"President Trump chose Cameron Hamilton to direct federal disaster response. As acting head of FEMA last year, he had opposed abolishing the agency and was ousted."
"President Trump on Monday nominated Cameron Hamilton, a former member of the Navy SEALs, as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, seeking to install the organization’s first permanent leader of the president’s second term.
If confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Hamilton would rejoin the agency a year after serving a brief stint as its acting administrator. He was ousted from that role days after he testified to Congress that FEMA should not be eliminated, an idea that Mr. Trump and Kristi Noem, then the homeland security secretary, had floated early last year.
The nomination is the Trump administration’s latest step toward an overhaul of FEMA that could shift significant responsibility for disaster response back to state and local governments, though officials have backed away from eliminating the agency. A Trump-appointed FEMA task force released a set of proposals Thursday that laid out goals to limit federal disaster aid to “truly significant events” while speeding up the flow of that money to communities.
The choice is likely to face opposition from Democrats and critics of the administration’s approach to disaster response, who have cited a federal law passed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 that requires the FEMA administrator to have experience leading disaster management."
