President Donald Trump’s new pick to lead Federal Emergency Management Agency’s vital Office of Response and Recovery is a critic of the agency with no relevant credentials to take on such an important, high-ranking role in the federal government. Gregg Phillips, best-known as a conspiracy theorist who denied the results of the 2020 election (which Trump lost) and the 2016 election (which Trump won, while losing the popular vote by roughly three million), will take over as head of the office Monday, according to The New York Times.
His stated belief that FEMA is inferior to Christian-led groups that respond to disasters makes him the wrong person for the role.
His stated belief that FEMA is inferior to Christian-led groups that respond to disasters makes him the wrong person for the role. That’s not a criticism of volunteer efforts but an acknowledgment that an effective response from the government matters more.
On December 23, 2015, an EF-4 tornado with maximum winds of 170 mph plowed a 75-mile long row of destruction through North Mississippi and a corner of Southwest Tennessee and in so doing, laid waste to my childhood home. Among the photos I took later is one showing Christian volunteers from a group called “Hope Reigns” standing in the middle of the devastation, praying with my dad.
I remember the men as kind and dedicated to their ministry, bringing some small measure of comfort to a family that had lost everything on the cusp of Christmas. They didn’t have to deploy to Mississippi. Nor did they have to stop when they saw us desperately pawing through the ruins for whatever we could salvage. But we were, and still are, grateful that they did.
Even so, they weren’t a substitute for the insurance agent who brought my father a check. Nor were they a replacement for the federal government, then overseen by President Barack Obama, which quickly estimated that $3.3 million in individual assistance was needed in the area and that damage to utilities warranted an additional expenditure of $5.2 million.
Phillips has said in the past that groups such as the one that helped my family during that devastating time deserve most of the credit for emergency response.
“It is almost always true that those with a Christ centered approach show up first and leave last bringing hearts, hands and supplies when darkness hits,” Phillips wrote in LinkedIn, according to The Washington Post. He complained that “FEMA has taken credit for their work — pushing DEI and ‘woke’” and added, “The fails have been epic.”
FEMA failed in 2005 for the same reason it’s been failing in 2025: The Republican running the federal government doesn’t value its mission.
You’ll never hear me downplaying FEMA’s failures. I was a New Orleans homeowner when Hurricane Katrina landed on the Gulf Coast 20 years ago. FEMA failed in 2005 for the same reason it’s been failing in 2025: The Republican running the federal government doesn’t value its mission enough to put experienced, service-driven people in charge.
If President George W. Bush had appreciated FEMA’s mission, then he would have appointed somebody other than the former commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association to lead the agency before Katrina landed. Michael Brown had more blame for everybody else than he did for himself after the country fumed at FEMA’s laggard response.
Trump has an even lower opinion of FEMA, and is so dismissive of the agency that he has talked about shuttering it altogether. That seems to explain why he’s not bothering with putting experienced and enterprising people to lead the agency. David Richardson, one of three people to act as FEMA director this year, was virtually absent this summer after flash floods in Texas killed more than 130 people. Richardson came to the role after he replaced the previous acting FEMA director, who reportedly angered Trump by testifying to Congress that FEMA shouldn’t be eliminated.
Americans ought to be able to depend on a response from the federal government when a natural disaster brings them to the lowest moments of their lives. But we can’t anymore. The New York Times’ Campbell Robertson reported Wednesday that Trump’s FEMA has repeatedly denied — and with no explanation — a $16 million request from a Maryland county (that Trump won in 2024 by 40 percentage points) which suffered a devastating flood in May. “This decision, just like all disaster requests, was based on policy, not politics,” FEMA said in a statement. But nobody should believe that. Maryland’s Democratic Gov. Wes Moore told The New York Times he believes Trump — who consistently threatens to withhold aid from Democrats — is denying the request from Allegany County because most registered voters in Maryland are Democrats and that he doesn’t think the president even considered that nearly 70% of Allegany County’s voters picked Trump last year. “I think they just said, ‘It’s Maryland, and therefore the answer is no.’” Now FEMA will be led by someone who doesn’t believe in FEMA’s mission and whose notoriety comes from his willingness to distort facts to appease Trump’s vanity. The integrity of the agency’s mission to indiscriminately help Americans in need hasn’t got a prayer.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MS NOW Daily. 
Whereas the Bush administration wanted us to believe that FEMA’s failure to help was a bug, Trump appears happy to have us see such as a feature.
