We didn’t work for David Richardson, but we knew him. We are part of a team of seven former senior executives and military officers who blew the whistle on waste, fraud, and retaliation in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Puerto Rico recovery. For seven years, we worked through the agency’s bureaucracy, and it produced delays. We called it the “Great Circle of Unaccountability”: its real mission is preserving jobs and obfuscating. Disaster recovery is a side hustle.
Then we got a half hour with Richardson. More moved in the days after that meeting than in the seven years before it. When his book, Texas Flood 4 July 2025: Power, Money, Politics, History, Bureaucracy, and Tragedy, came out, we contacted him because the leader on the page is the leader we met.
Richardson arrived at FEMA weeks before the July 4, 2025, flood on the Guadalupe River, sent, as he puts it, to “shut it down or reform it” with hurricane season bearing down. The book weaves the Texas response, a history of American floods, and Homeland Security politics into one argument: “During a crisis, good leaders go to the greatest point of friction, whether or not it costs them their life, reputation, or job.”
DAVID RICHARDSON: I RAN FEMA. HERE’S WHY YOU’RE PAYING FOR RICH PEOPLE TO LIVE ON THE BEACH
The flood history alone is worth the price. From Johnstown, where a neglected dam’s leaks were plugged “with mud and straw,” to Rapid City, where the sirens never sounded, the lesson repeats: the water is not the only cause of death.
He writes as he leads: bluntly, with wry humor. On his second day, he spent 90 minutes with senior staff until they agreed on a one-sentence problem statement: “FEMA does not know the Administration’s intent for the 2025 hurricane season.” Then he promised a hurricane strategy in two weeks. One member of the team that wrote it remembers the cost: “There was a team of us that spent like 15 days working with him, 15 days straight … even on weekends with him.” Then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem refused to approve it.
So much for his widely reported remark that he didn’t know the United States had a hurricane season. “He obviously knew the date,” the same team member said. A senior political appointee at FEMA told us Richardson “was chagrined that Noem didn’t sign off on the Hurricane Strategy … because it was forward leaning and ahead of the FEMA Review Council,” so he asked, in irony aimed at her, “Who knew there was a hurricane season coming?”
“It wasn’t a joke,” the appointee said. “He was in disbelief Noem would do something so stupid.” FEMA staff, the appointee added, knew he was serious about reform and ran to the press with the remark, knowing it would be taken out of context.
When the flood came, the point of friction was in Washington: a memo requiring Noem herself to sign every contract over $100,000. Noem flew to Texas with an entourage; Richardson stayed back to fight the memo, kept his footprint small, and shut out hangers-on. With search-and-rescue teams waiting, he overrode Noem’s memo and sent them when DHS headquarters dragged its feet. Anthony Antognoli, who served at his side, explains why critics called Richardson unreachable: “He was always available and connected to those who mattered and were working to respond to the tragedy; he was too focused to respond to those who were unequipped or unwilling to get help to Texas.”
The book’s spine is a mission analysis. Richardson’s team pulled the roughly 35 laws governing FEMA, extracted about 150 tasks Congress requires, and distilled them into eight mission-essential tasks. FEMA’s mission statement, “Help people before, during, and after a disaster,” he notes, “encourages mission creep and sounds good. That’s it.” The result: FEMA grew from no more than 4,000 personnel in 2006 to 25,000 positions today, adding an office for compensation for lost heirlooms and an army of 300 lawyers.
A former senior FEMA official who worked alongside him agrees: “This is the exact work that we have done when we arrived at FEMA, which is the mission analysis, looking at existing laws and aligning the organization based on that analysis.” Of Richardson, the official said, “His leadership style is very direct. There is no ambiguity.”
To Richardson, a Marine, an agency’s mission is dictated by law, not good intentions. Our team knew his approach intimately: several members were decorated former combat officers, and all of us had worked with the Marines as consultants. We did something similar in Puerto Rico: mapped the mission to tasks and cut the rest. Applied to FEMA, his approach would have shrunk and focused the agency — serving survivors and taxpayers, but not the people who run it.
The closing section, “Things Americans Should Know,” holds the book’s sharpest analysis. Richardson sorts the causes of the Texas deaths into immediate, proximate, and deep, and names the deep cause: building in the floodplain, fostered by federal flood insurance and mapping programs. That is root-cause analysis, our own discipline.
He proposes replacing years of site-by-site damage inspections with block grants based on “parametric models leveraging aerial photography and other techniques” to cut fraud and field staff. “Few want this,” he adds. We can confirm. In Puerto Rico, a digital site inspection tool that would have saved FEMA an estimated $70 million and shaved years off the recovery was lost.
He describes more than 80,000 open public assistance projects, some dating back to Hurricane Katrina, producing “an endless chain of extended deadlines, disputed claims, and finger-pointing where nobody is held accountable for the prudent close-out of projects.” That is the Great Circle of Unaccountability at work, and it should surprise no one. The lack of accountability runs through DHS in general, and FEMA in particular, and even the department’s watchdog reflects it. From fiscal 2019-2025, the DHS Inspector General acted on just 1,070 of 140,344 waste, fraud, and abuse complaints, or 0.76%; peer agencies act on 2% to 10%. Whistleblowers fared worse: only 11 of 3,144 retaliation complaints, or 0.35%, were validated, against 3% to 8% at other federal watchdogs.
We met with Richardson a few months after he arrived at FEMA. He took nothing on faith; he grilled us with pointed questions, had his staff pull the records and verify our claims, reviewed what came back, and, within days, acted decisively against the malfeasance and bad actors we had identified. He did not shoot from the hip or bury it in a working group. He lived what he writes in his book: “Decisive and justifiable action is the hallmark of a leader.”
To our team, Richardson was a breath of fresh air: the first official to give us real hope of resolving not just our issues but FEMA’s problems writ large. To FEMA, his directness, decisiveness, and competence made him a threat.
DAVID RICHARDSON: HOW ONE WORD BUILT FEMA’S BILLION-DOLLAR GRAVY TRAIN
Richardson stayed through hurricane season, as promised, “nursing a morbidly obese patient of an agency,” then resigned. What the book leaves out, he told us, is that he refused to keep working for Noem. His verdict on reform could serve as his FEMA epitaph: leaders able to carry it out “are nowhere to be found. The intestinal fortitude combined with the know-how is simply lacking.” For a few months, FEMA had both. Survivors, taxpayers, and whistleblowers like us lost the one leader who actually led.
Read this book as a field manual for leadership in government.
Barry Angeline is a retired executive with more than 30 years of experience leading process improvement at General Electric, Sun Microsystems, Time Warner, the Marine Corps, and the Army. He led FEMA’s Lean Six Sigma deployment in Puerto Rico.
Retired Col. Dan McCabe, U.S. Army, earned two Bronze Stars as an armor officer during Operation Iraqi Freedom and served as a senior consultant on FEMA’s Lean Six Sigma mission in Puerto Rico.
Continue reading...
[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
