(U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Greydon Furstenau)
For six years, FEMA has quietly buried one of the worst scandals in federal disaster response—a toxic mix of reverse discrimination, fraud, and whistleblower retaliation tied to the Hurricane Maria recovery in Puerto Rico. I led the contractor team that uncovered it firsthand.
In 2018, I deployed as the technical lead of a Lean Six Sigma team made up of straight, older, white veterans and executives.
Our mission was to bring order, transparency, and efficiency to a FEMA operation crippled by dysfunction. What we found was not just inefficiency—it was corruption: theft, favoritism, and rot embedded deep in FEMA’s culture.
We documented widespread violations of the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) and the Anti-Deficiency Act.
FEMA leadership stole contractor-developed intellectual property and inflated performance metrics in a $1.5 billion scheme to mislead Congress.
Unqualified personnel were promoted—not for merit, but for checking the right identity boxes. This was not mismanagement. It was deliberate.
FEMA’s culture was dominated by DEI politics—identity trumped merit, and promotions were rigged. One insider told us: “Straight white men are at the bottom here.” That was not just talk. It was policy.
At the heart of it was a tight-knit special interest group dubbed internally by FEMA insiders the “LGBTQ Mafia.”
They wielded outsized influence, shielded by management and FEMA’s Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) and FOIA offices, which buried complaints and blocked accountability.
A two-story Pride flag was unfurled in the FEMA Joint Recovery Office—while requests by Alcoholics Anonymous members and religious employees to form special interest groups were denied.
We were pressured by prime contractor ATCS Plc to hire an LGBTQ consultant—regardless of qualifications—just to appease FEMA’s internal clique.
Our team became a target. We faced reverse discrimination and internal sabotage—both overt and subtle—because of who we were and what we exposed.
FEMA’s insiders resented our demographic and refusal to play along. The moment we began challenging the status quo, the knives came out.
FEMA’s misuse of DEI did not just hurt outsiders. It failed the very communities it claimed to help. FEMA’s 80% local hire mandate filled recovery roles with unqualified workers, most with no emergency management experience.
The result? Incompetence, chaos, and a recovery effort that fell years behind schedule, leaving communities in limbo.
When we blew the whistle, FEMA immediately retaliated—terminating our contract, erasing over $100 million in potential efficiency gains, and killing a game-changing Digital Site Inspection Tool.
It could have saved 500,000 man-hours, slashed aid delivery time by 90%, and scaled to future disasters.
The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) eventually substantiated our retaliation complaint—a rare outcome.
Yet it ignored nearly $2 billion in documented waste, fraud, and abuse we also uncovered.
Worse, DHS’s Office of General Counsel, FEMA’s Contracting Office, and the DHS Whistleblower Protection Unit shielded bad actors.
ATCS Plc and FEMA employees who stole IP, falsified records, and targeted whistleblowers continue to be protected—not punished.
To date, we have filed seven lawsuits—three naming FEMA directly. I have briefed over 50 members of Congress and discussed the malfeasance with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Still, FEMA’s culture of retaliation and obstruction remains intact. The FOIA office withheld records from whistleblowers and Congress. The EEO office buried complaints.
FEMA knows what happened—discrimination, retaliation, and IP theft—but did nothing. Unfortunately, FEMA’s lawyers continue to hide behind procedural games, dodging the facts while quibbling over technicalities.
One FEMA attorney, after receiving multiple extensions from us, denied my team a routine filing extension out of spite—for other articles I wrote.
What FEMA did was not just unethical, it was catastrophic for Puerto Rico and for taxpayers. Maria was FEMA’s second-largest disaster, and our team had more insight than anyone on the island. We were positioned to fix it. Instead, we were eliminated for telling the truth.
This is not just a FEMA problem. It is a warning. Across government, DEI is being weaponized, whistleblowers are silenced, and unqualified ideologues are being installed in positions of power. At FEMA, where lives are on the line, the cost is not just dollars, it is disaster.
In quality management, the Japanese use a phrase—walking the Gemba—to describe going to the actual place where work is done, seeing problems firsthand, and fixing them at the root.
At FEMA, no one walks the Gemba. They hide defects. They punish those who speak up. They protect the rot. It reminds me of another Japanese saying: “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”
FEMA is not broken from lack of tools—it is broken by culture: fraud hidden, failure tolerated, integrity punished. It cannot be reformed from within.
The agency will continue to waste billions, fail in its mission, and destroy the lives of those who try to fix it.
Trump needs to consider devolving disaster recovery to the states and dismantling FEMA entirely. FEMA has become the middleman in a bad drug deal: bloated, corrupt, and obstructive.
Eliminating it would not create chaos—it would eliminate the bureaucracy and inefficiency that have plagued disaster response for decades.
Using block grants and putting recovery in the hands of states would allow them to tailor solutions to their specific needs at far lower cost, with far greater incentive to get it right.
Barry Angeline: retired corporate executive with over 30 years’ experience in process improvement at organizations like GE, Sun Microsystems, Time Warner, the USMC, and US army. Holds multiple awards for quality management, several patents and has publications in performance management. He holds a BS and MS degrees in chemical engineering from Case Western Reserve University and was awarded an MBA with Distinction from the Manchester Business School in the UK. Technical leader for the FEMA Lean Six Sigma deployment in Puerto Rico.
Dan McCabe (USA Ret.): awarded two Bronze Star Medals. Army armor officer and two-tour veteran of OIF-1. After retirement, worked with US and Iraqi flag officers and US Department of State in transferring US security training operations over from Army to State, and then to the Iraqi government. He holds a BS in history from Oregon State University and an MS is Strategic Studies from the US Army War College. Senior consultant for the FEMA Lean Six Sigma deployment in Puerto Rico.
The post FEMA’s Woke Disaster: $2 Billion Fraud, Reverse Discrimination, and Retaliation Buried for Six Years appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
