Nikki McCann Ramirez
View all posts by Nikki McCann Ramirez March 20, 2026
Office of Response and Recovery Director Gregg Phillips at FEMA headquarters on January 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. Al Drago/Getty Images Far-right activist turned high-ranking FEMA official Gregg Phillips has a problem. Sometimes he finds himself “teleporting” into ditches, or even into a Waffle House.
CNN reports that Phillips spoke “on multiple podcasts” about being teleported against his will, which he has described as “evil.” As director of the Office of Response and Recovery, Phillips oversees billions in funds, and is deeply involved in rapid response efforts in the aftermath of disasters.
“Teleporting is no fun,” Phillips said last year. “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.”
Phillips in the same interview described “teleporting” to a Waffle House 50 miles away. “I was with my boys one time and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House,” he said. “And I ended up at a Waffle House — this was in Georgia and I end up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was.”
Now, do not mistake Phillips description for something like a medical episode or a black out of some form. He insisted that he was traveling from location to location without experiencing the passage of time. When his friends asked him where he was, he replied that he was at the “‘Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.’ And they said, ‘That’s not possible, you just left here a moment ago.’ But it was possible. It was real.”
Phillips also claimed that he had once felt his car “lifted up” and teleported forty miles to a ditch near a church.
FEMA told CNN that “many of the comments cited are taken out of context or represent personal, informal, jovial, and somewhat spiritual discussions made in the context of barely surviving cancer; in a private capacity prior to his current role.” The agency did not immediately respond to additional questions from Rolling Stone.
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The teleportation problem is just the tip of the dysfunction iceberg for both Phillips and FEMA. The conspiracy theorist, who assumed his role at the disaster response agency in December of last year, has a long history of violent rhetoric and alleged abuse of office, CNN’s report revealed.
Phillips has styled himself as a voter fraud “expert,” and according to a 2017 report from The Daily Beast raked in millions scamming states into buying his own software programs purporting to guard against fraud, receiving lucrative government contracts through companies owned or operated by himself and his associates, and quietly closing the operations shortly after. His gifts saw him burn bridges in Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama, before transferring to the private sector. Texas confirmed in 2017 that Phillips was no longer authorized to conduct business with the state, and an investigation into allegations of financial misconduct connected to his work in Mississippi’s Department of Human Services determined he had facilitated “the appearance of impropriety, facilitating an erosion of the public trust.” His obsession with voter fraud actually predates the Trump era, and his partnership with the Texas-based conspiratorial election group True The Vote has left a years-long paper trail of suspicious — and potentially unlawful — money maneuvering and self-enrichment.
