FEMA staffers who canvassed homes in the aftermath of Hurricane Milton in 2024 illegally skipped over properties with signs promoting Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, according to a report from a federal watchdog.
Disaster Survivor Assistance crews surveyed more than 744,000 homes and other locations after Florida’s back-to-back Helene and Milton storms and did not make contact with more than 555,000 locations for reasons such as “private property” signs or safety concerns.
But one crew skipped 11 homes “due to the presence of political signage” supporting Trump, an incident that made headlines in 2024 and has been at the center of an investigation from Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General for nearly two years.
“This situation eroded public trust in FEMA’s ability to treat everyone impartially, offer unbiased and consistent assistance, and ensure equal access to resources and tools,” according to the report.
Several FEMA employees filed complaints, prompting the agency to open an investigation, which was then referred to the inspector general and Office of Special Counsel. FEMA then fired the crew leader, Marn’i Washington, as well as other staffers involved in the incident. The agency later provided additional mandatory ethics training on the Hatch Act, which sharply limits partisan political activities among federal employees.
open image in galleryIn February 2025, after Donald Trump entered office, the Office of Special Counsel filed a Hatch Act complaint against Washington, the fired FEMA employee.
Washington “repeatedly told her subordinate crew members not to visit properties with Trump 2024 campaign signage,” according to the office.
“One of Congress’s goals in passing the Hatch Act was to ensure that government programs are administered in a nonpartisan manner,” then-Special Counsel Hampton Dellinger said at the time. “A federal employee clearly violates the Hatch Act by engaging in explicit partisan political bias or activity when on the job.”
When reports first emerged that crews had skipped over Trump supporters, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis blamed then-President Joe Biden’s administration for what he called the “blatant weaponization of government by partisan activists in the federal bureaucracy.”
Washington, who was fired by the Biden administration, told NewsNation at the time that she was being “framed” and that she was “simply following orders.” She said the instructions followed “hostile” encounters her team experienced at homes with Trump signs.
open image in gallery“I execute orders. I don’t create policy. I do not reinvent the wheel. My record shows that,” she said in the interview at the time.
In her testimony to the House Oversight Committee in November 2024, then-FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said Washington’s actions “were unacceptable.”
“The evidence that I have seen so far shows that this was an isolated incident,” she said. “It has not gone beyond what this one employee did.”
Democrats on the panel pointed out that Trump, during his first administration, “deliberately and outspokenly” withheld aid to his political rivals without consequence. In his opening remarks to the committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, the panel’s top Democrat, said Washington’s directive was a “bad mistake, legally and constitutionally” but said that he agency’s workers “have been forced to work under a cloud of propaganda and lies concocted to erode public trust in FEMA.”
The watchdog report determined that FEMA had not adequately provided training around ethics violations and the Hatch Act and determined that the agency did not have any policy to explain why crews skipped homes.
When crewmembers “do not interact with a survivor at an assigned location, they must choose the reason they did not make contact from a limited set of options” in a survey program that has a preset menu of answers as well as an open text field to add other notes. But those notes “were not required or standardized,” the inspector general found.
Further complication issues is that investigators could not determine if crews skipped homes for other “unallowable reasons” during other disasters because the watchdog office cannot access records from the survey program.
Access to that program — Survey123 — was abruptly shut down in 2025 after FEMA’s contract lapsed and then-Secretary Kristi Noem “did not act on the FEMA request to fund the contract before its lapse,” according to the report.