The One With Teleportation (April 2026)
This newsletter is a compilation of recent disaster ~things~ that I think are cool, important, or otherwise of interest to people who are intrigued with disaster (broadly defined). There’s a little something for everyone!
I have been dyyyying to yap with y’all about teleportation!!!!
Sorry, let me start with a good morning. Hi. How is everyone doing? Spring has arrived in New England. Wild how the seasonal depression dissipates the second you can wear sandals.
Heckuva Job, Hamilton
FEMA is currently being run by Karen Evans who is serving as the Senior Official Performing the Duties of Administrator. This is because the Trump administration has failed for 15-months to nominate anyone to the administrator position. The failure to do this relatively simple task has been a significant point of frustration among the broader emergency management community as it is contributing to FEMA’s increasing vulnerability. This is a time when experienced, educated, and competent leadership is most needed. Karen Evans is not it.
The first person who held the (ridiculous) position of Senior Official Performing the Duties of Administrator was Cameron Hamilton. He served in the position for a few months before the rift between him and DHS leadership became untenable and he was fired. There are different versions of events but generally it seems Noem believed Hamilton had leaked a story to the media. He claimed he did not. She made him take a lie detector test (here are the questions I’d have asked him) which greatly offended him (sure). He went to testify in Congress about something (who can remember) and proclaimed he disagreed with Trump and Noem’s stance that FEMA should be disbanded. Depending on who you ask, this was either the final straw or a middle finger on his way out. Regardless, some combination of these events led to Hamilton being fired.
So, you can imagine my surprise when I see reporting that the Trump administration is considering nominating Cameron Hamilton to be FEMA Administrator.
I want to say right away that I am not sure what to make of this reporting. Hamilton has not actually been nominated for the position. This feels like someone floating the idea to gauge reactions. An important question is, “who”?
Regardless, this is why I keep receipts!
Cameron Hamilton has absolutely no business being the FEMA administrator. This was true a year ago and it is still true today. As I have said previously, he is “random Trump fanboy” and a spreader of disinformation. Let me re-quote myself from an interview I did last year with Tom Frank:
“He’s completely unqualified to be the head of FEMA right now…He doesn’t even understand how FEMA’s budget works... When you look at Hamilton’s background, the foundation of understanding how emergency management operates just isn’t there”
Of the people who have served as the Senior Official Performing the Duties of Administrator during this administration some seem to believe that Hamilton is the lesser of the three evils. What Hamilton did better than others is hide his extremely harmful views of federal emergency management policy under a veneer of politeness and polish.
We should not have to accept the lesser of evils. I expect that the person who leads FEMA – the agency for keeping us alive and safe from the horrors – should have real emergency management experience. It’s also the law. Like, HELLO?? Do we need to teleport back to 2005 so we can refresh our collective memory of what happens when you put a fool with inadequate emergency management experience in charge of FEMA?
I wrote the following when Hamilton left FEMA in May of last year:
“…some people who are unfamiliar with him have attempted to frame Hamilton as some kind of resistance hero. I very strongly disagree. He accepted a position he was not qualified for and spent months overseeing the illegal dismantling of key elements of FEMA to the detriment of the public. Does everyone need a reminder that he was one of the far-right politicians using his platform to spread disinformation about FEMA funding during the Helene response? Good riddance!”
We do not “have to hand it” to people who do the bare minimum of saying that FEMA should exist. Come on!
The last Trump administration was able to figure this out. Both Long and Gaynor were reasonable picks. Were they who I would have picked? No, but there were qualified to lead the agency. Just… do that again! There are three dozen+ state emergency management directors who are perfectly capable of leading FEMA. Many of them are from Republican led states, since that seems to be important to this administration. Just pick one!!!! (Just not that one, or that other one (IYKYK)).
I fear we have a lot riding on Congress actually enforcing PKEMRA.
Hello Hello BRIC
Last we left off I was saying “Bye Bye BRIC”. Times have changed!
After FEMA announced they would be ending the BRIC program several states led by Massachusetts sued (you’re welcome). The court said FEMA could not cancel the BRIC program because Congress had specifically instructed FEMA to spend this money on mitigation. Duh. Obviously. What a tremendous waste of everyone’s time and energy. Anyway, it took a minute, but FEMA recently put out a notice of funding for BRIC.
Understandably there has been a lot of excitement about BRIC’s return. Emergency management really needed a win.
Unfortunately, based on the way the notice of funding is written it is difficult to imagine how this will not be an equity bloodbath. (Y’all aren’t new around here, you knew I was going to find the problem.) BRIC already had a well documented problem with inequitable distribution of funding (largely tied to a lack of local capacity). The new way FEMA looks to be approaching the distribution of the fund will likely exacerbate these issues. Practitioners are already speaking up about these concerns from Pennsylvania to Alaska. Communities across the country are desperate for more mitigation funding. There are persistently more proposals than there is money. So, while it is absolutely a good thing to have close to a billion dollars getting out the door, we have to hold FEMA leadership accountable for the way this money is distributed — even in these times. In the long-term we need a national strategy for how to equitably distribute mitigation (or climate adaptation funding, if you prefer) across the country.
BEAM ME UP, GREGG
Gregg Phillips, the second or third highest ranking official at FEMA depending on the day, is the Associate Administrator of the Office of Response and Recovery. When Phillips was first hired in December 2025, some people expressed concern. By my count, there were five very large red flags flying.
You wouldn’t recognize his name but if you read anything in the wake of the 2020 Presidential election about millions of people committing voter fraud then you are familiar with the work of Gregg Phillips. Following the election, Phillips helped lead the disinformation campaign that claimed voter fraud had led to Biden’s win. The Handbasket has the story which I encourage you to read in full.
It turns out Phillips has a penchant for conspiracy theories. Most relevant to us in emergency management, he accused Biden’s DHS of conspiring to assassinate Trump. He is also a vocal anti-vaxxer who believes the COVID vaccine was designed to kill people. (I always feel inclined to reiterate that being anti-vax alone should disqualify you from being able to work in emergency management in the same way that someone not believing in building codes should be disqualifying.)
This man has a CVS receipt-length “controversies” section on his Wikipedia. He sure can hustle. He has committed an exceptionally clear pattern of ethical and financial misconduct across the government positions he has held in both Mississippi and Texas. Textbook cronyism.
Phillips appears to have a violent streak. In January of last year, he said of former President Biden “I would like to punch that bitch in the mouth right now… he is a nasty, shitty, crappy human being, and deserves to die. And I hope he does.” Okay, Regina. He also threatened to “beat the living snot” out of former intelligence officials who commented on the Hunter Biden situation. He has encouraged Americans to learn how to shoot guns as he floated a conspiracy that a “Chinese army” of 10 million were coming to the United States to kill us. (I guess?? It is unclear.) I am scratching the surface here. Some of this is so vile I do not feel comfortable subjecting you all to it. However, I also do not want to sane-wash this guy so you can read more at CNN.
Finally -- and I am sure this will surprise you -- he does not have any verifiable emergency management experience. He makes vague references to a “humanitarian background”. It would seem this is a reference to an effort he engaged in to solicit $25 million in donations for a mobile hospital in Ukraine. He was not successful. ProPublica investigated this one and the entire thing feels quite scammy.
To summarize, a violent right-wing crony conspiracy theorist with no emergency management experience was installed in one of FEMA’s most important positions. As if this all was not disturbing enough, it turns out, attempting to overthrow democracy is not the weirdest thing this guy has done.
While promoting the voter fraud conspiracy, Phillips spent many hours chatting away on right-wing podcasts. In a review of these interviews, CNN found Phillips shared a wealth of supernatural tales, each wilder than the next.
First, Phillips claims to have teleported 50 miles to a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.
“I was with my boys one time and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House. And I ended up at a Waffle House – this was in Georgia and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was,” Phillips said in the January 2025 podcast episode. “And they said, ‘where are you?’ and I said, ‘A Waffle House.’ And ‘a Waffle House where?’ And I said, ‘Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.’ And they said, ‘That’s not possible, you just left here a moment ago.’ But it was possible. It was real.”
The claims of teleportation are fantastical enough, but it really was the Waffle House element of the story that sent shockwaves through the emergency management community. A Waffle House? A WAFFLE HOUSE? A WAFFLE HOUSE?! Really? Really? A Waffle House? Have we checked on Fugate?
On another occasion he claims to have found himself in a ditch with no recollection of how he got there. Sure.
After CNN broke the teleportation story, it spun around the internet with plenty of attention from late night shows and additional media coverage. Of that additional coverage it was the New York Times that decided this guy needed to be investigated. You might think they looked into whether or not the person responsible for running the country’s response and recovery programs is mentally competent for the job. Or perhaps they would do a delayed investigation into his alleged humanitarian background and lack of qualifications for his position. Nope! Instead they decided to investigate his claim of teleportation.
The title sets the article up well “No One at Waffle House Remembers FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported In”. The New York Times interviewed around two dozen workers and customers at the Waffle Houses in Rome, Georgia. All denied having seen anyone teleport or having seen Gregg Phillips. With no luck there, the Times then turned to a physics professor emeritus from Emory University who very generously explained why teleportation defies physics.
I laughed the first time I read the article. There was extensive discussion on BlueSky over whether the article was meant to be a joke. It would fit in well over at the Onion or the Borowitz Report. But this is the New York Times, not satirical paper, which suggest this was meant as a serious journalistic endeavor. How many people had to sign off on this article?
I have read the article a dozen times. I struggle to think of a more bizarre piece of disaster journalism. If I taught a disaster media class, we would spend an entire week on it. Here we have the paper of record spending time and resources investigating teleportation. Imagine being one of the people interviewed. You’re sitting at a Waffle House, minding your own business, and a New York Times journalist walks in, shows you a picture of some guy, and asks if you’ve ever seen him teleport into the restaurant. Come on!
What the New York Times failed to do is explicitly acknowledge reality. Phillips did not teleport to a Waffle House because teleportation is not real. HELLO? “Does the New York Times know that teleportation is not real?” is a real question I am left to wonder about.
Since CNN broke the original teleportation story, they have uncovered additional lore. There are more teleportation claims – this time involving a McDonald’s parking lot. He also shared a story about being visited by Satan while walking through Spain. At Satan’s instruction he poured out his water bottle, leading him to become ill. Another tale involves the ghost of his dead girlfriend lifting his car up to prevent an accident.
It is impossible to say what is really going on with this guy. Since these interviews resurfaced, Phillips has doubled down on these stories via social media. He has sought to reframe them as a combination of religious experiences and also implied most of these instances occurred while he was on a self-directed regimen of antiparasitic drugs which he was taking to treat metastatic bone cancer which he learned he had when God woke him up in the middle of the night to tell him. I – okay.
I have a bachelor’s degree in psychology, and I am sure there was a case study of this guy in my Abnormal Psych class. My physio professor would have told us to check for brain tumors. The religious turn here sure does echo the behavior of religious cult leaders. And isn’t it just such a coincidence that all the places he ends up teleporting to – a Waffle House, a ditch, and a McDonalds – are the same places people who blackout drunk end up. Or maybe he is just a ~storyteller~. If so, go write a sci-fi novel and leave the rest of us alone!
CNN asked Trump about the situation. He asked if Phillips had been kidding. Honestly, same. I know we have all become a bit desensitized to the absurdity of the current timeline, but this is… idk, I don’t even have the words. Reporting suggests the White House is pressuring him to leave the agency, have pulled him out of the spotlight, removed him from some operations, and told him to stop posting about teleportation on his social media. CNN reported that Phillips has “grown increasingly agitated and suspicious” that officials in FEMA and DHS are conspiring against him. Seems like he may get the conspiracy he has always wanted.
All joking aside, watch out for this guy. Phillips is a dumpster of red flags. Cornering violent, unstable men is infamously quite dangerous.
Some of the reporting has quoted FEMA officials who claim that he is better at his job than some of the other options.
“Gregg Phillips is FEMA’s best hope at this moment,” one high-ranking FEMA official told CNN at the time. “I can’t believe I’m saying that.”
These sources are all unnamed so it is difficult to know if this is coming from people whose opinions we should trust. Much of this strikes me as less a testament to his skills and more an indication of how bad things have become at FEMA. Even if this guy was the Messiah of emergency management, surely this laundry list of deranged behavior is disqualifying. Plenty of people are good at emergency management who have not gone on a side quest to overthrow democracy. Come on!
Other Places I’ve Been Yapping
Last week I did a Q&A with Emily Sanders at ExxonKnews about the current state of emergency management and what emergency management looks like in the context of the climate crisis. I also recorded an episode for Code for America’s Government Fix podcast. You can also now read my updated interview with Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson in the new paperback version of her book “What If We Get It Right”.
The End Bits
It’d be cool if you forwarded this newsletter to your friends, post it on social media, or undertake any other form of newsletter sharing you deem appropriate. I’ve heard some of you print out the memes to hang in your emergency management offices! Incredible.
In case you signed up for this newsletter without knowing who I am (a bold choice!), you can listen to this interview with me on Ologies. If you really want to dive in, you can read my book Disasterology: Dispatches From The Frontlines of The Climate Crisis to catch up (here’s a USA Today review). You can order it here and get it as an audiobook here.
Other places to find me: Blog. BlueSky. Instagram. TikTok.
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Sam while I read these letters to keep up with EM news, this is the first that had me laughing out loud at the Gregg story. Keep up the good work .
I look forward to us getting back to serious EM work... Before a big one hits