As Texas flooded, key staff say FEMA's leader could not be reached [View all]

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s acting administrator, David Richardson, is often inaccessible, several current and former officials say, raising concerns within the agency.

On a Friday morning in July, shortly after deadly Independence Day floods swept through parts of Texas Hill Country packed with camps full of young children, the Federal Emergency Management Agency scrambled to coordinate a response. The next afternoon, teams readied search-and-rescue crews, imagery and other emergency equipment. Then their hustling hit a roadblock.

They couldn’t reach a key U.S. official needed to deploy the resources, one required by law to be accessible during emergencies: FEMA’s acting administrator, David Richardson.

Just a few weeks earlier, his boss, homeland security chief Kristi L. Noem, instituted a policy requiring her approval for any expenditure over $100,000. That meant, in order to deploy resources to Texas, FEMA officials needed Richardson to get those requests in front of Noem — fast.

But for about 24 hours in the early aftermath of one of the nation’s deadliest flash flooding events in decades, key staff members could not reach FEMA’s top official, according to eight current and former officials with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they said they feared retaliation. The agency’s typical posture is to get resources to a disaster zone before state and local governments even have to ask for them, current and former officials have said, because minutes can cost lives.

“Nobody could get ahold of him for hours and hours,” said one D.C.-based senior official who coordinated search-and-rescue resources.

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