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FEMA’s Woke Disaster: $2 Billion Fraud, Reverse Discrimination, and Retaliation Buried for Six Years

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(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 views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of The Gateway Pundit.

The post FEMA’s Woke Disaster: $2 Billion Fraud, Reverse Discrimination, and Retaliation Buried for Six Years appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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Politics

Musk Has Gone Quiet About the Launch of His ‘America Party’ — Here’s What We Know

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August 13, 2025

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Maybe Elon Musk is more interested in planets than politics.

The mega-billionaire founder of Tesla, owner of X, and the genius behind the pioneering company SpaceX caused a huge stir in early July when he announced the birth of a new third party on the American political scene.

The question now is, whatever became of that?

Musk first broached the subject in a July 4 post on X when he launched a poll to find out what his followers thought. The results weren’t even close.

“By a factor of 2 to 1, you want a new political party and you shall have it!” Musk wrote in a July 5 post.

“Today, the America Party is formed to give you back your freedom.”

Naturally, the post caused a splash.

Elon Musk is one of the few names in politics that can even come close to competing with the star power of President Donald Trump. So the idea that he could be mounting an actual challenge to Trump’s Republican Party would have been news indeed.

But as The Daily Caller White House correspondent Reagan Reese wrote in an article published Monday, there appears to be nothing in the way of follow-through coming yet.

“Musk hasn’t even mentioned the effort in over a month, and insiders told the Daily Caller that it seems Musk has begun to realize just how difficult what he pledged to do would be,” Reese wrote.

At the time of Musk’s announcement, Trump branded the idea of a third party “ridiculous.”

Musk, of course, has other things on his plate besides politics.

As USA Today reported last week, Musk’s SpaceX could be nearing a new test flight for its Starship rocket, a 400-foot spacecraft the newspaper called “crucial” to future space ambitions, for Musk and the country as a whole.

Musk is a very public booster of manned trips to Mars — extraterrestrial exploration is vital “for the long-term survival of civilization,” he said, USA Today reported.

Humanity is essentially faced with the prospect of branching out or dying out.

One path means “we stay on Earth forever and then there will be some sort of eventual extinction event,” he wrote in a 2017 paper published by the journal New Space.

According to the electronics news-centric website CNET, Musk told the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, in 2013 that he wants to die on Mars — “just not on impact.”

There are also very earthly concerns for Musk to consider about starting a party that would compete almost exclusively with Republicans for support.

(Besides Musk’s famously libertarian inclinations — free speech, gun rights, etc. — his popularity among liberals is so low it can be measured in the number of Tesla vehicles damaged and dealerships attacked by leftists.)

According to Reese’s report, a former Department of Government Efficiency consultant who launched a political action committee specifically to counter the threat of a Musk third party said Musk has realized that helping Democrats might not be so helpful to his own interests.

“Make no mistake, there is a real threat to both Elon and to his businesses if the Democrats were to regain control,” James Fishback, CEO of the Arizona investment firm Azoria, told Reese.

“That’s a message that I shared privately with Tesla executives, and that may have been part of the reason why he attenuated his positioning on that.”

Musk can be unpredictable, of course. He’s a generational genius, and geniuses make their own decisions and forge their own paths.

But for now, at least, it appears his third party is going to stay in the background of the political stage.

This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.

The post Musk Has Gone Quiet About the Launch of His ‘America Party’ — Here’s What We Know appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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Chinese Ships Collide: Karmic Payback for Years of Bullying the Philippine Coast Guard

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3 hours ago

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August 13, 2025

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RudolphChen, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

On an ongoing basis, the Chinese Coast Guard has harassed and intimidated Philippine Coast Guard and fishing vessels in the South China Sea. China claims almost the entire sea, while the Permanent Court of Arbitration has rejected China’s claims. As the Philippine ships and vessels continues to use territory which the world recognizes as belonging to the Philippines, China has historically used bully tactics, blocking, ramming, and damaging Philippine vessels or shooting them with high powered water cannons. This week, China was dished some karmic justice when two of its bully ships collided, rendering one of them on seaworthy.

This increased aggression by China is one of the primary reasons why the US Navy conducts freedom of navigation patrols in the region.

On Monday, August 11, 2025, two Chinese vessels collided while pursuing Philippine Coast Guard ships near Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. The Chinese Coast Guard cutter CCG 3104 struck the PLA Navy guided-missile destroyer Guilin (hull number 164) a botched blockade attempt.

The clash occurred as Philippine Coast Guard vessels BRP Teresa Magbanua and BRP Suluan escorted the fishing vessel MV Pamamalakaya and 35 local fishing boats as part of Manila’s Kadiwa Operation, which delivers fuel and supplies to Filipino fishermen operating in the country’s western exclusive economic zone.

Philippine Coast Guard spokesman Commodore Jay Tarriela said CCG 3104, while chasing the BRP Suluan at high speed, attempted a risky maneuver from the vessel’s starboard quarter. The cutter’s movement caused it to ram into the Guilin, which was approaching from the other side. Analysts believe the Chinese ships were trying to “sandwich” the Philippine cutter, forcing it into the path of a close-range water cannon blast. Poor coordination turned the maneuver into a self-inflicted collision.

The impact left CCG 3104 “unseaworthy,” with significant damage to its bow and forecastle. The Chinese crew did not respond to the Philippine ship’s offer of assistance, and it remains unclear if there were any injuries.

The involvement of the Chinese Navy destroyer Guilin in the Scarborough Shoal collision was considered highly unusual and “overkill” by analysts. PLA Navy warships typically remain “over the horizon” and avoid direct engagement, leaving such confrontations to the Chinese Coast Guard. This made the August 11 incident one of the most severe encounters between Chinese forces and the Philippines, highlighting the escalating tensions in the South China Sea.

Scarborough Shoal has been a persistent flashpoint since China seized it from the Philippines in 2012. Since then, Beijing has waged a steady campaign of harassment against Philippine civilian and government vessels, which has intensified in recent years. In February 2023, a Chinese Coast Guard vessel used a military-grade laser against a 44-meter Philippine Coast Guard ship during a resupply mission.

In March 2024, Chinese ships deployed water cannons on Philippine vessels, shattering a windshield and injuring crew members. The following month, three Chinese cutters rammed and blasted Philippine patrol boats with water cannons near Scarborough Shoal, while others threatened Filipino fishermen at Iroquois Reef. In January 2025, multiple Chinese vessels made aggressive maneuvers toward Philippine fisheries boats, forcing the suspension of a scientific survey.

Beijing justifies these actions through its “nine-dash line” claim, which asserts Chinese historical rights over roughly 90 percent of the South China Sea. The claim is based on a 1947 map created by the Nationalist government and later adopted by the Communist regime, citing historical records dating back to the Han Dynasty. Despite a 2016 international arbitration ruling rejecting the nine-dash line as having “no legal basis,” China has ignored the decision and continued to enforce its claims.

By enforcing the nine-dash line, Beijing seeks to transform these international waters into de facto sovereign territory in a process experts call “maritime territorialisation.”

Strategically, the South China Sea is a vital artery for global trade, with $3.36 trillion worth of goods passing through annually, including 80 percent of China’s energy imports. The waters are also rich in fishing grounds and contain large reserves of oil and natural gas.

Ironically, China is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), while the United States is not. Yet it is the U.S. that serves as the principal enforcer of the law, and China that stands as its principal violator.

The post Chinese Ships Collide: Karmic Payback for Years of Bullying the Philippine Coast Guard appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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$50 Million Bounty on Nicolás Maduro: A New Chapter in Counter-Terror Strategy.

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3 hours ago

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August 13, 2025

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This is a Gateway Hispanic article.

The post $50 Million Bounty on Nicolás Maduro: A New Chapter in Counter-Terror Strategy. appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

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