President Donald Trump’s selection to run federal disaster operations has spread misinformation about the agency he now leads and attacked California Gov. Gavin Newsom and diversity efforts on social media.
Cameron Hamilton, acting administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, embraced false Republican narratives that FEMA spent disaster aid helping migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border and blocked supplies to North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.
Trump echoed those claims to attack President Joe Biden and FEMA, an agency he has threatened to disband.
POLITICO’s E&E News examined more than 1,000 posts by Hamilton on X and reviewed hours of interviews with conservative news outlets. Hamilton has assailed diversity, equity and inclusion; called Trump’s conviction stemming from hush-money payments to a porn star a “sham”; and posted an unflattering photograph to attack former U.S. health official Rachel Levine, who is transgender.
On Election Day in November, Hamilton highlighted an X posting that proclaimed: “Trump is going to go down in history as the man who stopped the first female president. Twice.”
In September, Hamilton was named vice president of Feds for Freedom, a nonprofit that sued the Biden administration over Covid vaccine mandates and said last year it would sue the federal government “over mandated pronouns.”
Feds for Freedom recently promoted a Virginia militia, launched a petition to end taxpayer funded DEI programs and featured on its podcast pro-Trump activist Ivan Raiklin, who had urged Republican state legislatures to give Trump their states’ 2024 electoral votes.
As acting administrator, Hamilton is exempt from a statutory requirement that the FEMA administrator have “a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security.” Former agency officials told E&E News that Hamilton could remain acting administrator for a long time — potentially the next four years.
The former Navy SEAL worked at the Department of Homeland Security from 2020 to 2023 as director of emergency medical services and was a State Department supervisory emergency management specialist from 2015 to 2020. Since Congress imposed the job requirements after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, presidents including Trump in his first term had appointed veteran emergency managers to run FEMA.
“He’s completely unqualified to be the head of FEMA right now,” said Samantha Montano, disaster researcher and co-founder of the Center for Climate Change Research. “He doesn’t even understand how FEMA’s budget works.”
FEMA’s press office did not respond to questions about Hamilton, who has not spoken publicly since Trump put him in charge of the agency shortly after inauguration. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Since taking charge of FEMA, Hamilton has posted messages on his new FEMA account on X telling hurricane survivors “you are not forgotten” and that “real change is coming to FEMA.”
“I will prioritize enhancing FEMA’s operational focus and ensuring transparency,” Hamilton wrote on Jan. 26.
“As a life-long public servant, I have deep admiration and appreciation for @FEMA’s mission of helping people before, during, and after disasters,” Hamilton wrote in a separate post.
Repeating falsehoods about FEMA
Hamilton posted extensively about politics and his Christian faith on an X account he created before running for an open congressional seat in Virginia in 2024. Endorsed by the House Freedom Caucus, Hamilton called himself “a MAGA candidate” and said in an interview that he was “running as a firm constitutional conservative with a firm belief in limited government.”
Hamilton lost the Republican primary. The congressional seat is now held by Rep. Eugene Vindman, a Democrat.
During his campaign, Hamilton was endorsed by Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who said Hamilton would “fight the swamp,” and former Immigration and Customs Enforcement lead Tom Homan.
“He knows how to secure the border. He has committed to securing the border,” said Homan, who is now Trump’s “border czar.”
Days after Hurricane Helene hit six southeastern states in late September Hamilton targeted FEMA.
On Oct. 3, Hamilton reposted an X entry by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) that reads, “Illegals got $1.01B from FEMA that was supposed to/ SHOULD GO to flood victims!”
“Exactly!!” Hamilton wrote above Luna’s comment. “Why aren’t more members of Congress saying this?!”
Hamilton repeated the false information three days later by reposting an X message from Rep. Eli Crane (R-Ariz.), who targeted Vice President Kamala Harris: “Kamala’s admin has depleted our FEMA funding to resettle illegal aliens in this country.”
But the $1.01 billion was not taken from the FEMA fund that pays for disaster recovery. As FEMA noted on its website, Congress appropriated the money in a fiscal 2023 spending bill so FEMA could help create a shelter and services for migrants who were detained at the southwest border and released from federal holding facilities.
Around the same time, Hamilton reposted an X entry from Elon Musk who asserted false claims about FEMA’s response in western North Carolina, which Hurricane Helene devastated.
“FEMA is actively blocking shipments and seizing goods and services locally and locking them away to state they are their own,” Musk wrote. He added, “We are blocked now on the shipments of new starlinks coming in until we get an escort from the fire dept. but that may not be enough.”
Hamilton wrote above Musk’s post: “If this is true, the public officials doing this should go to jail … Change my mind…”
FEMA’s website denied “rumors” that it is “turning away donations, stopping trucks or vehicles with donations, confiscating and seizing supplies often spread after a disaster. These are all false.”
A North Carolina television station labeled Musk’s statement about his Starlink satellite internet service “false.”
“No, FEMA didn’t prevent Starlink equipment from reaching hurricane victims,” the station, WCNC, reported several days after Musk made his accusation.
Hamilton appeared on Fox News numerous times in 2024, along with other conservative outlets such as NTD News, Feds for Freedom and Real America’s Voice. Talking about politics, international affairs and national security, Hamilton came across as well-informed, thoughtful and occasionally funny.
In one interview, in which it was noted that actor Mark Hamill had given money to Vindman during his House campaign, Hamilton joked about the demise of Luke Skywalker.
Support for Joe McCarthy
Hamilton’s X feed is filled with support for Trump’s more controversial Cabinet picks — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who withdrew after Trump nominated him for attorney general.
In early January, as wildfires in Southern California were destroying thousands of homes, Hamilton shared another X post showing part of a Fox News interview with actor Zachary Levi, a Christian libertarian.
“This is just incredible mismanagement, incredibly poor leadership. I would go so far as to say it’s criminally negligent. Because Gavin Newsom has been either the governor for five years or the lieutenant governor prior to that for eight, nine years,” Levi told host Jesse Watters about the wildfires.
Trump also has publicly assailed Newsom and in 2020 would not approve the Democratic governor’s request for disaster aid after a wildfire until White House aides told him Republican areas had been damaged.
Hamilton is in charge of FEMA at a tumultuous time for the agency. It has struggled to deal with the soaring number of major disasters and their growing cost as climate change intensifies flooding, storms and wildfires.
Trump denounced FEMA during a Jan. 24 visit to western North Carolina and created a councilto review the agency’s operations and role in disaster response.
Montano, the climate researcher, said the field of emergency management has become increasingly professionalized in recent years. “When you look at Hamilton’s background, the foundation of understanding how emergency management operates just isn’t there,” she said.
During a Feds for Freedom podcast in October, Hamilton and guest Matthew Lohmeier defended Joseph McCarthy, the late Wisconsin senator whom the Senate censured in the 1950s after he led an investigation into communist infiltration of government agencies, universities and Hollywood.
Lohmeier derided McCarthy’s critics who called him “totally wrong” and said: “He wasn’t, by the way.”
“No, he was not,” Hamilton said.
“And we know that now more than ever,” Lohmeier said, noting documents released after the fall of the Soviet Union that show McCarthy was correct about some of his accusations and that Soviet espionage in the U.S. was broader than was widely understood.
“A lot of his concern was just that, hey, you’ve got people with a radical ideology that have infiltrated our government at various different levels,” Hamilton said. “That’s the premise of what he was arguing. History has proven that to be categorically true.”
Lohmeier, a former lieutenant colonel, was fired from the Space Force in 2021 after linking diversity, equity and inclusion to Marxism.
Trump recently named Lohmeier undersecretary of the Air Force.