We didn’t work for David Richardson, but we knew him. We are part of a team of seven former senior executives and military officers who blew the whistle on waste, fraud, and retaliation in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Puerto Rico recovery. For seven years, we worked through the agency’s bureaucracy, and it produced delays. We called it the “Great Circle of Unaccountability”: its real mission is preserving jobs and obfuscating. Disaster recovery is a side hustle.
Then we got a half hour with Richardson. More moved in the days after that meeting than in the seven years before it. When his book, Texas Flood 4 July 2025: Power, Money, Politics, History, Bureaucracy, and Tragedy, came out, we contacted him because the leader on the page is the leader we met.
