The acting chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency is stepping down from the role, according to multiple reports.
David Richardson, who was tapped to lead the agency in May despite having little disaster management experience, submitted a resignation letter Monday morning giving two weeks’ notice, according to CNN.
Multiple sources on Monday told the network that the Trump administration had already been working on plans to oust him from the role.
The Department of Homeland Security confirmed Richardson’s resignation to NOTUS in a statement, saying FEMA’s chief of staff, Karen Evans, will assume the leadership role on Dec. 1.
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In the statement, DHS said the agency thanked Richardson “for his dedicated service and wish him continued success in his return to the private sector.”
DHS also made clear that a restructuring effort currently in the works for FEMA will move forward regardless of the change in leadership. A highly anticipated Trump administration report is expected to be published soon, outlining potential changes to FEMA’s structure and duties.
“We anticipate the forthcoming release of the FEMA Review Council’s final report, which will inform this Administration’s ongoing efforts to fundamentally restructure FEMA, transforming it from its current form into a streamlined, mission-focused disaster-response force,” the statement read.
President Donald Trump, who for months has publicly teased eliminating FEMA altogether, signed an executive order in May directing states and localities to play a greater role in disaster preparation and recovery.
“I say you don’t need FEMA, you need a good state government,” Trump said in January while visiting the site of devastating wildfires in Los Angeles. “FEMA is a very expensive, in my opinion, mostly failed situation.”
Richardson is the second official to step down from FEMA’s top leadership post. He was appointed after DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s first acting chief, Cameron Hamilton, disagreed both privately and publicly with the Trump administration’s plans to wind down the agency, which resulted in his replacement.
With a background as a Marine veteran and martial arts instructor, Richardson previously led the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office at DHS, which the agency has dissolved in the 2026 fiscal budget.
Sources told The Washington Post, which first reported Richardon’s resignation, that he had stepped back from daily meetings in recent months and told FEMA staff that he didn’t expect to be in the position after the Thanksgiving holiday.
NOTUS reported in September that the culture within FEMA shifted drastically in the months after Trump took office, to one of fear and anxiousness. Employees told NOTUS they were operating under inconsistent information and layers of increased bureaucracy — and that Richardson did nothing to improve relationships with staff.
“The mood’s been very anxious, very confused, very stressed,” one employee, who anonymously signed a letter warning about the future of the agency, told NOTUS at the time. “We are used to working in environments where the information changes a lot. Disasters, the information changes all the time, you have to be able to shift, like, on a dime.”
“With this leadership, the information has been so inconsistent, and the guidance we’ve been getting has been so inconsistent that it has basically ground a lot of activities in the agency to a halt,” the employee continued. “There’s a lot of fear at the agency right now. Because we’ve seen that they will move faster to punish us than they would to save kids in Texas.”
Richardson made headlines his first week as acting administrator of FEMA, telling staff members in May that he would “run right over” those who attempted to impede upcoming changes.
“Obfuscation. Delay. Undermining. If you’re one of those 20% of the people and you think those tactics and techniques are going to help you, they will not because I will run right over you,” he said to thousands of employees at a meeting. “I will achieve the president’s intent. I am as bent on achieving the president’s intent as I was on making sure that I did my duty when I took my Marines to Iraq.”
Nearly two months into his role, when catastrophic flooding hit Texas in July, Richardson was reportedly unreachable in the early hours of the storm that ultimately killed more than 130 people.
NPR reported in August that flood survivors were unable to access FEMA’s federal aid hotline due to lapsed funding. From July 6-10, FEMA answered just over 15,000 of the approximately 55,000 calls that came in from disaster survivors, according to internal agency logs obtained by NPR.
In the weeks after Texas’ flooding, Richardson appeared before the House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee and faced tough questions from both sides of the aisle about the agency’s failures.
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