The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s top lawyer resigned Monday — the third chief counsel to leave the agency since President Donald Trump took office in January.
“Now I believe I can more effectively advance and advocate for our work from beyond government service,” Colt Hagmaier, FEMA’s acting chief counsel, wrote in a note to staff reviewed by NOTUS, announcing his departure in an email with the subject line “Pursuing a More Perfect Union.”
Hagmaier had worked at FEMA for more than 13 years and was appointed to lead the chief counsel office after Joshua Stanton, a 14-year veteran of FEMA, was placed on administrative leave from the role in March.
Stanton lasted in the chief counsel role only one week. He had been appointed to replace former chief counsel Adrian Sevier, who had held the position for about a decade before leaving the agency two months into the Trump administration under unspecified circumstances.
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One FEMA employee told NOTUS that Hagmaier worked hard to protect the staff below him from the political decisions at the agency. In his departing email to staff, he advised FEMA employees to place “people above politics.”
“This nation was once no more than idea. Courageous whispers of dangerous thinking; a wild experiment to organize and preserve government not by despotism or dynasty, but through the continued consent of the governed,” Hagmaier wrote.
He added that staff “bring hope to the hopeless and relief to the suffering. Your work is never easy, rarely appreciated, and often misunderstood or mischaracterized, but it is essential.”
FEMA did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Before he took on the chief counsel role, Hagmaier led all of the agency’s post-disaster recovery programs.
Trump’s administration has made sweeping cuts to FEMA’s staff, and many senior level leaders have left the agency during the new administration.
The agency has lost a significant portion of its most experienced civil servants in the last several months, including the head of its disaster command center and the head of its urban search and rescue unit, both of whom resigned in June and July respectively.
The agency had also lost 24 of its most senior civil servants between the time that Trump took office and June 1, compared to the agency’s average loss of about 13 such departures over the course of an entire year, according to a Government Accountability Office report from September.
The agency, which lacks an appointed leader, is being run by acting head David Richardson, who came from the Department of Homeland Security’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office in May.
Trump has not nominated someone to lead FEMA.
“Like a hardy willow, our Republic endures upon a trunk of federalism that is both fixed and flexible,” Hagmaier wrote in his resignation note to staff. “Unity, not unanimity, is our strength — we are not stymied by our differences, we are made resilient by channeling those differences into public good. Our words matter. We ought to choose them carefully, stand behind them, and offer them with empathy and kindness. My faith in our nation, like our liberties, is secured by strong, prudent, and principled democratic institutions.”
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