Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Deanne Criswell stands next to a track map of Hurricane Ian, during a press conference at FEMA Headquarters on September 28, 2022 in Washington, DC.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The Federal Emergency Management Agency on Saturday confirmed that it fired an employee who had instructed relief workers in Florida to not go to homes with yard signs in support of then presidential candidate Donald Trump.
“This is a clear violation of FEMA’s core values and principles to help people regardless of their political affiliation,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell wrote in a statement. “This was reprehensible.”
The Daily Wire first reported on Friday that the now-terminated FEMA supervisor had ordered her employees to exclude Trump-supportive houses from their recovery efforts.
“I will continue to do everything I can to make sure this never happens again,” Criswell said in the statement.
Criswell added that the matter had been referred to the Office of Special Counsel for an investigation.
Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Friday blasted the Biden administration for the incident and said he had ordered the Division of Emergency Management to investigate the “targeted discrimination of Floridians who support Donald Trump.”
“The blatant weaponization of government by partisan activists in the federal bureaucracy is yet another reason why the Biden-Harris administration is in its final days,” DeSantis wrote in a post on X.
The firing comes days after Trump won the presidency against Vice President Kamala Harris, but weeks into the recovery effort of Hurricane Milton, which ravaged neighborhoods along Florida’s Gulf Coast.
At the time of the hurricane damage, Criswell slammed Trump for spreading misinformation about the status of FEMA’s disaster relief funding.
And on the 2024 campaign trail, several former Trump administration officials came out to claim that the president-elect had repeatedly delayed disaster relief for Democratic-leaning states like California during his first term.
A 2021 report also found that Trump blocked an investigation into why his administration restricted congressionally approved funding for Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria.
— CNBC’s Lora Kolodny contributed to this report.
