Two weeks after 139 people died in raging Texas floods last summer, the leader of the Federal Emergency Management Agency ridiculed reporting that said the agency had missed thousands of calls to its emergency help center.
“Fake news,” David Richardson, the acting administrator at the time, told House lawmakers who were probing officials’ response to the flash flooding that killed more than two dozen children.
“The vast majority of phone calls were answered,” Richardson said. “All calls were answered within three minutes.”
Now, newly released FEMA records raise questions about the accuracy of his sworn testimony — and whether the agency was able to provide timely disaster services during one of the nation’s deadliest catastrophes.
FEMA’s shortcomings during the Texas flood and its jumbled answers afterwards came amid internal turbulence at the agency,which President Donald Trump has threatened to weaken since taking office. Under three temporary FEMA leaders with no emergency management background, the administration cut agency staff, canceled grant programs, slowed recovery funding and denied most aid requests from Democratic-led states.
Over nine days in early July, as flooding swamped Texas Hill Country, nearly 80,000 people called the toll-free FEMA Helpline, according to FEMA records disclosed for the first time in a recent Government Accountability Office report.
The agency failed to answer 58 percent of the calls. Callers who connected had to wait 25 minutes on average.
When call volume peaked from July 7 through July 9, FEMA failed to answer 78 percent of calls, records show. The average wait was 61 minutes.
Richardson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
FEMA did not answer questions about whether Richardson’s testimony to Congress was inaccurate. An agency spokesperson told POLITICO’s E&E News that during the flood FEMA prioritized “intake” callers registering for disaster aid over callers who were following up on existing cases.
“Intake was prioritized during the 2025 Texas Flooding event due to the increased incoming call traffic volume and to address immediate survivor needs,” a FEMA spokesperson said in an email. Richardson was citing FEMA answer rates only for intake calls, which “appeared higher” than the total answer rates reported by GAO, the spokesperson said. FEMA declined to provide E&E News the number of intake calls it received.
Democrats who had questioned Richardson at the July 23 hearing were outraged by the new disclosures in the GAO report. Richardson resigned as acting administrator in November.
“David Richardson sat in front of our committee and lied,” California Rep. Laura Friedman said in an email. “The subcommittee needs to bring FEMA back in, under oath, to explain the difference.”
The panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona, called the revelations “damning.”
“Tens of thousands of calls went unanswered and survivors waited up to an hour on hold,” Stanton said in an email. Administration officials must be “held fully accountable.”
Pennsylvania Rep. Scott Perry, a Republican who chaired the July 23 hearing and questioned Richardson about the phone calls, did not respond to requests for comment.
FEMA acknowledged to the House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee after Richardson’s testimony that a surge in calls during the flood “led to increased wait times longer than typically expected during this time of year.”
FEMA did not dispute the GAO’s findings. Agency officials told the GAO it missed a high percentage of calls because it had “reduced its surge support resources by about 50 percent” after call volume fell back to normal levels in early 2025 following hurricanes Helene and Milton.
The reduction let FEMA “focus on addressing” other priorities such as helping the hundreds of thousands of people who had already registered for disaster aid, the GAO said.
FEMA has been more responsive to callers in past disasters, even when the call loads were much heavier and the events engulfed larger geographic areas.
When Helene and Milton swept over seven Southern states in 2024, the FEMA Helpline got 3.1 million calls over 36 days — an average of 85,000 a day, according to agency records disclosed by GAO. FEMA missed 41 percent.
In 2017, when separate hurricanes simultaneously devastated Puerto Rico and parts of Florida and Texas, FEMA got 4.8 million calls over 64 days — a daily average of 75,000. FEMA missed 47 percent.
Yet in the nine days that floodwaters surged in Texas last July, FEMA got 80,000 calls — a daily average of 8,843. It missed 58 percent of them.
Those shortcomings came as then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lauded the agency’s flood response as “by far the best response we’ve seen out of FEMA, the best response we’ve seen out of the federal government in many, many years and certainly much better than what we saw under Joe Biden.”
Noem, who was fired in March, attacked a New York Times story revealing the missed calls as “false reporting, fake news.”
The new GAO report says that during the Los Angeles-area wildfires in January 2025, over a three-week period that fell mostly during the Biden administration, “99 percent of calls to the helpline for the wildfires were answered.”
California officials “said they did not hear many complaints from survivors of the wildfires about using the helpline,” GAO reported.
Former FEMA chief of staff Michael Coen said the agency used “creative math” to explain why it missed so many calls during the flooding.
The agency told Congress it answered 82.1 percent of intake calls on July 7 — the call center’s busiest day during the flood. That same day, FEMA missed 84.1 percent of all calls — roughly 13,800 out of 16,400, according to GAO.
“Based on my experience with past disasters and the monitoring of FEMA call volume, I do not believe it’s possible that FEMA answered 82.1 percent of intake calls on a day when it did not answer 84.1 percent of all calls,” said Coen.
FEMA did not answer questions about that assertion, saying it’s “laser-focused on its mission.”
