States caught unprepared for Trump’s threats to FEMA
FEMA is canceling plans to award states grants to help prepare against future disasters. Federal funds given to states after disasters strike could also be in jeopardy.
Torrential rain fell on Eastern Kentucky in July 2022, turning creeks into rivers that roared through the valleys and hollows, wrecking hundreds of homes and killing 45 people. Since then, the state has been trapped in a cycle of seemingly never-ending disasters, exhausting storm-weary residents in impoverished small towns.
“Our families are hurting and suffering, and our businesses are being hit and hit again,” said Kristin Walker Collins, chief executive of the nonprofit Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky.
During Donald Trump’s first presidency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency launched a program to break this cycle, awarding billions of dollars to states to repair levees, elevate flood-prone homes and shore up drinking water systems. The program was built on research showing it is many times less expensive to protect against future damage from natural disasters than to pay for repairs and rebuilding afterward. Kentucky received more than $7 million for hazard mitigation projects and upgrading power transmission lines.
FEMA is now canceling plans to award these grants for the 2024 fiscal year, according to an internal memo reviewed by The Washington Post. As Trump’s second administration looks to slash federal spending, money given to states by the federal government after disasters strike could also be in jeopardy. The president has said he wants to eliminate FEMA and shift responsibility for disaster response to the states — which experts said are unprepared to respond to catastrophic disasters without federal assistance.
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The preparedness grant program, known as Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, had made more than $5 billion available since 2020 to help local projects that reduce the impact of disasters. The agency plans to review earlier grants and claw back funding for those that have not yet been paid out, the memo said.
A FEMA spokeswoman said the program, known as BRIC, is ending “non-mission critical programs.”
“BRIC was yet another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program,” she said in a statement. “It was more concerned with climate change than helping Americans effected by natural disasters.”
Some emergency management experts say the president’s proposal to shift the financial responsibility of responding to those disasters to states could prompt chaos in state capitals and city governments, forcing messy political fights about how to pay for disaster relief and fund preparedness offices.
A key reason is that, since FEMA’s creation in 1979, states have come to rely on the agency to pay for their emergency management agencies’ day-to-day operations. In North Dakota, Homeland Security Division Director Darin Hanson said he expects about 89 percent of the division’s budget in the next two years will come from FEMA, paying for 28 of the division’s 45 full-time employees. In Wyoming, which has the smallest population of any state, the Office of Homeland Security is 92 percent federally funded.
If the Trump administration eliminates or cuts state emergency management grants, dozens of layoffs are likely to follow, state officials said, leaving them without the staff or money to manage large disasters.
FEMA did not respond to a request for comment about the impact that changes could have on states.
“For small states, like Vermont or Wyoming, there’s very little capability, especially at the local level,” said Erica Bornemann, who served as Vermont’s emergency management director for 16 years and now works in disaster consulting.
“It would take time for them not only to hire and fund the people necessary to respond to small- to moderate-scale disasters, but also to build a fund to support disaster survivors,” she said.
States may not have much time to adjust. Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem and other administration officials expressed support for stripping the agency of some of its main functions by Oct. 1, such as helping rebuild after disasters strike. In discussions with governors and lawmakers, some state emergency management directors have already asked for more money, anticipating that federal grants will be canceled or slashed.
“I don’t know any state who is saying, ‘We’re good,’” said Lynn Budd, president of the National Emergency Management Association and director of the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security. “We’re having conversations with our budget office and our governor’s office, but when you’re 92 percent federally funded, you can’t just make that up.”
Millions of dollars in FEMA funding have been frozen since January. Although a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to release the funds, at least 19 states have not been able to access the money, according to a filing last week by a coalition of 24 states, including those recently hit by major disasters such as California, North Carolina, Kentucky and Hawaii. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that the administration had violated his order by freezing the FEMA grants.
Since 2003, FEMA has distributed $150 billion in public assistance grants to states, local governments and private nonprofit organizations in the wake of natural disasters, according to a Post analysis of OpenFEMA data as of April 4. The agency issued another $87 billion in grants during the coronavirus pandemic.
Among states, Louisiana ($22 billion), New York ($17.6 billion) and Florida ($13.6 billion) received the most in public assistance funds over the past two decades, mostly for damage caused by hurricanes, according to the analysis. About $46 billion was set aside for Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands after they were devastated by Hurricane Maria in 2017.
States such as Iowa, Kansas and Kentucky have each seen more than $1 billion in public assistance funding in the wake of disasters — mainly severe storms and flooding — in the past 20 years, excluding funds for pandemic response.
In Kentucky, more than $500 million funded projects to repair roads and bridges, and another $300 million paid for debris removal, according to the Post analysis.
FEMA is intended to be a backstop. The agency’s role is to support state and local officials when hurricanes, wildfires and other disasters overwhelm them — and when governors ask for the federal government’s help. A growing number of climate-driven disasters has put more strain on the agency’s staff and finances in recent years and, its supporters argue, made it all the more essential.
But some former FEMA administrators and state directors say reform is needed. The agency’s aid-delivery process can be slow and bureaucratic, sometimes taking weeks or months to reach survivors — and in some cases only after many appeals. Some agency leaders have also criticized FEMA for allowing states to draw on billions of dollars in federal aid without requiring them to do more, or take steps to prevent future damage, like strengthening building codes.
“There are states that use FEMA as an easy button,” said Mark Ghilarducci, who led the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services for a decade before retiring in 2022. “But if they’re doing all the response and all the recovery, then why should a governor or state legislature put a dollar in?”
California’s emergency response system is “formidable,” Ghilarducci said, and less dependent on federal funding than smaller states. Still, the increase in severity and size of wildfires in recent years has taken a toll, leaving the state to manage multiple rebuilding efforts simultaneously amid spiraling costs. A UCLA analysis of the total property and capital losses from the two urban fires that decimated parts of Los Angeles in January found they could range between $76 billion and $131 billion.
“The federal support to help offset those disasters is really critical, even for a state the size of California,” Ghilarducci said.
In North Dakota, Hanson views the coming changes as mostly manageable, especially for a state that already handles its own disaster response and recovery operations and has not called in FEMA to respond on the ground since the early 2010s, despite receiving financial support.
The state has a rainy-day fund for disasters of about $24.8 million. If FEMA funding were slashed abruptly and a disaster were to hit, it would probably require the governor to call an emergency session to authorize more spending, Hanson said.
“We expect there’s going to be significant changes, but we have shown that state-led can be the way, and it puts the onus on us,” Hanson said.
In the meantime, communities that have recently been through a disaster are waiting to hear whether their FEMA grant applications will be approved — or if they are on their own to sort through the wreckage.
Nearly three years after Kentucky suffered extreme flooding, recovery efforts are “so slow going,” Collins said, and more disasters keep coming. Floodwaters inundated some of the same small mountain towns in 2023 and again this past February, killing 24 people.
After three major floods in four years, Collins said fatigue is setting in among her foundation’s donors. This year, she is aiming to distribute a little more than $2 million to residents and businesses to help them recover from the latest flood, significantly less than the $15 million she gave out in 2022.
“We’re able to get money out faster to people than FEMA or the state,” she said. “But we can’t deliver on the amount of need that our communities have.”
Brianna Sacks contributed to this report.