and flooded and killed.]

MICAH: These big disasters overwhelmed towns and counties and states—the big ones often do. But when they asked for help, the federal government was too disorganized to act quickly or efficiently.  Supplying extra ambulances, delivering food and water to survivors, fixing roads and power plants, each piece of the emergency management process could come from a different office or department. A hundred agencies might play a role. Navigating this patchwork of services and jurisdictions was a major pain in the ass for local leaders, especially during a crisis when lives are on the line and every second counts. Like in 1972 when another big storm hit.

[NEWS CLIP: Many of the people here and others in the path of Hurricane Agnes were completely wiped out. Many of them feel that federal aid is too slow and coming and too little.]

MICAH: Trump says FEMA should return its responsibilities to the states, which is odd because states often bring in FEMA when they're unable to respond on their own. And anyway, it was the states that asked for FEMA in the first place. In 1978, the National Governors Association drew up plans for a streamlined, one-stop shop for federal emergency response, and delivered it to a sympathetic White House.

[NEWS CLIP: In Washington, President Carter proposed merging five big federal emergency preparation and disaster relief agencies into one agency as part of his reorganization plans.]

[NEWS CLIP: Civil defense experts say it will provide much needed communication between the state and federal levels.]

MICAH: In 1979, Jimmy Carter signed an executive order giving life to the Federal Emergency Management Agency. FEMA was a federal Frankenstein with a dual mission: Cold War civil defense and disaster relief. I wish I could illustrate this moment by playing you, like, a triumphant speech from President Carter or some colorful news footage, but either that stuff never existed or no one thought it was important enough to archive. Even the earliest employees at FEMA were confused about how to talk about it.

LEO BOSNER: We had a new director there, and there was a message that went out to us that said that if we're referring to the agency publicly, we should say either Federal Emergency Management Agency or F-E-M-A, because the word FEMA he thought sounded too much like a laxative.

MICAH: This is Leo Bosner, a retired FEMA official, who's taught me a lot about the earliest days of the agency. He was working as a flood insurance specialist with the Department of Housing and Urban Development in one of the offices that was folded into FEMA.

LEO BOSNER: We're all working along in the office, and one day they tell us, okay, everybody go down to photo ID. You're getting new photo IDs. So we walk down the stairs, get new photo IDs that say FEMA, turned in our photo IDs that say Housing and Urban Development, And then we're all told we're all getting new job titles. And our new job title is Emergency Management Specialist. And I'm thinking what on God's earth is an emergency management specialist? Like, this is the end of my career. What kind of a dead-end job is this?

MICAH: Leo would spend the next 30 years at FEMA. He eventually found really satisfying work helping hospitals and medical organizations prepare for floods, wildfires and hurricanes. But less than two years after he started getting the hang of his new job, FEMA fell into a decade-long tailspin.

LEO BOSNER: The big shift really didn't come until 1980.

[NEWS CLIP: Ronald Reagan appears to be heading toward a landslide electoral victory tonight across the United States.]

LEO BOSNER: Ronald Reagan got elected president, and there's a super U-turn from Jimmy Carter who was mostly all about social welfare and Ronald Reagan was more about national defense.

MICAH: To run FEMA, Reagan picked someone who would stir up a lot of trouble for the agency, this man.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Louis Giuffrida: Only a masochist with a death wish would accept the job of directing FEMA. [laughs]]

MICAH: Army Colonel Louis Giuffrida, speaking here with a caller on Larry King's radio show.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, caller: I really don't believe that we can be saved if there is nuclear war. I mean, how are you gonna save me if you're blown up, too?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Louis Giuffrida: Yeah, but you're not suggesting that because we both might be blown up by a nuclear war that we shouldn't have in place a system that would take care of us if there was an earthquake or tidal wave or a hurricane or anything of that sort, are you?]

MICAH: While Louis Giuffrida paid lip service to FEMA's disaster relief mission, he was quietly funneling most of FEMA's budget toward Cold War civil defense. Leo Bosner.

LEO BOSNER: All of a sudden we start seeing all these military officers signing in at the login desk, and we're going why are these military people here? Do military people go to floods or something? And then we learned little by little that FEMA's mission was really, really gonna be to get ready for the big nuclear attack from the Soviet Union.

MICAH: In the early '80s, Leo started to hear whispers about classified programs at the agency. Everyday on his trip up the elevator at FEMA HQ, he'd ride by a secret fifth floor manned by a security guard. Mostly he rolled his eyes at all the Cold War theater, wishing FEMA would focus more on preparing Americans for natural disasters. But he still wondered, what were they doing in there?

GARRETT GRAFF: The majority of its funding ...

MICAH: Garrett Graff.

GARRETT GRAFF: ... and about a third of its workforce was actually hidden in the nation's classified black budget, the special budget that Congress oversees that protects our most secret programs and capabilities. And FEMA on a daily basis is in charge of tracking the whereabouts of everyone in the presidential line of succession, so that in the event of a nuclear war, it knows where all of those people are, how to get them to secure relocation sites like the Mount Weather bunker. And who would be best positioned to be the person who takes over as president of the United States in the event of a nuclear war.

MICAH: I wonder if this classified continuity-of-government planning helps explain why there was so little media about FEMA when it was first created. I think the feds just didn't want to draw attention to their secret plans. That said, the coverage did pick up when the agency launched a controversial new initiative.

[NEWS CLIP: The head of emergency management, Louis Giuffrida says the heart of the proposal is crisis relocation.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Louis Giuffrida: What we want to accomplish is taking the maximum number of people from high risk areas to areas of lesser risk.]

MICAH: A mass evacuation program.

GARRETT GRAFF: There was sort of this sense of well, if you could just get 20, 30, 50 miles away from a major city, you would at least have a chance to survive the initial blast from the nuclear weapons, and then live into nuclear winter.

MICAH: Government officials estimated that in the worst case, 60 million Americans could survive an attack. Can you imagine all those urbanites swamping small towns and rural areas? News reports at the time featured a mixture of fascination and incredulity.

[NEWS CLIP: My God, you're gonna have modified anarchy after that sort of thing. How in the world are you going to coordinate the recovery and putting leadership back into place. How are you gonna do that?]

GARRETT GRAFF: Sixty million is still a lot of people. That is the modern population of France. Those people would need a functioning government and functioning infrastructure afterward.

MICAH: This is where we start getting into the bizarre conspiracy theories that haunt FEMA today. In 1982, in an effort to game out some of these post-apocalyptic scenarios, President Ronald Reagan signed a secret executive order to create a covert program called Project Nine Naught Eight.

GARRETT GRAFF: That's 908, but they called it Nine Naught Eight.

MICAH: It pooled billions of dollars and top officials from the National Security Council, FEMA and the FBI.

GARRETT GRAFF: The FBI was in charge of pre-identifying buildings that could serve as refugee camps.

MICAH: If I have this right, basically you had FBI agents working undercover for FEMA, traveling around the country, visiting warehouses, car shops, casinos, Walmarts, helping identify businesses that could be used to house citizens after a nuke was dropped on an American city?

GARRETT GRAFF: Yes. And often without telling the businesses that they were being scouted for these purposes.

MICAH: There was, thankfully, never a need to construct these refugee camps. But the secrecy went way deeper and darker. Just five years after the launch of Project Nine Naught Eight, a bombshell report from the Miami Herald revealed that before Giuffrida was asked to help run FEMA, he'd written his masters thesis on how the military could quell race riots by detaining millions of Black people and putting them in concentration camps. Members of Congress were given a copy of his thesis during Giuffrida's confirmation hearings, a horrifying detail that makes me think they considered this to be part of his qualifications for the job. The most damning part of that Miami Herald piece, though, was news that Giuffrida had worked with Reagan's National Security Council to write plans for declaring martial law and putting the country temporarily under a sort of shadow government—and not just in the case of a nuke but also in a so-called "national crisis" like a war.

GARRETT GRAFF: A bunch of this comes out in the late 1980s amid the Iran-Contra hearings and investigations. It turns out that Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who is the central figure at the White House and Iran Contra, was also one of the planners for Project Nine Naught Eight.

MICAH: Oliver North was asked about these martial law plans during the Iran-Contra hearings.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jack Brooks: Colonel North, in your work at the NSC, were you not assigned at one time to work on plans for the continuity of government in the event of a major disaster?]

MICAH: North was questioned by Texas Representative Jack Brooks. We see North pause and whisper to his attorney. Then the Chairman of the hearings, Daniel K. Inouye, jumps in to respond on the governments' behalf.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Daniel K. Inouye: I believe that question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jack Brooks: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman, because I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan, a contingency plan that would suspend the American Constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it, and wondered if that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was, but I wanted to ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Daniel K. Inouye: May I most respectfully request that that matter not be touched upon at this stage.]

MICAH: The government never acknowledged any of this stuff until much of it was declassified years later. Louis Giuffrida ended up resigning from FEMA for totally unrelated reasons following a Congressional fraud investigation.

[NEWS CLIP: According to Senator Albert Gore, Giuffrida had spent $170,000 of federal money to build a house on federal property for his own use.]

MICAH: By the start of the '90s, FEMA employee Leo Bosner was beyond tired of the dysfunction and the kooky national security schemes.

LEO BOSNER: Frankly for me, once that stuff was in the rear view mirror, it's like, fine. That's the trash. I hope they come on Friday and pick it up and dump it to the landfill. There were some pretty nutty people working back there then. Fortunately nothing much ever came of that, except they ate up most of our budget.]

MICAH: He was eager for the agency to shift resources to preparing for floods and hurricanes. But all this doomsday planning had done a number on FEMA's reputation.

LEO BOSNER: I would talk on my off-duty time to people on Capitol Hill or news reporters and say, "Look, this is a dangerous thing. We're ignoring these natural disasters." And I was having lunch with a news reporter one day and I'm telling him this. And the guy's looking really bored, he says, "Yeah, Leo, that's all really bad. But tell me about FEMA's secret plan to round up all the liberals in the country and put them in concentration camps."

MICAH: What?

LEO BOSNER: Yeah. I said "Buddy, these people are so inept, they couldn't organize a two-car parade, and they're never gonna round up everybody in the country. Come on, get outta here, will you?"

MICAH: Leo didn't know it at the time, but those FEMA camps conspiracy theories had started popping up in fringe message boards on the early internet.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Linda Thompson: The FEMA plans to imprison American citizens have generated a lot of interest in locating the potential prison camps throughout the country.]

MICAH: This woman, Linda Thompson, a sort of godmother of the right-wing militia movement, made a 1994 documentary, America Under Siege, which warned that FEMA was part of  the New World Order, a global authoritarian takeover that would require rounding up anti-government dissidents.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Linda Thompson: These may be facilities that have other uses, but which could be quickly used to detain large numbers of people such as this Amtrak facility in Beech Grove, Indiana.]

MICAH: Following in her footsteps a couple decades later were militia leaders like Stewart Rhodes of the Oath Keepers, one of the January 6 guys.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Stewart Rhodes: A lot of this stuff is dual use. They'll put together a detention center or an emergency center supposedly for refugees from other countries.]

MICAH: And Infowars host Alex Jones.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Alex Jones: People are waking up in droves to the FEMA camps, to the new world order, to the troops on the streets.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Glenn Beck: These FEMA camps ...]

MICAH: And Glenn Beck, when he was still on Fox News.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Glenn Beck: I'm tired of hearing—you know about them? Sure. We've now, for several days, done research on them. I can't debunk them.]

MICAH: After whipping up this paranoia, Beck did eventually debunk the theory with help from the editor in chief of Popular Mechanics.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jim Meigs: This is an Amtrak repair facility in Beech Grove, Indiana. We set a crew there the other day and we got footage inside.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Glenn Beck: Is this your video?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jim Meigs: Yes. And sure enough, what did we find? They're repairing trains in there.]

MICAH: Remember how earlier, Garrett Graff told us about stores like Walmarts being scoped out by the government to be used as refugee camps? They don't exist, but people on TikTok and YouTube still like to make videos about them.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: It's like military style entrance, kind of like a FEMA camp. [laughs] Why in the hell does Walmart Supercenter need that? See the Walmart trucks?]

MICAH: These videos are low-effort and easy to laugh off, but I mean, if FEMA could operate a Mount Weather, why not a Mount Walmart?

GARRETT GRAFF: The challenge of a lot of these conspiracies is that they have a germ of truth to them.

MICAH: Garrett Graff.

GARRETT GRAFF: In the early stages of the Cold War, J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI had preselected lists of suspected communists and political dissidents that he wanted to round up in the event of a nuclear war.

MICAH: Not to mention the fact that the US imprisoned over 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

GARRETT GRAFF: I think FEMA has always been in a difficult place, and this is true by the way, across all of the continuity planning and doomsday planning. You just can't talk about these classified bunkers and classified operations, even if you're trying to debunk conspiracies.

MICAH: The secrecy in and of itself is naturally gonna feed conspiracy theories.

GARRETT GRAFF: Absolutely.

MICAH: The kicker to all this is that some of what the conspiracy theorists warned about is happening, just not to them.  This past July, FEMA, under Kristi Noem's Department of Homeland Security, revealed a new program.

[NEWS CLIP: FEMA allocating $608 million in state grants for construction of detention centers.]

MICAH: Migrant detention centers, part of Trump's mass deportation program. The announcement came right around when Florida Governor Ron DeSantis opened Alligator Alcatraz, the notorious facility in the Everglades. And while he built the jail using state emergency funds intended for natural disasters, he claimed that federal reimbursement was on the way.

[NEWS CLIP: A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security confirms Florida did submit an application to FEMA and were awarded two days ago the full amount Florida applied for: $608 million]

MICAH: The coverage made it sound like the money was in Florida's bank account, but at time of recording, those FEMA funds have actually been held up by Trump's Justice Department. Florida officials say the money is still likely, but who knows? Despite that uncertainty and many legal attempts aimed at closing it, Alligator Alcatraz remains open.

[NEWS CLIP: Amnesty International says immigrants held at the ICE jail in Florida, were shackled inside a two-foot-high metal cage and left outside without water for up to a day at a time. In a new report, they also detail unsanitary conditions, lights on 24 hours a day, poor quality food and water and lack of privacy.]

[NEWS CLIP: And while Governor DeSantis says the conditions are up to standard, the families of migrants being held inside are calling it a concentration camp.]

GARRETT GRAFF: That is the most real FEMA camp ever built.

MICAH: What do you think it says that FEMA would actually use public funds for the very thing that has been a far right boogeyman?

GARRETT GRAFF: I mean, there is something uniquely dystopian about a right wing government elected on the backs of the anti-government conspiracies that it is now implementing.

LATIF: After the break, Micah will explain how we got to this present-day iteration of FEMA, and help us understand what might happen to it going forward from here. We'll be back in just a minute.

LATIF: Hey, this is Radiolab. I'm Latif Nasser talking to Micah Loewinger about the series he put together over at On The Media about FEMA, with help from their senior producer, Eloise Blondiau. And this series picks up that story in the 1990s when FEMA stops obsessing over nuclear winter and focuses on climate disasters. It's still the subject of conspiracy theories at that point, but was, you know, relatively popular with the general public.

LATIF: Then 9/11. With all the concerns about counterterrorism, the agency's attention was once again divided. And the series shows how that was a big part of what led to their catastrophic mishandling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Micah then told me how FEMA hit its next inflection point with Hurricane Helene.

MICAH: Hurricane Helene hits in 2024, and brings historic flooding to western North Carolina.

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

MICAH: FEMA, in a way, was not caught off guard by the actual hurricane. It had pre-staged water and medical supplies and search and rescue teams. Nothing like what happened during Hurricane Katrina.

LATIF: Yeah.

MICAH: That said, what FEMA was not ready for was just an absolute onslaught of misinformation and conspiracy theories, and political lies aimed at making it look like FEMA totally screwed up.

LATIF: Yeah.

MICAH: We're talking about a month before the 2024 election. Donald Trump, he spreads a lot of conspiracy theories about FEMA's response, among them that FEMA is running out of money because it's given all of its money to migrant housing. He told a story of FEMA just giving money away to migrants at the expense of American hurricane survivors, which was just not true. That was a lie.

LATIF: Micah told me that those old stories about FEMA camps also resurfaced during this time, and there were stories about FEMA favoring Democratic voters over Republican voters.

MICAH: And it leads to violent threats against FEMA employees, intimidation and harassment of federal workers on the ground. And so just a few weeks later, Hurricane Milton hits Florida, and this one canvasser for FEMA who's going door to door knocking, telling people, "Hey, these are the assistance programs you can apply for." Her team that she's managing, they're telling her, "Hey, we're being harassed, especially at houses with Trump campaign signs." So this woman, Marnie Washington, FEMA manager, says, "Well, you guys can just skip these Trump homes to be safe." That gets leaked to the right-wing press. It goes viral, and then now—now basically ...

LATIF: It's proof.

MICAH: MAGA ...

LATIF: Proof of everything.

MICAH: They have proof. They have proof.

LATIF: Yeah.

MICAH: They create—they created this chaos with lies, and then when it kind of filters out and leads to, like, fear among FEMA employees, they end up with evidence that yeah, FEMA was neglecting Trump supporters all along. And so I just found that it felt like he like threw a boomerang in Hurricane Helene, caught it in Hurricane Milton, and then sort of ran with it as soon as he became president.

MICAH: Trump, three days after inauguration, does a press conference in North Carolina where he straight up says, "I don't like FEMA very much. It's really expensive. They don't do a very good job. I think we should either reform or get rid of it altogether."

LATIF: Micah says that in the year and a half or so since that speech, FEMA has been locked in a struggle to survive. That's basically the fourth episode of the series. And I want to play just one part of that episode here for you, because Micah managed to score an interview with a guy named Cameron Hamilton, who was the interim head of FEMA in the early days of Trump's second term, right after Helene, who was fired a year later and then in a strange turn of events, may now be the man who holds FEMA's future in his hands.

MICAH: On March 27, 2025, Cameron Hamilton, Trump's interim top leader at FEMA, was meeting with some high-ranking officials in an undisclosed secure location. He wouldn't tell me who he was with or where, just that he had to run out abruptly.

CAMERON HAMILTON: I received a phone call that was very distressing.

MICAH: It was Corey Lewandowski, a special government employee, working closely with Department of Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem. Lewandowski was ripping mad.

CAMERON HAMILTON: He proceeded to berate me over the fact that the media got ahold of a story and was running a topic that they felt was too sensitive and not fit for public domain.

MICAH: The topic was abolishing FEMA.

CAMERON HAMILTON: Correct.

MICAH: A day earlier, Politico had published a story about a meeting where Corey Lewandowski, Kristi Noem, and Cameron Hamilton had discussed whether to dismantle the agency and how they might do it. Lewandowski was now calling because he believed Hamilton had leaked the story.

CAMERON HAMILTON: To which I responded. "I'm not a liar. I'm not a leaker. I'm a man of honor. And if I tell you the truth, it's the truth."

MICAH: Lewandowski didn't buy it.

CAMERON HAMILTON: I wanted to choke somebody. And that's exactly what came through my mind. [laughs]

MICAH: Oh my God.

CAMERON HAMILTON: Living in my flesh, doing some very un-Christian things to a certain person, but nonetheless ...

MICAH: A certain person being Mr. Lewandowski?

CAMERON HAMILTON: No, no, we're—yeah, I think you can read between the lines on that statement.

MICAH: After his call with Lewandowski, Hamilton got an email from a DHS official asking him to submit to a voluntary polygraph test, as in a lie detector. Hamilton told me he had nothing to hide, but he was shocked and not sure how to respond. So he started calling his friends around Washington.

CAMERON HAMILTON: I called people in the White House. I called people in Congress, people in the Senate. My first question is: Is this normal? I've never encountered such unprofessionalism ever in my life. To which unanimously their perspective was I've never seen something like this. And then the second argument that I had received from others was do I resign in protest or do I do this? Overwhelmingly the advice was please do not resign. They will try to destroy you if you do—publicly. So they said the honorable thing to do is to take the test, pass it, and then look them in the face and remind them that you're not a liar. So that's what I chose to do.

LATIF: So just a quick bit of context here: Micah actually interviewed Cameron Hamilton five months before they released this episode, so early in 2026. And one of the reasons Micah wanted to talk to him was because Hamilton was acting head of the agency at the moment when Donald Trump gave that speech in North Carolina saying he might maybe want to abolish FEMA, which apparently took everyone by surprise.

CAMERON HAMILTON: My phone was blowing up. Probably about at least a dozen members of Congress called me that Friday saying basically, is this really what's gonna happen?

MICAH: This was just Hamilton's third day on the job, and all of a sudden FEMA's 20,000-plus workforce, and the entire world of emergency managers, were spinning out.

CAMERON HAMILTON: There were state directors and governors that heard this and thought, this is a terrible idea.

MICAH: FEMA employees at the agency's headquarters were barging into Hamilton's office in tears.

CAMERON HAMILTON: I assembled a leadership team and said, "Guys and gals, this is our moment. This is our make-or-break testing period here. We can either let this Sword of Damocles drop on us and let us fail, or we can dig down deep, which is what emergency managers do, and deal with this crisis and meet it head on and do it with a smile on our face.

MICAH: Some seasoned FEMA staffers I spoke with were not happy to have Hamilton leading them through this crisis. They believed his appointment was part of the problem.  The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act requires that FEMA's leader have significant experience responding to disasters. Trump's last FEMA administrator, Pete Gaynor, who served in Trump's first term, had done over 10 years of emergency management in Rhode Island before coming to FEMA. Hamilton's resume looked nothing like that. He had served for a decade as a Navy Seal, and then in DHS and the State Department. Running FEMA, even temporarily, was a gigantic promotion.  He got the job, because as the second Trump administration was taking shape, he was a well-connected MAGA warrior saying all the right things.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: Cameron, tell me about your race.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Cameron Hamilton: Yeah. Well, good morning. Thanks for having me. And all the patriots out there, thank you for listening. So I'm running in ...]

MICAH: This is an interview on Real America's Voice from March 2024 when Hamilton was running for a Congressional seat in Virginia about 10 months before he ended up at FEMA.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Cameron Hamilton: I've worked in the federal government in various different jobs and capacities, and I understand exactly the bureaucratic sickness that our government is plagued by.]

MICAH: The bureaucratic sickness that our government is plagued by.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: So are you ready and able to dismantle the administrative state?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Cameron Hamilton: I think so. Absolutely.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, interviewer: When Trump is president, if you win, are you ...]

MICAH: He lost in the Republican primary three months later. After Donald Trump was elected that fall, Hamilton began seeking the approval of conservative groups in the hope of scoring a role in the incoming administration. The Heritage Foundation had lobbied for decades to reduce the size and role of FEMA. Its Project 2025 stopped short of calling for the end of the agency, but it laid out ambitious plans like  scrapping preparedness programs,  pushing much more recovery costs to the states, and privatizing the part of the agency that offers home flood insurance to 4.7 million households.

CAMERON HAMILTON: My recommendation, believe it or not, when I talked to Heritage was actually about move FEMA to the Department of Interior. And I say this as a constitutional-limited government conservative, I don't think DHS should exist.

MICAH: Dismantling DHS and moving FEMA to the Department of Interior were also two goals of Project 2025. During Trump's transition, Hamilton was put in touch with the DHS Secretary-to-be, Kristi Noem.

CAMERON HAMILTON: The interview went very well. And we discussed the principles of emergency management.

MICAH: How did you make the case to her that you were the man for the job?

CAMERON HAMILTON:  I worked in emergency management more specifically at my time at the State Department. So while the traditional model of emergency management is domestically focused, all my experience was overseas, dealing with mass evacuation planning, dealing with biocontainment for Ebola, you name it. I did not pretend or presume by any means to be the most qualified individual, but my arguments to her were simply I would love to be an asset for you to have an ally within the agency. But also, still give the president time to make his determination.

MICAH: As in, time to decide whether to nominate Hamilton officially for the job, or find a more qualified FEMA administrator who might have an easier time passing senate confirmation.

CAMERON HAMILTON: Nowhere in this conversation was there ever a discussion about abolishing FEMA. And that didn't happen until the president traveled to North Carolina when the president spoke at that press conference.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Donald Trump: I'll also be signing an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA or maybe getting rid of FEMA. I think, frankly, FEMA's not good.]

CAMERON HAMILTON: All of a sudden every action, everything that we did, was now immediately under the microscope.

MICAH: That afternoon, Hamilton asked that FEMA remove climate resilience from the agency's top three goals in an effort, he said, to make it seem less quote-unquote "political." But it was a little late for that. In a matter of weeks, Elon Musk sent his DOGE goons to FEMA. Hamilton told me he was wary of them, but he gave Musk's team full access to the agency's payment systems. No one was more hellbent on gutting the agency than Secretary Kristi Noem and her "special" employee Corey Lewandowski, a MAGA operative and former pundit who was rumored to be having an affair with Noem. Neither of them, says Hamilton, knew the basics of FEMA's history or its disaster relief systems.

CAMERON HAMILTON: The general lack of understanding from DHS, at least at the senior political level of what it is that FEMA does, is what necessitated the meeting to be held in late March.

MARYANN TIERNEY: We were tasked by Corey Lewandowski and the secretary to write a memo on how we would abolish FEMA.

MICAH: This is MaryAnn Tierney, who was Hamilton's deputy, his number two. She's a longtime emergency manager who had risen through the ranks at the agency in the decades following 9/11. And now here she was, helping craft plans for how to radically reduce the staff at FEMA.

MARYANN TIERNEY: It was very upsetting, but part of your job as a senior executive is to implement the prerogative of political leadership, right? And that's something that I still take seriously. And so what our memo laid out was how you could do it, but also raise the legal concerns associated with it.

MICAH: As we discussed in episode two, the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act limits how much DHS can meddle with FEMA. The memo identified parts of FEMA that with help from Congress could be killed or doled out to different agencies. And so that March meeting between Kristi Noem, Corey Lewandowski and Cameron Hamilton was an opportunity to discuss these different strategies.

CAMERON HAMILTON: They were eager to see my plans on reform, and then I think that they wanted to have a rebranding.

MICAH: Hamilton's memo suggested some potential name changes for FEMA, including the National Office of Emergency Management. N-O-E-M. As in Noem.

CAMERON HAMILTON: And she said, "I love this. Let's just rename it. We'll call it abolishing." And then politically it would look like it was an abolition when in reality it was a relabeling and a reshuffling of the deck.

MICAH: That was just one idea, but Hamilton told me he insisted that they wait to see what Congress and Trump's FEMA Review Council proposed before taking action. And you know a bit of what happens next. Politico reported on the existence of that meeting, and Lewandowski blamed Hamilton for the leak, despite the fact that many other people knew the meeting was happening.

CAMERON HAMILTON: That meeting was transmitted to us through an ESEC process, the executive secretariat. The meeting's label was "FEMA: abolish or reform?" So the meeting topic itself was visible to about 50 to 100 people.

MICAH: Nevertheless, Lewandowski insisted that Hamilton sit for a polygraph test.

CAMERON HAMILTON: They're not always perfect. You can get them wrong and ...

MICAH: Yeah. I feel like they're famous for not being that accurate.

CAMERON HAMILTON: Well, they're more accurate than people realize. It's just the difficulty now is there are more people in the American populace who have had training on how to defeat them and how to overcome them.

MICAH: I see.

CAMERON HAMILTON: I've had that training before in the military, specifically as a Navy seal. My interrogator understood this, and they made it very clear you are not to use certain techniques. But I will just say I made my statements there without any methods to shield myself from accountability.

MICAH: Hamilton was cleared, but he never received an apology. Then DHS began working its way through the agency's senior leadership.

MARYANN TIERNEY: I would say about eight to ten FEMA staff were polygraphed as a result of the meeting and the memo.

MICAH: MaryAnn Tierney was spared from the witch hunt.

MARYANN TIERNEY: I even consulted an attorney because I thought I was going to be polygraphed. It traumatized our workforce.

MICAH:  Did they find the leaker?

CAMERON HAMILTON: No. Well, I suspect I know where the leak came from. It did not come from FEMA. I'll put it that way.

MICAH: When Cameron Hamilton was called to testify on May 7, 2025, before the House Appropriations Committee, he knew his days at FEMA were numbered.

CAMERON HAMILTON: The morning of my testimony, at about 10:00, maybe 10:30, FEMA security received a phone call from DHS security asking them to terminate my access to the building, which is essentially a firing, if you will.

MICAH: Yeah.

CAMERON HAMILTON: MaryAnn had asked how would you like us to handle this? And I said, "I'd like you to notify DHS that I'm submitting a letter to the Appropriations Committee now that will indicate that I've been removed and that I will not be able to testify." The department then realized the optics of it would not look proper, so they backtracked, essentially indicating hey, just sort of pretend this didn't happen.

MICAH: You can go ahead and testify, but when you come back you're fired.

CAMERON HAMILTON: That's not what they said, but that's what I understood it to mean.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa DeLauro: Does this administration seek to eliminate FEMA, and do you support eliminating FEMA?]

MICAH: US Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut questioned Hamilton later that day.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Cameron Hamilton: I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Rosa DeLauro: Okay.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Cameron Hamilton: Having said that, that is a conversation that should be had between the President of the United States and this governing body.]

[NEWS CLIP: Acting head Cameron Hamilton was abruptly fired yesterday. It came one day after he testified before Congress that FEMA should not be scrapped.]

MICAH: Then this March, just when morale at FEMA had hit rock bottom ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Kamlager-Dove:  So Secretary Noem, at any time during your tenure as director of Department of Homeland Security have you had sexual relations with Corey Lewandowski?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kristi Noem: Mr. Chairman, I am shocked that we're going down and peddling tabloid garbage in this committee today.]

MICAH: In a congressional hearing, lawmakers like California Representative Sydney Kamlager-Dove grilled Kristi Noem ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Kristi Noem: Has no authority to be making decisions and putting him in a position.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Kamlager-Dove: But it is also a real question. So what I would say to you—and you should be able to answer the question clearly.]

MICAH: ... on a wide range of topics, including her decision to delay disaster recovery funds to North Carolina, and allegations of corruption and dysfunction at DHS more broadly.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Kamlager-Dove: Chair, before I yield my time, I would like to enter into the record some articles, and I'm asking for unanimous consent. "Noem tightens her grip on DHS." Lewandowski fired, FEMA admin also ...]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Objection.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Kamlager-Dove: Okay. The next one is, "Kristi Noem secretly took a cut of political donations," from ProPublica.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Objection.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Sydney Kamlager-Dove: "Kristi Noem fires pilot over a blanket, but is forced to reinstate him to fly home," Wall Street Journal.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Without objection.]

[NEWS CLIP: We're coming on the air because President Trump has just announced that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is out of a job. This follows reports that the president was frustrated by her recent testimony on Capitol Hill.]

MICAH: After Noem was abruptly fired in March, FEMA's fortunes began to slowly turn around. Trump's new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin brought a decidedly more conciliatory tone when he traveled to North Carolina to meet with local emergency managers, first responders and regional FEMA staff working on the Hurricane Helene recovery.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Markwayne Mullin: Let us know what we can do better. Not just beat up on FEMA, that's not the point, because they've done a great job, but what is it that we could maybe tweak just a little bit.]

MICAH: Over the past couple of months, Secretary Mullin began to lift Kristi Noem's $100,000 review policy.  President Trump also released some state disaster relief funding that his White House had withheld. But most surprising of all ...

[NEWS CLIP: the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, is about to get a second crack at the job. President Trump has nominated Cameron Hamilton to lead the agency a year after he was removed from that very same position.]

LATIF: So Trump is now trying to rehire the guy who just a year or so ago he fired?

MICAH: Yes. He—he gets not even just his old job, but now he's up for Senate confirmation, so he gets to be, like, the real deal, the real McCoy.

LATIF: He's like the guy drummed out in disgrace, and they just call him back. Like, they're like, "Oh, and by the way, will you just take your old job back?"

MICAH: [laughs] Yeah.

LATIF: Okay, so I want to play you just one last bit of tape here from that episode four, because after Cameron Hamilton was nominated to lead FEMA—again—Micah and his senior producer Eloise Blondiau got a call from Hamilton.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Cameron Hamilton: Hi, Eloise. How are you?]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Eloise Blondiau: I'm good. Hey Cam, I'm here with Micah, who you spoke to before.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Cameron Hamilton: Okay, excellent. Well, thank you. I wanted to call and reach out because I understand that you are getting ready to air our previous conversation, and I wanted to speak with you about that if you have some time.]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Micah Loewinger: Yeah Cam. Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I am recording this conversation, but I'm happy to talk about it.]

MICAH: Earlier this week, Eloise and I got a call from Cameron Hamilton. When we called him back, he asked us to delay the release of this episode. He was concerned that our interview from five months ago could draw negative attention ahead of his upcoming Senate confirmation hearing. I told him I thought the request was inappropriate and that we would release the episode as planned. It's true that he may face tough questions about his qualifications. If confirmed, he would be the least experienced FEMA administrator since Hurricane Katrina-era leader Michael Brown. And my sources believe Hamilton will still likely get the job.

LATIF: So what is the status now? Is FEMA still on the bubble? Is FEMA still gonna exist? What—how do we— what does it look like?

MICAH: So it's—I do feel like the agency has, like, turned a corner in a significant way. That said, you know, the disaster season's about to begin. Hurricane season, wildfire season is basically about to start.

LATIF: Uh-huh.

MICAH: And there are serious concerns about the agency's capacities to respond to these disasters.

LATIF: It's like we're punching ourselves in the face at the time when we—when we need to be most on it, you know? It's so depressing!

MICAH: Absolutely. That—that is incredibly depressing for me, too. And in a way, it felt to me like the continuation with the problem with FEMA at its core all along.

LATIF: Mm-hmm.

MICAH: Which is that it is the agency where our leaders, like, dump their worst fears. And it really matters what you're afraid of as a country.

LATIF: Interesting. Interesting.

MICAH: During the Cold War, it was nuclear annihilation. After 9/11, it was the War on Terror.

LATIF: Yeah.

MICAH: DHS basically had FEMA throw out the old book and write new emergency response protocols with terrorism at the heart. Then we have Hurricane Katrina. And arguably a version of that has happened again today under Kristi Noem and this Trump 2.0, where fear of immigration became like the thing that DHS was obsessed with.

LATIF: Yeah.

MICAH: They even tried to pull FEMA workers out of the agency and make them help out at ICE, just to illustrate once again how this national security paranoia is always sort of in tension with natural disasters. And, like, there is a gulf between what a growing chorus of Americans feel threatens our future and the ways that fear among our leaders manifests in the way they run our government.

LATIF: But, like, FEMA's not going anywhere.

MICAH: FEMA is not—FEMA's not going anywhere, but I don't think that FEMA's out of the woods. I think that Americans will continue to approach it with incredible suspicion and paranoia. And it's true that a lot of people who are suspicious of FEMA, I think, are generally suspicious of the federal government. That's something that I encountered when I was doing reporting in North Carolina, speaking to Hurricane Helene survivors and people who were there. It's—I don't know that this agency can, like, wriggle its way out of a kind of distrust that's so much bigger than FEMA.

LATIF: Okay, that's our show for today. Big, big thanks to the team at On the Media, especially co-host Micah Loewinger and senior producer Eloise Blondiau, who reported and produced the series together. They did a terrific job. Go check it out. There are all kinds of stories, detailed reporting in there that we didn't cover here. You'll hear FEMA workers—this is actually one of my favorite parts of the series—these FEMA workers who worked through Katrina and Helene. It's so inspiring to hear from them because I mean, they know how hated the agency they work for is. They know all these conspiracy theories. And yet it's so important and fulfilling to them to be showing up for victims of these catastrophes, to be there on the worst day of these strangers' lives. And it just—I don't know, that completely melted me. You can listen to the whole series at OnTheMedia.org or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Latif Nasser. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with some brand-spankin' new Radiolab content next week. Same podcast time, same podcast channel. I'll see you there.

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Maia, and I'm from London, and here are the staff credits. Radiolab is hosted by Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser. Soren Wheeler is our executive editor. Sarah Sandbach is our executive director. Our managing editor is Pat Walters. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Jeremy Bloom, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Mona Madgavkar, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Natalia Ramirez, Rebecca Rand, Joanna Strogatz, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Molly Webster and Jessica Yung, with help from Gabby Santas and Maia Appleby Melamed. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Natalie Middleton, Angely Mercado and Sophie Sanahee.]

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Monica, and I'm calling from Mexico City. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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