Fema worker fired for telling Milton emergency crews to jump home with Trump signs | US election 2024

A Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) employee has been fired from her job and is being investigated for telling a disaster relief team she led in Florida after Hurricane Milton to avoid homes displaying campaign signs supporting Donald Trump, behavior, that bureau chief on Saturday called “reprehensible”.

Deanne Criswell, the administrator of the federal agency, published on X: “Every day, more than 22,000 Fema employees adhere to Fema’s core values ​​and are dedicated to helping people before, during and after disasters, often sacrificing time with their own families to help disaster survivors.”

She continued, “Recently, a FEMA employee departed from these values ​​to advise her survivor assistance team not to go to homes with yard signs supporting President-elect Trump. This is a clear violation of FEMA’s core values ​​and principles of helping people regardless of their political affiliation.”

Hurricane Milton roared across the Gulf of Mexico and hit Florida last month, crossing the state before reaching the Atlantic Ocean, just two weeks after Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida and then arcing inland on a deadly path through Georgia and the Carolinas before disappeared in Tennessee. It killed 35 people.

The Fema employee has not yet been officially identified, but Criswell said of the actions, “This was reprehensible. I want to be clear to all of my employees and the American people, this type of behavior and action will not be tolerated at Fema, and we will hold people accountable if they violate these standards of conduct.”

The agency has said it viewed the behavior as an isolated incident. The Daily Wire was the first to report about actions by the employee, a supervisor, which it said it uncovered from internal correspondence.

The employee reportedly sent a message to workers going door-to-door in Lake Placid, Florida, to schedule federal assistance, telling them to “avoid homes that advertise Trump.”

Creswell further wrote Saturday: “We take seriously our mission to help everyone before, during and after disasters. This employee has been terminated and we have referred the matter to the Office of Special Counsel. I will continue to do everything I can to make sure this never happens again.”

In the wake of the devastating Hurricane Helene, which hit 10 states and killed more than 230 people, Trump campaigned in North Carolina and accused the Biden administration of withholding aid from Republican-voting areas, even as the administration and prominent Republican leaders on the grounds disputed it.

But after the report from the Fema staff surfaced, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, published on X: “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.”

He said he was conducting his own investigation into what happened.