Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has called for an investigation into FEMA after alleged FEMA volunteers told the Daily Wire that they were instructed by the agency to avoid President-Elect Donald Trump supporters’ homes when surveying damage in Highlands County following Hurricane Milton.
The newspaper looked at internal text messages that showed workers in Lake Placid avoided about 20 homes that were “advertising Trump.”
Gov. DeSantis said on x that the Florida Division of Emergency Management would be looking into what happened.
A lot of Republicans have also said something, like Senator Rick Scott and Representative Anna Paulina Luna.
A FEMA spokesperson told Fox News Digital that the agency is “deeply disturbed” by what happened and that the official who gave the order “was given no direction to tell teams to avoid these homes.”
The whole statement that FEMA gave to Fox News Digital:
“FEMA helps all survivors, no matter what party they belong to or what they believe in, and we are very upset about what this employee did.”
While we think this is an isolated case, we have taken steps to remove the employee from their job and are looking into what happened to make sure it does not happen again.
That worker who gave this advice did not have the power or direction to tell teams to stay away from those homes, and we are reaching out to those who may not have been reached because of this.
We are taking this matter very seriously and are doing everything we can to make sure that all survivors get help from FEMA.
As of now, we have helped over 365,000 households in Florida that were affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton and have given over $898 million in direct aid to survivors.
We are horrified that this happened, so we have done absolutely everything we can to fix it and made sure that everyone involved takes care of it. Helping people is what we do best, and our staff will keep working to help survivors for as long as it takes.
FEMA Director Deanne Criswell talked about it on X and said it was wrong. She then said that the worker had been fired and would be sent to the Office of Special Counsel.