A Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) employee has been fired and is under investigation for telling a disaster response team she was leading in Florida after Hurricane Milton. The head of the agency on Saturday called it “reprehensible”.
Deanne Criswell, the federal agency’s administrator, wrote on sacrificing their own families to help disasters. survivors.”
She continued: “Recently, a Fema employee deviated from these values by advising her survivor support team not to go to homes with yard signs supporting President-elect Trump. This is a clear violation of Fema’s core values and principles to help people regardless of their political beliefs.”
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Hurricane Milton barreled across the Gulf of Mexico and struck Florida last month, crossing the state before reaching the Atlantic Ocean just two weeks after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and then veered inland on a deadly path through Georgia and the Carolinas before turning disappeared in Tennessee. It killed 35 people.
The Fema employee has not yet been officially identified, but Criswell said of the actions: “This was reprehensible. I want to be clear to all my employees and the American people that this type of behavior and action will not be tolerated at Fema and that we will hold people accountable when they violate these standards of conduct.”
The agency has said it is treating the behavior as an isolated incident. The Daily Wire was the first to report on the actions of the employee, a supervisor, which it said emerged from internal correspondence.
The employee allegedly sent a message to workers going door to door in Lake Placid, Florida, to schedule federal assistance, telling them to “avoid homes that promoted Trump.”
Creswell further reported on Saturday: “We take seriously our mission to help everyone before, during and after disasters. This employee has been terminated and we have referred the matter to the Office of Special Counsel. I will continue to do everything I can to ensure this never happens again.”
During the aftermath of the devastating Hurricane Helene, which hit 10 states and killed more than 230 people, Trump campaigned in North Carolina and accused the Biden administration of withholding aid from Republican-voting areas even though the administration and prominent Republican leaders locally had disputed that.
But after the Fema employee report emerged, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, posted on Harris is in her final days. ”
He said he was launching his own investigation into what happened.
