FEMA Administrator Brock Long on Wednesday announced via Twitter that he was stepping down from the agency.
Long writes that while working as the FEMA Administrator “has been the opportunity of,” a lifetime, it was “time for,” him, “to go home to,” his family.
He explains that during his two year tenure that President Trump, “and his entire Administration provided unprecedented support to the Agency as we led the nation through the historic 2017 hurricane and wildfire season.”
Long also announced that upon his departure that FEMA’s Deputy Administrator Peter Gaynor, will be the acting FEMA Administrator.
For What It’s Worth: Back in September The Washington Post reported that Long was facing a “potential criminal probe related to his use of government vehicles, after an internal investigation into his travel was referred to U.S. attorneys for prosecution.”
President Trump along with FEMA faced heavy criticism over their poor response to Hurricane Maria that left Puerto Rico without power for weeks.
CNN reported back in the fall, that the Government Accountability Office found that FEMA was “so overwhelmed with storms by the time Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico that more than half of the workers it was deploying to disasters were known to be unqualified for the jobs they were doing in the field.”
Long told reporters via a conference call, “We made a lot of changes in real time in addition to the high-level efforts that we learned through our after-action process. Bottom line is, we are concentrating on what we call critical lifelines — health, safety, security. You know, we’ve got food, shelter, health and medical, power and fuel, communications, transportation, hazardous waste,” he added “We are hyper-focused on those seven critical lifelines because we realized last year that if any one of those lifelines goes down, then life safety is in jeopardy. And so, we’re reorganizing the firepower of the federal government underneath these critical lifelines, we’re pushing forward.”
Long joins a long number of departures from the Trump Administration, for a full list, CNN or the New York Times.
Jennifer Jacobs with Bloomberg was the first to report Long’s resignation via Twitter.
