President Donald Trump nominated ex-Federal Emergency Management Agency leader Cameron Hamilton on Monday to direct the organization once again, just over a year after he was ousted from the post.
Hamilton served as the acting head of the agency from January to May 2025. The former Navy SEAL was fired just one day after publicly breaking with Trump’s efforts to dismantle the agency.
“I do not believe it is in the best interest of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” Hamilton told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security in March 2025, though he added that he believed FEMA had “evolved into an overextended federal bureaucracy, attempting to manage every type of emergency no matter how minor.”
Hamilton at the time was appearing before the subcommittee to discuss FEMA’s 2026 budget requests and distribution of aid.
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His comments were widely interpreted as a rebuke of Trump’s efforts to pare back the agency.
Trump in June 2025 announced plans to abolish FEMA after the hurricane season, but his administration quietly backed off of this promise when catastrophic flooding devastated parts of Texas. The president initially sought to transfer more relief responsibility to state governments, a move that concerned many lawmakers from disaster-prone areas.
In order for Hamilton to reassume his post, his appointment must be confirmed by the Senate — a process he avoided last year while he served as the acting head of FEMA.
Hamilton has worked in the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, but he only led FEMA for 5 months. This relative lack of executive experience could expose Hamilton’s nomination to Senate scrutiny during the confirmation process.
Since being removed from his role leading FEMA, Hamilton has been working with private “disaster response and recovery operations,” according to his LinkedIn.
If Hamilton is approved, he will be the agency’s first Senate-confirmed leader since Trump’s second presidency began. The Senate will have to move quickly to confirm Hamilton before the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane season starts on June 1.
Trump’s nomination comes just after a panel tasked with reviewing FEMA’s operations recommended last week that the president’s administration shift a significant portion of the responsibility for disaster relief to state and local governments. The new arrangement would make it more difficult for states to qualify for federal aid, and the plan called on state and local authorities to take the lead in the aftermath of natural disasters.
It remains unclear whether Hamilton supports the changes.
His nomination also follows the recent departure of Deputy Associate Administrator Keith Turi, a senior official who held “decades of FEMA institutional knowledge,” a source with direct knowledge of the situation told NOTUS.
“Keith is one of the most trusted voices in the agency and it’s a huge blow to not only the workforce but our readiness at large,” the source added.
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