THE FEMA OFFICIAL WHO SAID HE TELEPORTED TO A WAFFLE HOUSE HAS BEEN REMOVED — HERE IS THE FULL, STRANGE STORY OF HOW HE GOT THE JOB AND WHY HE LOST IT

A Departure That Was Weeks in the Making

On Thursday, June 25, 2026, the Department of Homeland Security confirmed that Gregg Phillips — the man appointed in December 2025 to lead the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Office of Response and Recovery, one of the most consequential disaster management roles in the American federal government — had departed from his position. DHS's official statement described his exit as a personal leave. Four sources who spoke to CNN told a rather different story: Phillips was pushed out. New DHS leadership, according to those sources, had grown weary of the embarrassment surrounding his public image and of his periodic clashes with the department's other leaders. The departure was not voluntary.

His replacement has already been named. David Arnold, a senior FEMA official who had left the agency earlier in 2026, is returning to lead the Office of Response and Recovery in an acting capacity while a permanent appointment is determined. The change also arrives at a moment when President Trump has nominated Cameron Hamilton — the former acting FEMA director who was himself forced out last year after objecting to the idea of dismantling FEMA entirely — to serve as the agency's official administrator, signalling an attempt to stabilise leadership at an agency that has seen significant turbulence throughout 2025 and 2026.

To understand why this particular departure has generated as much news as it has, and why the story of Gregg Phillips and FEMA says something both darkly comic and genuinely serious about the appointment process that brought him there, you need to start at the beginning — and at the Waffle House.

"It Was an Incredibly Frightening Moment": The Teleportation Claims in Full

In January 2025, Gregg Phillips appeared on an episode of the K Files podcast — a right-wing media programme hosted by journalist Andrew Kaczynski — and made a series of claims about supernatural experiences he said he had personally undergone. The most memorable, and the one that has come to define public awareness of his tenure at FEMA, concerned a Waffle House in Georgia.

"We had a teleport incident," Phillips told the podcast. "The car lifted up and took me where I was going. And I end up at a Waffle House, like 50 miles away from where I was. It was an incredibly frightening moment to experience yourself in your car, flying through the air."

This was not, in his telling, an isolated event. In the same interview, Phillips described multiple incidents in which he claimed to have been physically teleported — on one occasion finding himself at the bottom of a ditch without understanding how he got there, on another finding himself at the Waffle House. He reflected on the broader experience with a kind of resigned wonder: "Teleporting is no fun. It's no fun because you don't really know what you're doing. You don't really understand it, it's scary, but yet so real. And you know it's happening but you can't do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride. And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was."

These remarks were made in January 2025 — approximately eleven months before the same man was appointed to one of FEMA's most senior leadership roles. They came to wide national attention only in March 2026, when CNN reported on them and on the broader cache of outlandish statements Phillips had made on right-wing podcasts. By that point he had already been in the job for nearly three months.

When CNN brought the teleportation claims to the attention of President Trump at the White House, his response was candid in its own way. "That sounds a little strange," Trump said. "I know nothing about teleporting or him, but I'll find out about it right now."

Phillips, for his part, did not retreat. In April 2026, he posted on Truth Social doubling down on the claims and framing them explicitly within his Christian faith. "God will not be mocked. People can debate me. Question me. Even ridicule what they don't understand," he wrote. He also offered what might charitably be called a clarifying detail: the teleportation incidents occurred while he was heavily medicated during cancer treatment. "Haters gonna hate," he added. He cited biblical examples of supernatural transportation — a reference to passages in which figures like Philip the Evangelist are described as being physically transported by God — as context for why he found his own experiences credible and spiritually meaningful.

Whether understood as a sincere account of experiences undergone during a medically disorienting period, as a spiritual testimony rooted in a specific strand of charismatic Christian belief, or as the kind of remark that should have disqualified its author from a senior federal emergency management appointment, the Waffle House teleportation claim has now become one of the stranger footnotes in the history of American federal appointments.

Who Gregg Phillips Actually Is — and Why He Was Appointed

To treat the Waffle House story as the primary reason Gregg Phillips was a questionable appointment to lead FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery is, arguably, to let the more substantive concerns off the hook. The teleportation claims were genuinely bizarre and generated enormous media attention. But they were far from the only thing that raised questions about whether this was the right person for this particular job.

Phillips is best known in American political life not for emergency management but for his prominent role in spreading election conspiracy theories — specifically, the claim that three million or more non-citizens voted illegally in the 2016 presidential election. This claim, for which no credible evidence has ever been produced and which has been thoroughly investigated and rejected by election officials of both parties in multiple states, was among the most widely spread pieces of election misinformation in modern American political history. Phillips did not simply repeat the claim in passing — he was one of its primary architects and amplifiers, a figure centrally involved in the discredited "2000 Mules" documentary project that alleged widespread illegal ballot trafficking in the 2020 election. Federal courts, election security officials, and independent fact-checkers systematically debunked every specific claim in that project.

Before being appointed to FEMA, Phillips also had a documented record of violent rhetoric directed at political opponents and of comments warning that migrants were coming to kill Americans, urging podcast listeners to arm themselves. He had no official, prominent experience managing government emergency responses at scale — though FEMA's official statement and multiple news reports note that he had spent decades working with nonprofits and religious organisations on the ground after natural disasters, and had previously served as a senior human services official in both Texas and Mississippi. He brought, in other words, a genuine grassroots disaster volunteer background alongside a public profile defined almost entirely by conspiracy theories, inflammatory rhetoric, and podcast claims about supernatural transport.

The appointment was made by White House officials in December 2025 and did not require Senate confirmation — a structural feature of many political appointments that allows the executive branch to place loyalists in consequential agency roles without the scrutiny of a confirmation hearing. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem formally announced the appointment. The Office of Response and Recovery, which Phillips was appointed to lead, oversees one of FEMA's most operationally critical functions: pre-positioning equipment and supplies before major hurricanes, mobilising additional resources after disasters strike, and coordinating the financial assistance and housing support provided to people who have lost their homes and belongings in natural disasters. It is not an obscure or ceremonial position.

What Phillips Actually Did in the Role

The picture of Phillips's tenure that emerges from reporting by CNN, The Washington Post, and UPI is genuinely more complicated than either a straightforward tale of incompetence or a straightforward tale of successful leadership.

On one side of the ledger: FEMA's official departure statement described Phillips as having "played a pivotal role in stabilising the Office of Response and Recovery and advancing key reforms to strengthen our mission delivery." It credited his leadership as "instrumental in guiding FEMA's response to Typhoon Sinlaku and the 2026 winter storm in the Southeast, ensuring effective, immediate support to communities in need." These are real events involving real communities, and the statement — whatever its diplomatic purposes — attributes genuine operational contributions to his tenure.

On the other side: multiple sources inside FEMA told The Washington Post that some agency staff were actually unhappy with his ouster, specifically because of the role he played in defending the agency's mission against political pressures from above. "He showed interest in preserving the mission of the agency and helping us serve citizens," one current agency official told the Post. Another said Phillips was "one of the only political appointees who supported staff and would push back against leadership such as former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem or Karen Evans, who briefly led FEMA." This portrait — of a conspiracy-theory-promoting, teleportation-claiming political appointee who nonetheless functioned, in the views of some career staff, as an unexpected internal defender of the agency's core purpose — is a peculiar one, but it is the portrait that multiple sources have drawn.

The ultimate reason for his departure, according to CNN's sources, was not operational failure but reputational damage. New DHS leadership had grown weary of the "embarrassment surrounding Phillips' public image" and his "periodic clashes" with the department's other leaders. The Waffle House claims were not, it appears, the direct and immediate cause of his removal — but they were the story that crystallised the public perception problem in a way that made his continued tenure untenable.

A Broader Pattern at FEMA and DHS

Phillips's departure does not exist in isolation. It is part of a pattern of significant turbulence in FEMA and DHS leadership throughout the first eighteen months of the Trump administration's second term that has raised legitimate questions among emergency management professionals about the agency's stability and direction.

Cameron Hamilton, whom Trump has now nominated to lead FEMA as its permanent administrator, was the agency's own acting director until he was forced out in 2025 — specifically because he objected, publicly and internally, to the idea of dismantling FEMA entirely. His forced departure at the time, and his subsequent nomination as permanent director, constitutes something of a reversal: the official who was removed for defending the agency's existence is now being asked to lead it.

Karen Evans briefly led FEMA in the interim between Hamilton's first departure and the current period, mentioned in FEMA staff accounts as among the leadership figures that Phillips pushed back against. Kristi Noem, who made the Phillips appointment as DHS Secretary, has since departed that role. The churn in senior leadership at both DHS and FEMA over the past eighteen months has been substantial by any historical comparison.

The context matters because FEMA's core mission — coordinating the federal government's response to natural disasters — is one of the most operationally demanding and consequential functions in the federal government. The United States faces an ongoing reality of hurricanes, wildfires, flooding, tornadoes, and winter storms affecting millions of Americans every year. The competence and stability of FEMA's leadership directly affects how effectively the federal government responds to those events and how quickly affected communities receive the assistance they need. Phillips's own tenure, according to FEMA's official statement, involved responses to Typhoon Sinlaku and a major Southeast winter storm — real events with real stakes, managed in part by a man whose public profile was dominated by election conspiracy theories and claims of involuntary supernatural transportation.

"God Will Not Be Mocked": The Question the Story Leaves Open

There is an uncomfortable but genuine question buried underneath the darkly comic surface of this story, and it concerns how seriously to take Gregg Phillips's teleportation claims and what they actually represent.

The most obvious reading — and the one that has dominated the media coverage, including this article's headline — is that the claims are self-evidently disqualifying: a person who sincerely believes they were physically transported by supernatural force to a Waffle House in Georgia is not a person whose judgment should be trusted with the coordination of federal disaster response for a country of 335 million people.

But Phillips's own explanation, offered in his April 2026 Truth Social post, introduces a complicating factor: he said these experiences occurred while he was heavily medicated during cancer treatment. Disorienting, hallucinatory, or dissociative experiences during serious illness and heavy medication are not uncommon, are not indicative of baseline mental instability, and are experienced by people across the full spectrum of professional competence and social standing. The specific framing of those experiences within a charismatic Christian spiritual worldview — in which supernatural transportation is a biblically attested phenomenon and therefore a credible category of experience — is one shared by millions of Americans.

None of this necessarily makes the claims less disqualifying in the specific context of a senior federal appointment. But it does suggest that the story is not quite as simple as "official claims to have teleported, therefore disqualified" — and that the more substantive and durable objections to Phillips's appointment were the ones that had nothing to do with Waffle Houses: the documented promotion of false election claims, the violent rhetoric directed at political opponents, and the absence of the kind of formal, large-scale emergency management experience that the Office of Response and Recovery's responsibilities demand.

Those objections existed before the teleportation story broke. They are the objections that should have prevented the appointment in the first place. The Waffle House made it impossible to ignore them. But it was the accountability gap that allowed the appointment to happen — the combination of no Senate confirmation requirement, White House political prioritisation, and the normalisation of conspiracy-theory promotion as a credential within certain political circles — that represents the more durable institutional problem the story exposes, and the one least likely to be resolved by a single departure.

Sources

1. CNN Politics — "FEMA official who claimed he teleported to Waffle House ousted from agency, sources say" (June 25–26, 2026) — cnn.com
2. The Washington Post — "FEMA official who said he teleported to a Waffle House steps away from post" (June 25, 2026) — washingtonpost.com
3. Rolling Stone — "FEMA Official Who Says He Teleported to Waffle House Has Been Zapped Out of Job" (June 25–26, 2026) — rollingstone.com
4. UPI — "Official who claimed to have teleported to Waffle House fired at FEMA" (June 26, 2026) — upi.com
5. CBS6 Albany — "FEMA official who claimed he teleported to Waffle House steps down from post" (June 2026) — cbs6albany.com
6. KTEN (CNN feed) — "FEMA official who claimed he teleported to Waffle House ousted from agency, sources say" (June 2026) — kten.com
7. 10News San Diego (CNN feed) — "FEMA official who claimed he teleported to Waffle House ousted from agency, sources say" (June 2026) — 10news.com
8. Primetimer (Akanksha Mishra) — "What did Gregg Phillips say about being teleported to a Waffle House? FEMA official fired over podcast claims" (June 26, 2026) — primetimer.com
9. MSNBC / Rachel Maddow Blog — "FEMA official known for Waffle House teleportation claims steps down from role" (June 26, 2026) — ms.now
10. K Files Podcast (Andrew Kaczynski) — January 2025 episode featuring Gregg Phillips (cited across all above sources)

This article reflects reporting as of June 26, 2026. The precise nature of Phillips's departure — whether characterised as a leave of absence or a permanent ousting — was described differently by different official and unofficial sources, with DHS citing personal reasons and CNN's four sources characterising it as an involuntary removal.