A week into his appointment, FEMA’s new acting chief, David Richardson, held his first town hall for the agency’s employees.
His May 15 remarks outlined a planned overhaul of the nation’s disaster response operations dubbed “FEMA 2.0,” tried to reassure staff that the agency is “to a great degree ready” for the 2025 “disaster season,” and made clear he plans to carry out President Donald Trump’s agenda.
His speech and answers to employee questions also included several folksy talking points: He used fruits as an example to describe how the agency’s responsibilities are structured, made reference to his girlfriend’s big red hair, and said he hadn’t realized how big Texas is.
If his presentation, which was livestreamed and played on televisions at the embattled agency’s headquarters, was meant to improve morale and boost confidence among the rank and file, it may have fallen short.
Two veteran staffers told Business Insider that they saw at least a dozen employees openly mocking Richardson — laughing while he was talking, jeering at the screen, and later circulating memes about him.
Like other federal employees, FEMA workers have been rattled by the Trump administration’s staff cutbacks. Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have called for the agency’s eventual elimination.
At the beginning of May, FEMA’s acting administrator, Cameron Hamilton, lost his job after telling Congress that he thought the agency should continue. His departure paved the way for Richardson to bounce over from Homeland Security’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office to run the agency.
An emergency agency in flux
These big changes come during a critical period for FEMA. Tornadoes in Kentucky and Missouri left 28 people dead last week. Hurricane season on the Atlantic coast, a six-month sprint of emergencies for the agency, begins in June.
Several FEMA employees who are tasked with helping states prepare for and respond to emergencies ranging from earthquakes to wildfires and beyond told Business Insider they’re worried about whether they’ll have the resources and support to provide life-saving aid to states when crisis strikes.
The agency is pushing back on criticism.
“Under Secretary Noem and Acting Administrator Richardson, FEMA is shifting from bloated, DC-centric dead weight to a lean, deployable disaster force that empowers state actors to provide relief for their citizens,” a spokesperson for FEMA told Business Insider. “The old processes are being replaced because they failed Americans in real emergencies for decades.”
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Oranges, plantains, and fruit bowl memes
Richardson, a Marine veteran who attained the rank of lieutenant colonel, introduced himself to some of his staff a day after his appointment with bold words, saying he would not tolerate those who resist reforms — a group he estimated would be about 20% of employees based on his past experience.
“Obfuscation, delay, undermining. If you’re one of those 20% of people and you think those tactics and techniques are going to help you, they will not, because I will run right over you,” Richardson said at the May 9 meeting, according to Reuters. “Don’t get in my way… I know all the tricks.”
The town hall for all employees came almost a week later. According to a transcript based on leaked audio published by the independent news outlet Drop Site News, Richardson focused largely on conducting a “mission analysis” of FEMA’s operations and aligning with Trump. (Two current FEMA staffers confirmed to Business Insider that the Drop Site News transcription of the meeting was accurate.)
In his introduction, before taking questions from staff, Richardson said that FEMA has between 150 and 175 statutorily obligated tasks to conduct, and each one of those specified tasks “can be binned into categories,” he said.
“And by bin them, I mean some of those, some of those tasks will be kind of orange-like tasks — and by orange, I mean the fruit orange, but they might be tangerines, they might be blood oranges, it just might be maybe a little bit of grapefruit,” Richardson said. “All those will go in one bin.”
A FEMA staff member told Business Insider that some staffers watching the livestream began laughing during the remarks about fruit.
Shortly after the meeting concluded, a meme of Richardson’s face, looking surprised, and with a basket of fruit on his head, began circulating among FEMA employees. The meme, shared with Business Insider by a staffer, was styled to look like the “Shrek 2” movie poster, with the title “FEMA 2” in green letters with ogre ears. Another meme seen by Business Insider, which was styled as a bingo card for people listening to Richardson’s remarks, included a bowl of fruit as one of its spaces.
‘Texas is huge!’
During the Q-and-A part of the session, a staff member asked about the plan for this hurricane season, whether the agency is appropriately staffed for emergency response, and the timeline for training staff to respond. Richardson said the agency is in a “transition period.”
The process, he said, is “not going to look entirely different of how we did in 2024, but it’s not necessarily going to look like how we’re going to do it in 2026.”
He added that FEMA would begin creating a road map for states to do the bulk of their own emergency response going forward, sharing as much as 50% of costs with the federal government.
A FEMA spokesperson declined to comment on what costs individual states would be responsible for in an emergency and what support the federal government could be expected to provide.
Richardson said he hoped to model future responses after states with good emergency preparedness, using Texas and Florida as examples.
“Some states are pretty good at this,” Richardson said, referring to emergency response. “The other day I was chatting with my girlfriend — she’s from Texas, she’s got like, huge red hair, like she’s from Texas.”
He continued: “I said, how come it takes so long to drive 10 hours from Galveston to Amarillo? And she said, ‘Well, you know, Texas is bigger than Spain.’ I didn’t know that. So I looked at the map. Texas is huge! I mean, if you put it in the middle of Europe, it takes up most of Europe up. However, they do disaster recovery very, very well, and so does Florida.”
One FEMA employee told Business Insider that by the time Richardson mentioned his girlfriend, more than a dozen members of the livestream audience watching from their office had begun jeering loudly at the screen. Some staff members began walking around the office waving pencils in the air, referencing the way Richardson had fidgeted with a writing utensil while speaking, the employee said.
“I’ve never seen people so mocking of an agency head,” the employee said.
It’s unclear exactly how much of FEMA’s staff has been cut since Trump took office; the most recent estimates from CNN put the total reduction of force at about 20% of FEMA’s permanent full-time staff, or about 1,000 workers.
The US Government Accountability Office reported in 2023 that FEMA had an overall staffing gap of approximately 35%, equating to 6,200 employees, which had “affected its ability to achieve its mission.”
A FEMA spokesperson told Business Insider that, “under Secretary Noem’s leadership, and the efforts of Acting Administrator Richardson, FEMA is fully activated in preparation for Hurricane Season.”
The Trump administration has not made a public statement about a permanent nominee to lead FEMA.
The spokesperson added that “complaints about morale, training, and planning come from the same internal class that resisted accountability for decades. This is just another example of a long line of internal leaks from people who clearly couldn’t care less about Americans facing disaster and prefer to manufacture petty drama for their own self-aggrandizement.”
In the town hall meeting, Richardson said his plan for the agency is to follow “the president’s intent,” which he described as limiting FEMA’s activities to its “mission essential tasks.”
“Those of us still remaining were either too committed to go anywhere, not eligible to take the resignation options, or so committed to the mission we do not care what he does,” one FEMA staff member said.