This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capital & Main, a 2022-2023 LRN partner. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

In January, Katie Clark’s one-bedroom rental of more than 15 years, and nearly everything inside, was incinerated by Los Angeles County’s Eaton fire, one of the most destructive wildfires in California history. For her troubles, she received a one-time payment of $770 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which she used to replace clothes, food and a crate for her dog. While it was only a fraction of what she needed, the money was at least available while she waited for other funding.

As an organizer with the Altadena Tenants Union who has been helping renters with their FEMA applications, Clark knows just how common her experience has been for fire survivors. She believes federal and local agencies severely underestimated the need and cost of housing for the 150,000 people displaced by the fires, leaving many still struggling to recover. A FEMA spokesperson denied the accusation, saying the agency’s “ongoing assessments indicate that the current Rental Assistance program is effectively meeting the housing needs of survivors eligible for FEMA assistance.”

The disaster response “has been so shockingly bad,” Clark said, but she recognizes that without FEMA’s help in responding to fires that killed at least 30 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures, “it could have been so, so, so much worse.”

“We would have seen a whole lot more people left to their own devices. And what that would mean is homelessness. It would mean people just abandoned,” Clark said.

Even before President Donald Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom squared off over Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops to quell immigration protests, before Newsom likened Trump to a dictator and Trump endorsed the idea of arresting the governor, the question of how much California could continue to rely on FEMA was front and center.

It’s a critical question in a state — with its earthquakes, wildfires, floods, drought and extreme heat — that frequently suffers some of the costliest disasters in the country.

Since Trump’s inauguration, his administration has floated sweeping proposals that would slash FEMA dollars and make disasters harder to declare. This has left both blue and red states wrestling with scenarios in which they must pay for what FEMA will not. States have long counted on FEMA to cover at least 75% of declared major disaster response and recovery costs.

In just the past few months, FEMA has denied federal assistance for devastating floods in West Virginia and a destructive windstorm in Washington. The agency approved such funding for deadly tornadoes in Arkansas after Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appealed an initial denial and personally begged the president for help.

Last month, ProPublica reported that FEMA missed a May deadline to open the application process for many grants, including funding that states rely on to pay for basic emergency management operations. The delay, which the agency has not explained, appears to have little precedent.

In California, Trump has cast doubt on whether he will approve the $40 billion Newsom has requested to help pay for recovery costs associated with the fires, including $16.8 billion from FEMA to rebuild property, infrastructure and remove debris. That’s on top of the almost $140 million the agency has already provided to individual survivors.

The president told reporters last month that states need to be weaned off FEMA and that the federal government will start distributing less federal aid after hurricane season ends in November.

The questions now are: How much will be approved? Will it be enough? And, if not, what then?

A FEMA spokesperson did not directly respond to questions from Capital & Main about anticipated funding cuts and potential impacts on state and local communities, but said the agency “asserts that disasters are best managed when they’re federally supported, state managed and locally executed.”

The uncertainty makes it “very hard” to plan, said Heather Gonzalez, principal fiscal and policy analyst for emergency services at California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office. “The little bean-counters in the back are stressing out right now trying to figure out ‘what are we going to have to work with?’”

The recent “dust-ups” between Newsom and Trump, she said, have only underscored the unpredictability. For his part, Newsom said he prefers the “open hand” of cooperation over the “closed fist” of fighting when it comes to disaster response.

“Emergency preparedness and emergency planning, recovery and renewal — period, full stop — that should be nonpolitical,” he said on Monday, which marked six months since the fires.

Since at least the 1980s, California has endured a rapidly growing number of billion-dollar disasters, with 18 occurring between 2015 and 2024 alone.

As the frequency and severity of California’s disasters increase, so too does its reliance on federal assistance to respond. In the aftermath of January’s Eaton and Palisades fires — the second and third most destructive wildfires in California history, respectively — FEMA has already provided $139 million for everything from home repair costs to medical expenses, and the agency “has allocated billions of dollars for debris removal,” according to a FEMA spokesperson. Over 5,000 properties have already been cleared of ash and fire debris.

Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management Communications Director Emily Montanez said recovery efforts for the fires likely won’t be complete for many years and are heavily dependent on FEMA.

“After the Northridge earthquake in 1994, FEMA had field offices here for 28 years,” Montanez said. “We see this as being no different. This was way more devastation, way more impact. So this could be years, definitely decades.”

While Montanez acknowledged that potential “gaps” in disaster response efforts leave some survivors without sufficient resources, she said that the recent operations coordinated between FEMA and local agencies in Los Angeles have mostly been efficient and successful.

FEMA’s federal assistance supplements California’s own disaster response and mitigation resources like those allocated to the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, which was allotted $4.4 billion in the May revision of the state’s 2025-26 budget. When the office’s funding does not cover all disaster costs, California can also pull from a number of its reserves, including the Budget Stabilization Account and Special Fund for Economic Uncertainties.

Newsom told Capital & Main on Monday that the state has increased its discretionary reserves as a direct consequence of Trump’s ongoing threats to FEMA, though he admitted that even that increased investment wouldn’t make up for the potential loss in federal funding.

California “can’t backfill the elimination of FEMA,” Newsom said. “There’s no state in America [that can], even the most endowed state — $4.1 trillion a year economy — largest in the nation, fourth largest in the world.”

And California’s $12 billion budget deficit will make backfilling the office’s shortfall especially difficult the next time a major disaster strikes, according to Laurie Schoeman, senior adviser on climate resilience to former President Joe Biden.

That will be made even harder if the still-unfinalized proposals outlined in an internal FEMA memo are implemented, according to Schoeman. One of the reforms floated in the memo caps the proportion of recovery costs covered by the federal government at the current baseline of 75%. Under current rules, the president can increase FEMA’s cost share up to 100%, as Biden did for the Los Angeles fires less than two weeks before he left office.

Another proposal quadruples the amount of damage that needs to be suffered in a disaster before FEMA awards any public assistance grants for infrastructure repair and debris removal. That would hike California’s damage threshold from roughly $75 million to nearly $300 million per disaster.

Had just that second reform been in place between 2008 and 2024, California would have received 26% less in public assistance funding from FEMA, a loss of nearly $2 billion, according to a May analysis by the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Such reduced funding during future events would cause an “apocalyptic scenario” where California communities would struggle to afford the cost of running shelters and paying for emergency responders to rescue disaster victims, according to Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow in the Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Yet already, significant damage has been done, Schoeman said.

In April, the Trump administration canceled the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, a FEMA initiative dedicated to funding disaster-preparedness projects. Over $880 million in federal funding was rescinded, including a $35 million grant in California’s Napa County largely dedicated to wildfire prevention work. The administration declined to respond to Capital & Main’s request for comment, referring questions to FEMA. An agency spokesperson said that its approach to disaster preparedness mirrors that of disaster response: FEMA will play a supporting role.

“All types of preparedness start with families, individuals and local and state officials ahead of any emergency and disaster,” a statement from the agency said.

The rescinded federal funding risks undermining communities’ abilities to protect against future disasters, Schoeman said, and undoes work accomplished under Trump’s first term.

“They’re just cutting these projects even though they have proven benefit cost analyses in place,” Schoeman said. “The BRIC program was started under the Trump administration … so it feels like the administration is going to cut their own leg off.”

Clark said she is already struggling to get help. She said her insurance provider has so far withheld over $25,000 due to disagreements over whether her transitional housing qualifies as temporary, and her applications for additional FEMA assistance have been denied due to her technically being insured. Some wealthier survivors had “the insulation and resiliency that economic resources give you,” while others had to depend on nonprofits or the kind of government assistance that is now at risk to afford transitional housing.

“If you don’t have those economic resources, your only option is to turn to either philanthropy or the state,” Clark said. “If neither of those are available, then tough luck.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jeremy Lindenfeld, Capital & Main.

At least 82 people have died and dozens are still unaccounted for after flash flooding in central Texas over the weekend, when the Guadalupe River rose about 26 feet in less than an hour on Friday amid torrential downpours. At least 10 girls who attended Camp Mystic, a girls’ summer camp located on the banks of the river, are among the missing. In Kerr County, the most devastated area, at least 40 adults and 28 children have died. The speed and scale of the natural disaster has raised questions about why officials weren’t better prepared, and whether the Trump administration’s cuts to scientific positions exacerbated the situation.

“The National Weather Service, like a lot of federal agencies, went through significant loss of staff back in the spring,” says retired NOAA meteorologist Alan Gerard, now the CEO of Balanced Weather, which provides critical weather and climate alerts. Gerard says that while it appears there was appropriate staffing ahead of the Texas flood, the impact of current budget cuts and even deeper reductions being considered by the administration are a cause for concern. “We still have all of hurricane season to deal with,” he says.

This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

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Upheaval at the nation’s top disaster agency is raising anxiety among state and local emergency managers — and leaving major questions about the whereabouts of billions of federal dollars it pays out to them.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency still has not opened applications for an enormous suite of grants, including ones that many states rely on to pay for basic emergency management operations. Some states pass on much of that money to their most rural, low-income counties to ensure they have an emergency manager on the payroll.

FEMA has blown through the mid-May statutory deadline to start the grants’ application process, according to the National Emergency Management Association, with no word about why or what that might indicate. The delay appears to have little precedent.

“There’s no transparency on why it’s not happening,” said Michael A. Coen Jr., who served as FEMA’s chief of staff under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

FEMA’s system of grants is complex and multifaceted and helps communities prepare for and respond to everything from terrorist attacks to natural disasters.

In April, the agency abruptly rescinded a different grant program that county and local governments were expecting to help them reduce natural hazard risks moving forward. The clawback of money included hundreds of millions already pledged. FEMA also quietly withdrew a notice for states to apply for $600 million in flood mitigation grants.

On top of that, on June 11, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem began requiring that she review all FEMA grants above $100,000. That could slow its vast multibillion grants apparatus to a crawl, current and former FEMA employees said.

FEMA did not answer ProPublica’s questions about the missed application deadline or the impact of funding cuts and delays, instead responding with a statement from DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin that Noem is focused on bringing accountability to FEMA’s spending by “rooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and working to ensure only grants that really help Americans in time of need are approved.”

The memo announcing the change arrived the day after President Donald Trump said he wants to begin dismantling FEMA at the close of hurricane season this fall.

All of this has left states — some of which rely on the federal government for the vast majority of their emergency management funding — in a difficult position. While Trump has sharply criticized FEMA’s performance delivering aid after disasters strike, he has said almost nothing about the future of its grant programs.

“It’s a huge concern,” said Lynn Budd, president of the National Emergency Management Association and director of the Wyoming Office of Homeland Security, which houses emergency management. The state agency gets more than 90% of its operating budget from federal funds, especially FEMA grants. “The uncertainty makes it very difficult,” she said.

In North Carolina, a state hit hard by a recent natural disaster, federal grants make up 82% of its emergency management agency’s budget. North Carolina Emergency Management leaders are pressing state lawmakers to provide it with “funding that will sustain the agency and its core functions” and cut its reliance on federal grant funding, an agency spokesperson said.

A forced weaning off of federal dollars could have an outsize impact in North Carolina and the other states that pass on much of their FEMA grants to county and local agencies. Many rural counties have modest tax bases and are already stretched thin.

In May, ProPublica published a story detailing the horrors of Hurricane Helene’s impact on one of those counties, Yancey. Home to 19,000 people, it suffered the largest per capita loss of life and damage to property in the storm. Jeff Howell, its emergency manager, was operating with only a part-time employee and said that for years he had been asking the county commission for more help. It wasn’t until after the storm that county commissioners agreed with the need.

“They realized how big a job it is,” said Howell, who has since retired.

But even large metropolitan counties rely on the grants. The hold upin opening the grant applications concerns Robert Wike Graham, deputy director of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Emergency Management, which serves an area of 1.2 million people and is home to a nuclear power plant. The training and preparation FEMA grants help the agency pay for are critical to keeping the community safe in the face of a nuclear catastrophe.

Yet Graham said he has resorted to scouring social media posts and news reports for bits of clues about the grants — and the future of FEMA itself.

“We’re all having to be like, hey, what have you heard? What do you know? What’s going on? Nobody knows,” Graham said.

Trump is on his second acting FEMA administrator in five months, and the director who coordinates national disaster response turned in his resignation letter June 11. More than a dozen senior leaders, including the agency’s chief counsel, have left or been fired, along with an unknown mass of its full-time workers.

“Every emergency manager I know is screaming, ‘You’re screwing the system up.’ We’ve all been calling for reform,” Graham said. “But it’s too much, too fast.

Shortly after President Jimmy Carter created FEMA in 1979 to centralize federal disaster management, the agency began to dole out grants to help communities grappling with large-scale destruction. Over the years, its grants ballooned, especially after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, when huge new programs helped states harden security against this alarming new threat.

Today, FEMA operates roughly a dozen preparedness grant programs. Among other things, the money serves as a financial carrot to ensure that even spending-averse and tax-strapped states and counties employ emergency managers who help communities prepare for and respond to terrorist attacks and natural disasters.

Former FEMA leaders said states have been largely content to sit back and let the feds pay up. As a result, they said, the grants have created a system of dependence that leaves emergency managers vulnerable to ever-shifting national priorities and, at the moment, a president set on dismantling the agency.

Across the country, the percentage of state emergency management agencies’ budgets paid by federal funding ranges from zero to 99.4%, a 2024 National Emergency Management Association report says. A spokesperson declined to provide a state-by-state breakdown, so ProPublica canvassed a few.

Wyoming tops 90%. Texas’ agency gets about three-quarters of its operational budget from federal funding. Virginia gets roughly 70%. South Carolina comes in around 61% federal funding for day-to-day operations.

Most state emergency managers agree that their states need to depend less on the federal government for their funding, “but there’s got to be some glide path or timeline where we can all work toward the goal,” Budd said.

Some states would need upwards of a decade to prepare for such a seismic shift, especially those like Wyoming that budget every other year, she added. Its Legislature is in the middle of budget negotiations for fiscal year 2027-28.

ProPublica is continuing to report on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. If you are an emergency manager who would like to tell us about your needs or share your experience with recovery efforts, please email helenetips@propublica.org.

If emergency managers instead are scrambling, “the effects that we’re going to see down the line is a lack of preparedness, a lack of coordination, training and partnerships being built,” Budd said. “We’re not going to be able to respond as well.”

A key reason states have become so dependent on FEMA grants despite the risk of national political upheaval is that state legislatures and local elected leaders haven’t always prioritized paying for emergency management themselves despite its critical role. With FEMA’s grants, they haven’t had to.

W. Craig Fugate has seen reluctance to wean off FEMA grants from all levels of government. He served as FEMA administrator under Obama and, before that, as head of Florida’s emergency management division under then-Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist.

“My experience tells me locals will not step up unless they are dealing with a catastrophe,” Fugate said.

Because most of the preparedness grants require no match from state or local governments, he said, it strips away any motivation for them to do so — especially with other pressing needs vying for those dollars.

“The real question is how much of this is actually critical and should be the responsibility of local governments to fund?” Fugate said. “Neither local governments nor states have been very forward in funding beyond the minimums to match federal dollars.”

After Hurricane Helene, North Carolina’s Emergency Management agency commissioned a report that pointedly criticized the state’s “over-reliance on federal grants to fund basic operations.” Only about 16.5% of the state agency’s budget comes from state appropriations.

The report noted that this reliance had led to an inadequate investment by the state in its emergency management staffing and infrastructure. A staff shortage at the agency “severely compromised the state’s response to Hurricane Helene.” Among other things, a lack of staff hampered the State Emergency Response Team’s ability to maintain a 24-hour operation that was supposed to support local and county officials who were overwhelmed by the massive storm.

North Carolina state Rep. Mark Pless, the Republican co-chair of the House Emergency Management and Disaster Recovery Committee, said the state’s conservative spending and $3.6 billion in reserves have “afforded us the ability to fund ourselves for preparedness” if FEMA suddenly yanks its grants.

But Democratic Rep. Robert Reives, the House minority leader, worried that any financial flexibility would dry up if planned and potential tax cuts in the years ahead create a budget shortfall, as some have predicted.

In mostly rural Washington County, along North Carolina’s hurricane-prone coast, Lance Swindell is a one-man emergency management office. His county, home to 11,000 people, lacks a big tax base.

Like other emergency managers across the state, Swindell said he supports cutting FEMA red tape and waste, but “grant funding is a major funding source just to keep the lights on.”

One of the grants in the FEMA program that blew past its deadline for opening applications pays half of his salary. That grant can fund core local operations such as staffing, training and equipment. It is critical to local emergency management offices: Almost 82% of counties across the country report tapping into it.

Cuts to this particular grant under the Biden administration already reduced what North Carolina gets — and therefore what gets passed down the governmental food chain to people like Swindell. North Carolina was allocated $8.5 million in fiscal year 2024, down from $10.6 million two years earlier.

Looking ahead, Swindell is still waiting for the applications to open while wondering if FEMA will more drastically slash the grants — and, if so, whether his county could find the money to continue paying his full-time salary.

Mollie Simon contributed research.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Jennifer Berry Hawes.

A memo reviewed by Wired, dated May 2 and addressed to regional FEMA leaders from Cameron Hamilton, a senior official performing the duties of the administrator, instructs program offices to “take steps to implement” five “key reforms” for the upcoming hurricane and wildfire season.

Under the first reform, titled Prioritize Survivor Assistance at Fixed Facilities, the memo states that “FEMA will discontinue unaccompanied FEMA door-to-door canvassing to focus survivor outreach and assistance registration capabilities in more targeted venues, improving access to those in need, and increasing collaboration with [state, local, tribal, and territorial] partners and nonprofit service providers.”

FEMA has for years deployed staff to travel door-to-door in disaster areas, interacting directly with survivors in their homes to give an overview of FEMA aid application processes and help them register for federal aid. This group of workers is part of a larger cadre often called FEMA’s “boots on the ground” in disaster areas.

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Ending door-to-door canvassing, one FEMA worker said, will “severely hamper our ability to reach vulnerable people.” The assistance provided by workers going door-to-door, they said, “has usually focused on the most impacted and the most vulnerable communities where there may be people who are elderly or with disabilities or lack of transportation and are unable to reach Disaster Recovery Centers.” This person spoke to Wired on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press.

“Door-to-door canvassing is another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program,” Geoff Harbaugh, FEMA’s associate administrator for the Office of External Affairs, told Wired in an email. “Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem, FEMA is changing how it operates and reforming its policies to better support disaster survivors and the American people. President Trump’s recent executive orders empower states to effectively respond to natural disasters and provide resources at the community level.”

Todd DeVoe, the emergency management coordinator for the city of Inglewood, California, and the second vice president at the International Association of Emergency Managers, said that in his years of working in disaster management he has seen how many survivors don’t get information about recovery or resources without door-to-door outreach — despite emergency managers using strategies like direct mailers and radio and newspaper ads.

“Going door-to-door, especially in critically hit areas, to share information is very important,” he said. “There’s a need for it. Can it be done more efficiently? Probably, but getting rid of it completely is really going to hamper some things.”

FEMA’s door-to-door canvassing became a political flash point last year during Hurricane Milton, when an agency whistleblower alerted the conservative news site The Daily Wire that one official had told workers in Florida to avoid approaching homes with Trump yard signs. Former FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability during a hearing last year that the incident was isolated to one employee, who had since been fired. The employee, in turn, claimed that she acted on orders from a superior and that the issue was a pattern of “hostile encounters” with survivors who had Trump yard signs.

Republicans on the Oversight Committee alleged that they had received information indicating “widespread discrimination against individuals displaying Trump campaign signs on their property” throughout FEMA. In March, the agency fired three more employees following an internal investigation into the issue.

The Office of Professional Responsibility “investigation found no evidence that this was a systemic problem, nor that it was directed by agency or field leadership,” Hamilton wrote in a letter sent to Oversight chair James Comer.

The canvassing controversy made it into the White House’s 2026 budget, released on May 2, which decries “woke FEMA grant programs” and proposes cutting $646 million from “non-disaster” FEMA programs.

“FEMA discriminated against Americans who voted for the president in the wake of recent hurricanes, skipping over their homes when providing aid. This activity will no longer be tolerated,” the budget document states. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

There is no mention in the FEMA memo of the investigation or recent controversy and no reasoning provided for ending the door-to-door canvassing process. FEMA has deployed door-to-door canvassing in states with federal disaster declarations approved under the Trump administration: An agency press release from March mentions teams going door-to-door in West Virginia following February’s severe storms.

Read Next

Trump wants to wind down FEMA. Could states fill the gap?

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The memo comes at a turbulent time for the agency as it prepares for disaster season. In late April, CNN reported that FEMA stood to lose around 20 percent of its staff in buyouts as part of cuts related to Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Last week, Politico reported that the administration had stopped approving allocations for a crucial hazard-mitigation program just a few weeks after news broke that the agency would end one of the federal government’s biggest climate-adaptation programs.

Some of the other reforms in the memo include directives for the agency to “emphasize assistance available from other partners” over federal aid, as well as to emphasize efforts to rely on local- and state-run recovery centers rather than federally-run ones, “reducing the need to establish FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers and optimizing support for state and locally led recovery efforts.” The memo emphasizes that the agency intends to “respect the primacy of states, territories, and Tribal Nations in disaster response.”

“Our role is to support our partners, not replace them,” the memo states. “FEMA does not act alone.”

DeVoe said that like many of the responsibilities being shifted from FEMA to local response, the task of surveying survivors door-to-door will now fall to local and state responders. These groups may be hard-pressed to find the budget and manpower, especially as federal programs and grants keep getting cut.

“California, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, Oregon, Florida, Texas — they’re going to be OK,” he said. “It’s going to be those smaller states — are they going to be OK?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA is ending door-to-door canvassing in disaster areas on May 11, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Molly Taft, WIRED.

A memo reviewed by Wired, dated May 2 and addressed to regional FEMA leaders from Cameron Hamilton, a senior official performing the duties of the administrator, instructs program offices to “take steps to implement” five “key reforms” for the upcoming hurricane and wildfire season.

Under the first reform, titled Prioritize Survivor Assistance at Fixed Facilities, the memo states that “FEMA will discontinue unaccompanied FEMA door-to-door canvassing to focus survivor outreach and assistance registration capabilities in more targeted venues, improving access to those in need, and increasing collaboration with [state, local, tribal, and territorial] partners and nonprofit service providers.”

FEMA has for years deployed staff to travel door-to-door in disaster areas, interacting directly with survivors in their homes to give an overview of FEMA aid application processes and help them register for federal aid. This group of workers is part of a larger cadre often called FEMA’s “boots on the ground” in disaster areas.

Read Next

FEMA moves to end one of its biggest disaster adaptation programs

Zoya Teirstein & Jake Bittle

Ending door-to-door canvassing, one FEMA worker said, will “severely hamper our ability to reach vulnerable people.” The assistance provided by workers going door-to-door, they said, “has usually focused on the most impacted and the most vulnerable communities where there may be people who are elderly or with disabilities or lack of transportation and are unable to reach Disaster Recovery Centers.” This person spoke to Wired on the condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press.

“Door-to-door canvassing is another example of a wasteful and ineffective FEMA program,” Geoff Harbaugh, FEMA’s associate administrator for the Office of External Affairs, told Wired in an email. “Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem, FEMA is changing how it operates and reforming its policies to better support disaster survivors and the American people. President Trump’s recent executive orders empower states to effectively respond to natural disasters and provide resources at the community level.”

Todd DeVoe, the emergency management coordinator for the city of Inglewood, California, and the second vice president at the International Association of Emergency Managers, said that in his years of working in disaster management he has seen how many survivors don’t get information about recovery or resources without door-to-door outreach — despite emergency managers using strategies like direct mailers and radio and newspaper ads.

“Going door-to-door, especially in critically hit areas, to share information is very important,” he said. “There’s a need for it. Can it be done more efficiently? Probably, but getting rid of it completely is really going to hamper some things.”

FEMA’s door-to-door canvassing became a political flash point last year during Hurricane Milton, when an agency whistleblower alerted the conservative news site The Daily Wire that one official had told workers in Florida to avoid approaching homes with Trump yard signs. Former FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell told the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability during a hearing last year that the incident was isolated to one employee, who had since been fired. The employee, in turn, claimed that she acted on orders from a superior and that the issue was a pattern of “hostile encounters” with survivors who had Trump yard signs.

Republicans on the Oversight Committee alleged that they had received information indicating “widespread discrimination against individuals displaying Trump campaign signs on their property” throughout FEMA. In March, the agency fired three more employees following an internal investigation into the issue.

The Office of Professional Responsibility “investigation found no evidence that this was a systemic problem, nor that it was directed by agency or field leadership,” Hamilton wrote in a letter sent to Oversight chair James Comer.

The canvassing controversy made it into the White House’s 2026 budget, released on May 2, which decries “woke FEMA grant programs” and proposes cutting $646 million from “non-disaster” FEMA programs.

“FEMA discriminated against Americans who voted for the president in the wake of recent hurricanes, skipping over their homes when providing aid. This activity will no longer be tolerated,” the budget document states. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

There is no mention in the FEMA memo of the investigation or recent controversy and no reasoning provided for ending the door-to-door canvassing process. FEMA has deployed door-to-door canvassing in states with federal disaster declarations approved under the Trump administration: An agency press release from March mentions teams going door-to-door in West Virginia following February’s severe storms.

Read Next

Trump wants to wind down FEMA. Could states fill the gap?

Jake Bittle

The memo comes at a turbulent time for the agency as it prepares for disaster season. In late April, CNN reported that FEMA stood to lose around 20 percent of its staff in buyouts as part of cuts related to Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency. Last week, Politico reported that the administration had stopped approving allocations for a crucial hazard-mitigation program just a few weeks after news broke that the agency would end one of the federal government’s biggest climate-adaptation programs.

Some of the other reforms in the memo include directives for the agency to “emphasize assistance available from other partners” over federal aid, as well as to emphasize efforts to rely on local- and state-run recovery centers rather than federally-run ones, “reducing the need to establish FEMA Disaster Recovery Centers and optimizing support for state and locally led recovery efforts.” The memo emphasizes that the agency intends to “respect the primacy of states, territories, and Tribal Nations in disaster response.”

“Our role is to support our partners, not replace them,” the memo states. “FEMA does not act alone.”

DeVoe said that like many of the responsibilities being shifted from FEMA to local response, the task of surveying survivors door-to-door will now fall to local and state responders. These groups may be hard-pressed to find the budget and manpower, especially as federal programs and grants keep getting cut.

“California, New York, Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, Oregon, Florida, Texas — they’re going to be OK,” he said. “It’s going to be those smaller states — are they going to be OK?”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA is ending door-to-door canvassing in disaster areas on May 11, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Molly Taft, WIRED.

“I do not believe it is in the best interests of the American people to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency,” Hamilton told members of the House homeland security subcommittee. President Donald J. Trump named him acting head of the agency — more specifically, the senior official performing the duties of the Administrator — in January. His bio no longer appears on the FEMA, as the agency is known, website.

Hamilton’s statement directly contradicted one made a day earlier by his boss, Kristi Noem. She leads the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, which oversees FEMA. Addressing the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday, she said, “The president has indicated he wants to eliminate FEMA as it exists today.”

Neither FEMA or DHS explained why Hamilton is not longer in position.

Tension between Hamilton and Noem has been mounting for weeks. In late March, after news leaked that DHS was considering downsizing FEMA, the department suspected Hamilton of leaking the information and gave him a lie detector test, which cleared him. Politico was the first to report his ouster. 

“I think Cam did the best he could with what he was facing,” one person who recently left the agency and asked to remain anonymous told Grist. “He earned a lot of respect from FEMA staff.”

FEMA employed more than 20,000 people at the start of the Trump administration. Is stated mission is “helping people before, during and after disasters.” For many Americans, the agency is the face of the federal government’s response to events such as Hurricane Helene, the Los Angeles fires, and other disasters. It also runs the National Flood Insurance Program, which covers millions of American homes.

As climate change fuels more extreme weather, the long-underfunded agency has strained to keep pace with its mandates. Hamilton’s departure is happening as the country heads into an Atlantic hurricane season that begins June 1 and is expected to be especially active. 

Both FEMA and DHS confirmed that David Richardson, the assistant secretary at DHS’s countering weapons of mass destruction office, will take over for Hamilton. Richardson, who previously served as a Marine in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Africa, takes the helm at a time when the future of FEMA remains both unclear, and in peril.

Noem has already begun to dismantle the agency. In early April, she announced that it would discontinue mitigation-related grant initiatives. The cancellations include the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, program — the agency’s main climate adaptation program — which was launched during Trump’s first term and has helped hundreds of communities across the country prepare for the impacts of climate change. 

DHS has also recently revived President Trump’s earlier ‘Fork in the Road’ approach to downsizing, which gave employees various options to leave voluntarily, such as early retirement, deferred resignation or a buyout. It’s unclear how many FEMA employees took the offer.

Hamilton reportedly had been making further plans to significantly transform FEMA’s workforce, including potentially sending more employees into the field to respond to disasters. Apparently those changes weren’t enough. 

“When Disaster Strikes, We’re Here to Help,” the FEMA’s website reads. The worry among the agency’s supporters is that, in removing Hamilton, the Trump administration may be clearing the path for broader rollbacks — or ensuring that FEMA doesn’t exist at all.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The head of FEMA defended the agency on Capitol Hill. Trump fired him on May 8, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Tik Root.

What could possibly go wrong with Ameri-snitchers running around their communities?

Don’t like your neighbor’s dog running through your yard? Call ICE. Don’t want to pay for work an immigrant just performed for you? Call ICE. Co-worker not religious or patriotic enough? Call the government’s anti-Christian bias hotline!

Calling ICE on Your Neighbors

In January, Tom Homan, appointed by Trump to oversee deportation efforts, announced plans for a government hotline where individuals can report undocumented immigrants in their communities. Homan stated, “I’m hoping people start calling ICE and reporting because we have millions of people in this country that can be force multipliers for us if they just call us with information.”

“Experts warn government-inspired informing can devolve into corrupt acts and score-settling,” Forbes’ Stuart Anderson reported. “Businesses are likely to become targets during the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Given the nature of bureaucracies, officials will assign a top priority to generating large numbers of arrests without concern for collateral impacts.”

Trump’s Anti-Christian Grievance Hotline

For decades, prominent Religious Right leaders have complained about anti-Christian bias. In early February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.

Politico’s Robbie Gramer and Nahal Toosi recently reported that “The [State Department] … will work with an administration-wide task force to collect information ‘involving anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration’ and will collect examples of anti-Christian bias through anonymous employee report forms. … Some State Department officials reacted to the cable with shock and alarm, saying that even if well-intentioned, it is based on the flawed premise that the department harbors anti-Christian bias to begin with, and warning it could create a culture of fear.”

“The instructions are clear,” Daily Kos’ Alex Samuels recently pointed out. “Give names, dates, and locations of the alleged bias, with a task force set to meet on April 22 to review the ‘evidence.’ The goal? To collect examples of religious discrimination under the Biden administration, because nothing says “freedom of religion” quite like your coworkers quietly documenting your every move for a federal task force.”

According to the Guardian:

One example of the ‘bias’ the department wants reported includes ‘mistreatment for opposing displays of flags, banners or other paraphernalia’ – a thinly veiled reference to Pride flags displayed at US embassies under the previous administration. The cable also specifically points to ‘policies related to preferred personal pronouns’ as potentially discriminatory against religious employees.

George W. Bush’s Operation TIPS

In early March  2002, professional sidekick Ed McMahon (look up Johnny Carson) introduced Attorney General John Ashcroft to an enthusiastic audience of representatives from more than 300 Neighborhood Watch groups meeting in Washington, D.C. Ashcroft unveiled an expanded mission for the Neighborhood Watch Program, announcing a grant of $1.9 million in federal funds to help the National Sheriffs’ Association double the number of participant groups to 15,000 nationwide.

According to the government’s web page at citizencorps.gov/watch.html, “Community residents will be provided with information which will enable them to recognize signs of potential terrorist activity, and to know how to report that activity, making these residents a critical element in the detection, prevention, and disruption of terrorism.” Under the supervision of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), “Terrorism prevention” was intended to become the “routine mission” of the Neighborhood Watch Program, the web site pointed out.

The new thrust of Neighborhood Watch is just part of the Bush Administration’s plan to set up a whole network of citizen snitches. In August, for instance, it will unveil a new Justice Department initiative called Operation TIPS, which stands for Terrorist Information and Prevention System.

Operation TIPS “will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity,” says the citizencorps.gov web site. Involving one million workers in ten cities during the pilot stage, Operation TIPS will be “a national reporting system…. Every participant in this new program will be given an Operation TIPS information sticker to be affixed to the cab of their vehicle or placed in some other public location so that the toll-free number is readily available.”

Encouraging people to skulk around their neighborhoods in search of immigrants, and at government workplaces hunting anti-Christian bias is a totally anti-American undertaking. Trump’s policies could easily lead to abuse and misuse, including racial profiling, false reports and personal vendettas. It could also foster fear and mistrust within communities.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

What could possibly go wrong with Ameri-snitchers running around their communities?

Don’t like your neighbor’s dog running through your yard? Call ICE. Don’t want to pay for work an immigrant just performed for you? Call ICE. Co-worker not religious or patriotic enough? Call the government’s anti-Christian bias hotline!

Calling ICE on Your Neighbors

In January, Tom Homan, appointed by Trump to oversee deportation efforts, announced plans for a government hotline where individuals can report undocumented immigrants in their communities. Homan stated, “I’m hoping people start calling ICE and reporting because we have millions of people in this country that can be force multipliers for us if they just call us with information.”

“Experts warn government-inspired informing can devolve into corrupt acts and score-settling,” Forbes’ Stuart Anderson reported. “Businesses are likely to become targets during the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Given the nature of bureaucracies, officials will assign a top priority to generating large numbers of arrests without concern for collateral impacts.”

Trump’s Anti-Christian Grievance Hotline

For decades, prominent Religious Right leaders have complained about anti-Christian bias. In early February, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias.

Politico’s Robbie Gramer and Nahal Toosi recently reported that “The [State Department] … will work with an administration-wide task force to collect information ‘involving anti-religious bias during the last presidential administration’ and will collect examples of anti-Christian bias through anonymous employee report forms. … Some State Department officials reacted to the cable with shock and alarm, saying that even if well-intentioned, it is based on the flawed premise that the department harbors anti-Christian bias to begin with, and warning it could create a culture of fear.”

“The instructions are clear,” Daily Kos’ Alex Samuels recently pointed out. “Give names, dates, and locations of the alleged bias, with a task force set to meet on April 22 to review the ‘evidence.’ The goal? To collect examples of religious discrimination under the Biden administration, because nothing says “freedom of religion” quite like your coworkers quietly documenting your every move for a federal task force.”

According to the Guardian:

One example of the ‘bias’ the department wants reported includes ‘mistreatment for opposing displays of flags, banners or other paraphernalia’ – a thinly veiled reference to Pride flags displayed at US embassies under the previous administration. The cable also specifically points to ‘policies related to preferred personal pronouns’ as potentially discriminatory against religious employees.

George W. Bush’s Operation TIPS

In early March  2002, professional sidekick Ed McMahon (look up Johnny Carson) introduced Attorney General John Ashcroft to an enthusiastic audience of representatives from more than 300 Neighborhood Watch groups meeting in Washington, D.C. Ashcroft unveiled an expanded mission for the Neighborhood Watch Program, announcing a grant of $1.9 million in federal funds to help the National Sheriffs’ Association double the number of participant groups to 15,000 nationwide.

According to the government’s web page at citizencorps.gov/watch.html, “Community residents will be provided with information which will enable them to recognize signs of potential terrorist activity, and to know how to report that activity, making these residents a critical element in the detection, prevention, and disruption of terrorism.” Under the supervision of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), “Terrorism prevention” was intended to become the “routine mission” of the Neighborhood Watch Program, the web site pointed out.

The new thrust of Neighborhood Watch is just part of the Bush Administration’s plan to set up a whole network of citizen snitches. In August, for instance, it will unveil a new Justice Department initiative called Operation TIPS, which stands for Terrorist Information and Prevention System.

Operation TIPS “will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity,” says the citizencorps.gov web site. Involving one million workers in ten cities during the pilot stage, Operation TIPS will be “a national reporting system…. Every participant in this new program will be given an Operation TIPS information sticker to be affixed to the cab of their vehicle or placed in some other public location so that the toll-free number is readily available.”

Encouraging people to skulk around their neighborhoods in search of immigrants, and at government workplaces hunting anti-Christian bias is a totally anti-American undertaking. Trump’s policies could easily lead to abuse and misuse, including racial profiling, false reports and personal vendettas. It could also foster fear and mistrust within communities.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.

In an internal FEMA memorandum obtained and first reported by Grist, the Trump administration announced it plans to dismantle that program — the biggest climate adaptation initiative the federal government has ever funded — even as disasters incur hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damages across the United States. The decision comes as at least seven people were killed this week as tornadoes and catastrophic flooding descended on the central United States in what meteorologists called a once in a generation event.

The Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, or BRIC, was established in 2018 during President Donald Trump’s first term, replacing a similar FEMA initiative. BRIC’s first round of funding was launched in 2020, when Trump was still in office, and in 2023, the program awarded close to a billion dollars to scores of communities, states, and Tribal Nations across the country. In January, before Trump began his second term, the agency opened its fiscal year 2024 notice of funding, with $750 million in matching grants made available to applicants from areas that received a major disaster declaration within the past seven years. 

But FEMA now aims to cancel those grants and any other BRIC grants that have not been paid out yet by the federal government, according to the pre-decisional memo dated April 2 from Cameron Hamilton, a Trump administration official who is serving as FEMA administrator until the president appoints a permanent head of the agency. 

“Following the Administration’s direction, FEMA is working to … implement the principles of cost efficiency and commonsense to our approaches and investments,” the memo says. The BRIC program generally shoulders 75 percent of the cost of a given resilience project, and up to 90 percent of the cost of projects in disadvantaged communities. The program’s emphasis on equity is what may have marked it for demolition — the Trump administration has been systematically dismantling Biden-era efforts to infuse equity into governmental programs and direct more climate spending toward underrepresented groups.

FEMA employees disputed Hamilton’s argument in the memo that BRIC grants “have not enhanced the level of hazard mitigation as much as desired.”

“I don’t know where that came from,” said one agency employee who preferred to stay anonymous. 

According to a source within the agency, the Trump administration asked BRIC staffers to offer justification for the program and its Direct Technical Assistance sister initiative, which offers non-financial support to help communities navigate the BRIC funding process and identify the hazards they face. The request was made on Tuesday this week with a Wednesday deadline. 

With a tight turnaround, staffers offered success stories from across the country. BRIC awards have helped communities bury power lines, protect wastewater facilities from being inundated by flooding, build culverts, and upgrade power stations. If the draft memo takes effect and BRIC is frozen, communities will no longer be able to apply for the grants for fiscal year 2024 made available in January. Projects that have been selected in past years but not yet disbursed funds will no longer receive payment. Partially completed projects will be scrutinized and reviewed, the memo said. 

“The administration now has one of FEMA’s most effective grant programs on the chopping block,” said Shana Udvardy, a senior climate resilience policy analyst with the Climate & Energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s oversubscribed almost every single year.” In fiscal year 2023, FEMA received more than 1,200 subapplications across all 50 states, 35 tribes, five territories, and Washington D.C. totaling more than $5.6 billion in requests. It was able to provide less than a fifth of the money requested. 

A looming question is whether FEMA can yank grants that are being funded with money appropriated by Congress. The 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, allocated approximately $6.8 billion to FEMA for community-wide mitigation efforts, with a portion of this funding directed to the BRIC program. “If this administration does away with the program, it goes against a law that Congress passed,” Udvardy said, “so there’s a concern there to be raised.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA moves to end one of its biggest disaster adaptation programs on Apr 3, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

Storm-wracked house, coastal Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair

Imagine a world in which a hurricane devastates the Gulf Coast, and the U.S. has no federal agency prepared to quickly send supplies, financial aid and temporary housing assistance.

The post If FEMA Didn’t Exist, Could State’s Handle Disaster Response? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ming Xie.

Storm-wracked house, coastal Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair

Imagine a world in which a hurricane devastates the Gulf Coast, and the U.S. has no federal agency prepared to quickly send supplies, financial aid and temporary housing assistance.

The post If FEMA Didn’t Exist, Could State’s Handle Disaster Response? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Ming Xie.

Noem’s announcement was just the latest in a series of Trump administration moves to radically decrease or eliminate the federal government’s role in responding to climate-driven disasters. Just after taking office, the president mused about eliminating FEMA and then convened a council to consider the agency’s future. In recent weeks, he has laid off hundreds of staff who work on resilience and preparedness. And last week, Trump signed an executive order that called for state and local governments to “play a more active and significant role in national resilience and preparedness” and directed agencies to “streamline” their disaster resilience efforts.

Trump’s unprecedented efforts to weaken FEMA come at a time when many disasters are intensifying due to climate change. A study of more than 750 recent heat waves, wildfires, and flood events found that around 75 percent of these events had been made significantly worse by human-caused warming. Though experts say there is merit in the idea of beefing up state and local emergency preparedness, they also caution that the Trump administration’s slash-and-burn approach to remaking the federal government could backfire when it comes to FEMA. While they acknowledge that disaster response needs reform, they also argue that a total withdrawal by the federal government would leave many communities in the lurch, especially those that can’t fund disaster recovery on their own.

For much of American history, a state that suffered a disaster had to plead with Congress for a one-off infusion of money, then figure out how to spend that money on its own. In 1980, the Carter administration created FEMA to speed up the government’s response to worsening disasters. The agency got its own multibillion-dollar pot of money to reimburse states for disaster response, including for disasters that are too small to get a special transfer from Congress. Over the past 45 years, it has distributed billions of dollars in grants to help local areas prepare for future disasters, reduce flood risk, and — more recently — address climate change. The agency also coordinates multistate responses to large disasters, summoning search-and-rescue and cleanup teams from across the country after big hurricanes.

In the decades since FEMA’s botched response to 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, the agency has been a frequent target of criticism by politicians and the public. Local officials often complain that federal involvement tends to slow down disaster response, and emergency management experts warn that it disincentivizes state and local authorities from taking action to reduce climate risks. FEMA’s programs to increase disaster resilience come with reams of paperwork, and the agency often pays to rebuild the same areas over and over again without reducing actual risk.

Trump’s recent executive order pushing for a bigger state and local role in disaster response echoes some past criticism of the agency, calling for reforms “to reduce complexity and better protect and serve Americans.” 

“A lot of this stuff in the order, I look at it, and it just sounds like Emergency Management 101,” said W. Craig Fugate, who served as FEMA administrator under then-president Barack Obama. He said emergency managers have long maintained that state and local governments should not rely on federal aid and to make them whole after disasters, and need to find their own ways to reduce risk over the long run.

However, other experts fear that what Trump is proposing could leave cities and states unable to pay for much-needed resilience projects—and that a rapid shuttering of FEMA would leave most states and local governments unprepared to fill the gap.

“The Trump administration aims to shift most of the responsibility for disaster preparedness to state and local governments, asking them to make more expensive infrastructure investments without outlining what support the federal government will provide,” said Shana Udvardy, senior climate resilience policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy organization.

Trump’s public statements and executive orders on the issue have been vague — so vague, in fact, that Udvardy called them “baffling.” If Noem and Trump tried to wind down the agency altogether, the move would likely face similar legal challenges as his attempts to destroy the Department of Education — neither agency can lawfully be closed without congressional approval. But in theory, if the administration prevailed in closing FEMA, or moved some of its operations to the Department of Homeland Security, there are a few ways the change could play out. 

One scenario would be a return to the situation that existed before FEMA, when states had to seek direct help from Congress or another federal agency every time they suffered a disaster. Congress works differently now than it did in the decades before FEMA existed — it often takes months or years for lawmakers to send out long-term recovery money after a disaster such as the 2023 Maui wildfires, which can make it hard for local governments to find money to develop replacement housing and restore public infrastructure. Congress is also far more polarized than it used to be, even on the issue of disaster aid — Republican leaders have suggested they might impose political “conditions” on wildfire assistance to California, goading the state to change its policies on immigration or water management.

Without a centralized disaster fund like the one FEMA has, the party in control of Congress would control who gets relief money, which could delay or derail rebuilding efforts in states run by the out-party. 

Another possibility, whether or not FEMA is abolished, would be for Congress to provide a flat amount of preparedness money to each state and let states decide how to spend it, which is how some other big federal programs work. But this scenario could also be subject to political maneuvering: When the Department of Housing and Urban Development distributed its own disaster recovery block grant to Texas after Hurricane Harvey, the state government allegedly favored white and rural areas over Black and Latino residents in Houston, according to a federal probe.

If FEMA shrank or disappeared, it’s unclear who would coordinate lifesaving aid between states during large disasters. But if states continued to receive robust disaster funds from Congress, and if they distributed this money equitably, it could potentially speed up a spending process that is often described as being slow and bureaucratic.

For instance, in Harris County, Texas, which encompasses the massive Houston metro area, floodplain officials said that removing federal oversight could accelerate the process of acquiring and demolishing so-called “repetitive-loss” homes — those that flood multiple times. Officials would no longer be subject to federal paperwork requirements before they bought out homes.

“Currently, every level of government is involved when utilizing federal grant programs for flood mitigation,” said James Wade, who leads the county’s home buyout program. “Removing one level of government may help expedite the process.” Wade’s program could certainly use some paperwork relief. Thanks in large part to federal grant requirements, it can take as long as five years for the county to purchase and destroy a flooded home, during which time flood victims have no choice but to wait or flip their homes to private buyers.

But if Trump’s reforms led to a reduction in overall federal disaster funding — as seems likely, given his focus on cutting spending — the county might not be able to keep up its current pace of adaptation projects. The county flood control district has applied for no fewer than 14 FEMA grants, for stormwater upgrades as well as buyouts, and a shift away from national funding could make it harder to fund these essential projects.

The district “relies heavily on federal programs to leverage the local funds for flood mitigation,” said Wade. Under Trump’s new approach, “The question is who decides how to allocate the funds to the states and how much each is allocated.”

A reduction in federal grant money for resilience projects could force local governments to make harder choices. This wouldn’t always be a bad thing. Fugate pointed to the state of Florida, which rolled out strong building codes after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, forcing developers to build houses that could withstand strong winds. The move led to up-front costs for builders, but reduced damage in the long run.

The problem with this tough-love approach is that many states and local governments aren’t ready to handle disaster resilience on their own — they don’t have the expertise to design new building codes or plan for climate change, and they don’t have the money to build infrastructure that can protect against existing flood and fire risk. Past administrations have rolled out a number of reforms to help these communities design and fund such infrastructure projects: In 2020, FEMA began providing “direct technical assistance” to help rural communities and low-income areas figure out their vulnerabilities and design projects. It also changed its scoring for grant applications to privilege rural and disadvantaged communities more. (The direct technical assistance page is now unavailable on FEMA’s website.)

Udvardy, of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said that taking FEMA out of the resilience equation would leave smaller and poorer communities in the lurch, without either the money or expertise they needed to reduce their risk. This would cost the government and disaster victims more in the long run. 

“Based on the indiscriminate way this administration has laid off staff with deep expertise and upended critical science … I am very concerned that the implications of this order will mean less support for communities to help them prepare for and recover from the disasters to come,” said Udvardy.  

The worst-affected places would be rural areas in poor states like West Virginia, where the federal government is the only entity with the resources to finance even basic adaptation projects like flood retention ponds or home elevations. Many of these areas supported Trump last year by wide margins.

The rural city of Grants Pass, Oregon, is already experiencing the potential consequences of such a federal shift. The city has been working to secure $50 million from a FEMA grant program designed to enhance climate resilience. The city’s water treatment plant is almost 100 old, and it sits right next to the flood-prone Rogue River. In the event of a big storm or earthquake, the plant could flood or collapse, leaving locals without clean drinking water.

Grants Pass has already raised utility rates on its 33,000 customers to fund the construction of a new plant, but it was still falling short of the money it needed for such a large project. In 2023, FEMA advanced the city’s grant application to build a new treatment plant away from the floodplain, which the local public works director called “incredible good fortune.”

But late in February, the state of Oregon informed Grants Pass that FEMA had canceled all coordination meetings around the grant program, and now city officials have no idea if they’ll receive the money they’ve spent years counting on.

“This grant is a critical piece of our funding strategy,” said Jason Canady, the city’s public works director. “We are concerned, but at this point we are not sure what actions can be taken to ensure an award will be forthcoming.”

Fugate, the former FEMA administrator, said that cuts to federal resilience funding would split the nation into haves and have-nots. States and cities that have the staffing and money to pursue adaptation efforts would do so, and might even be able to complete some projects faster than they can right now. But rural areas would no longer have access to federal money that enables them to even consider reducing climate risk. People living in those places will have less protection from future disasters, exposing them to the risk of death or injury, and will have a harder time recovering after disasters, which could push them into poverty.

“They’ll have more flexibility — with less money,” said Fugate.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump wants to wind down FEMA. Could states fill the gap? on Mar 27, 2025.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

The loss of these staff will degrade FEMA’s ability to execute the critical missions the agency performs for the country. Beyond responding to ongoing storms, fires, and floods, FEMA staff help communities prepare for disasters, support long-term recovery efforts, work to reduce states’ and communities’ vulnerabilities, and support resilience and preparedness efforts nationwide.

Additional cuts on the horizon

Additional cuts are possible as the Trump administration looks to get rid of even more staff, according to news reports. These will reportedly target FEMA staff who work on climate resilience and disaster risk reduction. These cuts “will affect the entire FEMA workforce,” according to an internal agency memo, particularly the directorates for national preparedness, grants, hazard mitigation, and flood insurance and mitigation.

“FEMA staff are some of the most critical and needed in the federal government," says Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at NRDC. Slashing these employees indiscriminately will put more Americans in harm’s way, and means we will have slower and less-coordinated recovery efforts.”

These actions come days after deadly floods in Kentucky and West Virginia. Hundreds of people are still displaced from their homes. Tens of thousands are without safe drinking water, and many roads remain impassable. The staff firings will reduce FEMA's ability to manage these emergencies, and response times will likely slow dramatically. Seven additional disaster declarations are currently awaiting approval by the White House, delaying critical assistance needed in states from California to Virginia.

States and local governments depend on FEMA to recover from disasters

FEMA is currently operating 33 joint field offices across the country, with thousands of staff supporting 97 major disasters and 9 emergency declarations. The agency is also managing long-term funding and recovery for 654 major disasters dating back many years. In total, FEMA is managing 1,057 incidents across every U.S. state and territory, including major disasters, federal emergencies, and fire management incidents.

The independent Government Accountability Office (GAO) cites the increasing frequency of disasters as stretching FEMA’s workforce in “unprecedented ways.” According to GAO, the number of disasters that FEMA is managing “more than doubled in the last seven years, from 30 disasters in 2016 to 71 disasters in 2023. Similarly, the average daily deployments increased from 3,331 employees before 2017, to 7,113 after 2017.”

For recent and ongoing disasters, federal staff are deployed to directly support response and recovery operations. During this phase, FEMA plays a major role coordinating complex operations involving multiple federal, state, and local agencies, as well as volunteer and nonprofit groups that work on disasters (e.g., the Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, and community- and faith-based organizations). Later, FEMA transitions from active management to a supporting role, coordinating activities through its regional offices and with other federal, state, and local agencies.

FEMA staff also play a key role in distributing critical disaster funding to households, communities, states, and nonprofits. In 2024 alone, FEMA obligated $35 billion in funds to state and local governments for immediate disaster response and cleanup, as well as $29 billion to repair public buildings and infrastructure. Billions more were provided directly to disaster survivors, including $385 million just to North Carolinians affected by Hurricane Helene.

As of this writing, there are also seven major disaster declaration requests from governors that are pending action from FEMA and approval by President Trump. These include disasters in Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Washington, Oklahoma, and California.

FEMA disaster staffing was already inadequate

As of February 20, FEMA has 14,203 staff assigned to various disasters around the country, with 7,136 of those deployed to joint field offices or other remote locations that are supporting active recovery efforts.

FEMA disaster staffing has been very thin for many years, as the frequency and severity of catastrophic disasters has increased. According to GAO, in 2022, “FEMA had a disaster workforce strength of approximately 11,400 employees at the beginning of fiscal year 2022, a gap of 35 percent between the actual number of staff and the staffing target of 17,670.”

The agency has not been able to achieve its disaster staffing targets for many years. This is due in part to high turnover in FEMA’s disaster workforce, as staff experience burnout with the increasing pace of disaster response, length of deployments, and the mounting pressure of existing staffing shortages.

President Trump’s cuts to FEMA staff will further exacerbate existing problems, leaving the nation unprepared for the disasters that will undoubtedly occur in the months and years ahead.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

But Florida may also present Trump with one of his thorniest political challenges. He’ll have to oversee the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which has spent the past four years bringing down the hammer on Americans who live in disaster-prone regions like Florida’s populous coasts, rolling out a series of insurance hikes and enforcement actions that make it more expensive to live and rebuild in risky areas.

This ongoing effort is a direct threat to the boom of cheap coastal development that has fueled the Sunshine State’s breakneck growth. Florida accounts for a huge share of the nation’s total risk from hurricanes and floods: It has more than $2 trillion in residential property, almost all of which is vulnerable to extreme winds or flooding, and it accounts for more than a third of all policies in the federal government’s public National Flood Insurance Program. FEMA is now raising premiums in that flood insurance program by around 18 percent per year in parts of the state — based on a formula developed during Trump’s first term — and it’s also penalizing Floridians who rebuild their homes in dangerous areas.

In conservative Lee County, which lost more than 5,000 homes to Hurricane Ian in 2022, a backlash has reached a fever pitch. Last spring, FEMA accused the county and several of its cities, including Fort Myers Beach, of disregarding federal rules that require homeowners to elevate their homes when rebuilding after floods, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars per home but lowers the amount that taxpayers will have to pay for future disaster relief in the area. Lee County towns allowed hundreds of homeowners to rebuild at ground level after Ian, according to FEMA, and in response the agency moved to take away their flood insurance discounts, which could raise average insurance costs by hundreds of dollars per year. County leaders accused the federal government of “revenge politics” and threatened to sue.

As Trump takes office, he and his FEMA director will have to choose how to approach these kinds of conflicts, which are brewing in every place where the real estate market is premised on government-subsidized disaster relief. Trump could let the agency stay the course, which would save the federal government money on future disaster relief but place financial burdens on some of his most stalwart supporters. Or he could let Floridians off the hook, forgiving the dangerous redevelopment and siding with Republican state officials who want insurance relief.

Read Next

FEMA is making an example of this Florida boomtown. Locals call it ‘revenge politics.’

Jake Bittle

The president-elect has tried to politicize the disaster relief process in the past. During his first administration, he diverted FEMA funding to beef up immigration enforcement at the southern border; last month, an outgoing agency official said that he feared Trump would do so again on a larger scale in his second term. Trump also vowed earlier this year to deny wildfire relief money to California unless the drought-prone state delivers more irrigation water to farmers. But Trump’s first administration also tried to fix long-standing issues that were driving the National Flood Insurance Program into insolvency by designing the very premium hikes that now draw so much ire from Florida Republicans. 

As of now, there’s little evidence about his intentions for his second term. The two members of congress who he’s reportedly considered to lead FEMA, Republican Garret Graves of Louisiana and Democrat Jared Moskowitz of Florida (who denies he’s interested in the job), are deeply engaged on disaster relief issues and currently represent constituencies who benefit heavily from subsidized disaster relief and flood insurance. Graves has blasted FEMA’s efforts to raise insurance premiums.

Despite the uncertainty, current FEMA officials say they don’t believe Trump will tamper with the agency’s efforts to stop development in flood-prone areas, if only because those efforts help cut federal spending in the long run.

“I think there’s been a shift in perspective since that last administration on investing in a way that’s built to last,” said Victoria Salinas, FEMA’s current head of resilience. “No taxpayer should want their money going into things that are clearly going to get damaged before their time is up.”

The conflict in Fort Myers Beach was over exactly this issue: Homeowners wanted to rebuild houses primed for future damage, despite federal regulations that prohibited them from doing so without elevating them above potential floodwaters. Local politicians appeared happy to let them do so.

“It’s very political,” said Bill Veach, a former Fort Myers Beach city council member who was in office during Hurricane Ian. “You’ve got people on the council who were elected at a time when people were tired of regulations, and so they kind of made an effort to be softer.”

After the initial spat with Lee County in April, the Biden administration tried to smooth things over, restoring insurance discounts in almost every town in the county. But last month, the agency imposed harsh penalties on Fort Myers Beach, where the risky rebuilding was most egregious, and it has faced a torrent of criticism from Florida officials ever since. 

The political divisions between the state and the feds only got worse in the aftermath of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, when a FEMA relief crew supervisor told her employees not to knock on the doors of homes with Trump lawn signs when distributing information about disaster aid. FEMA chief Deanne Criswell fired the employee and called her actions a “clear violation of FEMA’s core values,” but the incident created a frenzy among conservative politicians in Florida. The state’s attorney general sued the agency over the alleged bias, and Republican congressman Byron Donalds called for the agency to be “completely revamped.” The House of Representatives later called Criswell to testify about the incident. 

Some town residents are hoping the incoming Trump administration will restore Fort Myers Beach’s insurance discount, as well as clean house at the agency.

“I’ve worked with FEMA for about 20 years,” said Fred Mallone, a restaurant owner who also runs an emergency management business, at a Fort Myers Beach town council meeting earlier this week. “They’re all gonna get fired. So, don’t be scared of FEMA.”

FEMA’s problems go well beyond Lee County. The Trump administration also inherits nationwide blowback around attempts to raise flood insurance premiums for the riskiest homes. The shift to a new system of higher premiums for riskier properties, known as Risk Rating 2.0, was planned under the first Trump administration. The administration also sought to end insurance coverage altogether for new homes in flood-prone areas, part of a long-standing campaign by conservatives to wind down government-subsidized flood insurance. The Project 2025 agenda, which Trump disavowed during the presidential campaign and re-avowed after winning election, proposes to end the National Flood Insurance Program altogether.

But the politics of flood insurance have become scrambled since Trump’s first term. When the Biden administration rolled out Risk Rating 2.0, flood insurance rates started to soar in coastal states, rising to more than $10,000 a year for some households. A group of Republican state attorneys general, including those representing Florida and Louisiana, filed suit to block the program.

As costs keep rising and coastal households feel the squeeze, Trump will face pressure from multiple directions. The conservative policymakers behind Project 2025 will pressure him to go even further than Risk Rating 2.0 and wind down federal flood insurance altogether, while coastal politicians in Florida and Louisiana will pressure him to roll back FEMA’s insurance rate hikes, effectively restoring taxpayer-funded subsidies to the program. The latter may align more closely with Trump’s own self-interest: The president’s Mar-a-Lago estate is a customer of the flood insurance program and stands to see its premiums shoot up under the new system. 

But some FEMA experts doubt Trump will chart a drastic course in either direction.

When it comes to flood insurance, the first Trump administration “was sort of just a period of neglect,” said Rebecca Elliott, a professor of sociology at the London School of Economics who has studied the flood insurance program. “Whether you think that was benign neglect or malign neglect, I think is open to interpretation.” Either way, she said, the administration is unlikely to revoke Risk Rating 2.0, which would return FEMA to a system that the agency has admitted was prone to miscalculating insurance costs. 

As for the more radical Project 2025 proposals to wind down subsidized flood coverage altogether, Elliott doubts they will find purchase, even in a very conservative administration. The program’s subsidized coverage helps prop up the value of floodplain homes in places like Florida, and as a result these homes are overvalued by as much as $237 billion, according to one estimate. Winding down the program would likely cause these home values to crater, and it would leave homeowners on their own to deal with flood damages, which now exceed $500 billion in the United States each year.

“I think natural disasters are one of those areas where people kind of lose their free market religion as soon as they need help,” Elliott said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As Trump mulls his FEMA pick, a political land mine awaits in Florida on Dec 20, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Honolulu Civil Beat. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

When the federal government stepped in to rent housing for survivors of the devastating 2023 fires on Maui, officials said they didn’t want to drive up rental rates or give landlords an incentive to evict tenants in order to secure lucrative government contracts.

On paper, the plan sounded good: It would rely on finding empty vacation rentals and second homes, which was consistent with Federal Emergency Management Agency policy.

But new reporting shows that FEMA didn’t take basic steps to ensure that happened: When the agency inked contracts with private companies to identify homes they could rent for survivors, it didn’t prohibit them from signing up properties that had been occupied by long-term residents.

Without such safeguards, and with FEMA offering rates well above what residents typically paid each month in rent, some landlords kicked out tenants and housed wildfire survivors for more money. Local economists warned that rents could rise across the small island and that Maui’s housing crisis could intensify — and both have come to pass, Civil Beat and ProPublica found.

A study of the impact of emergency housing programs on Maui’s economy, commissioned by FEMA itself, found that median rent rose 44% from early 2023 to June 2024. Though researchers concluded that was primarily due to the loss of so much housing in the fires, they said anecdotal evidence and hundreds of complaints to state agencies indicated that “the behavior of some landlords may have changed” in response to FEMA’s high prices, leading to increased rents and displacement.

Reporting by Civil Beat and ProPublica corroborates the researchers’ conclusion. Tenants, housing advocates, government officials and property owners have said that landlords have jacked up rents and that residents have been displaced by wildfire survivors or others who will pay more.

“It seemed pretty clear they were setting up a bounty system for removing long-term residents,” said Justin Tyndall, an associate professor at the University of Hawaii who co-wrote a report cautioning that FEMA’s housing program could cause residents to be displaced. “If you could just find a way to get your tenant to leave, then you would be eligible for these enormous rents from FEMA. So it’s unsurprising that people would find creative ways to try to tap into that money.”

When it launched the program, the agency did instruct potential contractors to lease units “not available to the general public.” David Greenberg, the head of Parliament LLC, one of the companies FEMA hired, said in an email that the agency made it clear that leasing properties from landlords who had forced out tenants, even if the company didn’t know about it, would cause Parliament to lose its contract. He said his employees sought out properties advertised as vacation rentals and were instructed to “explicitly ask owners and property managers if there were any existing tenants.”

FEMA officials told Civil Beat and ProPublica that the 1,362 properties in the agency’s housing program were primarily vacation rentals and second homes, though they didn’t know exactly how many. They also said FEMA’s policy allows for flexibility; because housing on the island was limited and their program couldn’t meet survivors’ needs with vacation rentals alone, the agency allowed any property owner to sign up as long as the home was safe and ready for move-in.

One nonprofit that also leased properties was more proactive in trying to prevent profiteering by landlords. The Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, a prominent local nonprofit, ran the only nongovernmental leasing program after the fires. On the online application for its program, property owners had to attest that they were not evicting anyone in order to house survivors. They had to say what type of rental property they had and whether it was furnished. And if a landlord said a property was a short-term rental, staff tried to verify that through property tax records or Airbnb listings.

Additionally, if a landlord said a property was a long-term rental — the type of property FEMA hoped to avoid — CNHA requested prior leases and the names of previous tenants so staff could make sure no one had been pushed out, according to Skye Kolealani Razon-Olds, who oversees the nonprofit’s emergency housing and recovery efforts. When the nonprofit did lease long-term rentals, it offered lower rates than for vacation rentals. By contrast, FEMA said it generally set its rates to be competitive with what tourists typically paid.

“We knew the areas that were typically used for short-term rentals, we had deeper conversations with folks, and we were willing to say no,” Razon-Olds said. “Most of the stuff that we went for was short-term rental, so we knew that we weren’t going to be moving somebody.”

Bob Fenton, the FEMA regional administrator in charge of disaster relief after the fires, acknowledged that the agency didn’t require contractors to avoid long-term rentals. “It’s not like we put in the contract: must be in the vacation rental market,” he said. He said he wasn’t aware of FEMA’s contractors taking the steps that CNHA did but added that the agency is open to suggestions on how to improve the program. “Those are all ideas, recommendations, lessons learned that we’ll take into account as we continue to operate here,” he said.

In practice, it largely fell to FEMA’s contractors to ensure that their efforts to secure housing didn’t lead landlords to force people out. Greenberg, the head of Parliament, said his company refused to work with several landlords who were trying to evict current tenants. “If we caught even a whiff of impropriety, we would move on to the next unit.”

However, the online application that the company created for property owners didn’t ask anything about tenants or what type of rental it was — just the address, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, when it would be available and additional information such as whether pets were allowed or if it was accessible for people with disabilities.

In response to allegations that companies like his were more focused on speed than vetting properties, Greenberg said, “I am proud of the balance we upheld in ensuring that all of our properties were compliant, owners were treated with respect, and the survivors living in our units were received with dignity.” He didn’t answer a question about whether his employees inquired about prior tenants.

Fenton acknowledged that the agency wouldn’t normally know if someone had been forced out before its contractor leased a unit. In “fewer than 10” cases, Fenton said, it learned that a landlord had improperly terminated a tenant’s lease in order to participate in FEMA’s program. It kicked those properties out.

Parliament was one of three companies hired by FEMA to manage properties; representatives of the other two, Lima Charlie Inc. and Aesthetic Home Investments, did not respond to questions from Civil Beat and ProPublica.

Two landlords who had rented to long-term tenants before the fires told Civil Beat and ProPublica that FEMA’s contractors spent little time vetting their properties. Hank Rapoza, a Maui-based real estate agent, said he contacted Parliament in December or January about leasing his two-bedroom condo in Wailea. He said a representative asked if the unit was vacant and didn’t inquire further when he said it was. The company offered him $7,500 a month, far more than the $3,500 he had charged before.

“The $7,500 was more than fair, so I said I’ll take it,” Rapoza said. “After I said that, I had a lease sent to me in three hours that I signed. That’s how fast they were.”

Steven Clark, the other landlord, said signing up for the program was remarkably easy. After the fires he listed a newly renovated three-bedroom home in Makawao, asking $4,000 a month. In November, he said, he was eating tacos from a food truck in Kahului when a representative of Lima Charlie called and offered him $8,000 a month. Clark said no one asked about previous tenants; the representative just wanted to know if the place was empty. Clark said it was. “They took me at my word,” Clark said. They struck a deal before he finished his lunch.

Struggling to Keep or Find Housing After Maui’s Wildfires? Tell Us Your Story.

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Nick Grube, Honolulu Civil Beat.

This article was produced in partnership with Source New Mexico, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2023. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Victims of New Mexico’s biggest wildfire could receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government for the hardship they endured when the blaze roared across their land in 2022 after the U.S. Forest Service accidentally ignited it.

U.S. District Judge James Browning said at the end of a hearing in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Tuesday that he was “leaning” toward ruling for fire victims who sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency last year for limiting the types of damages it would pay for. Browning said he would issue a ruling as soon as possible, but likely not until next month.

The lawsuit centers on FEMA’s determination that a federal law allows it to pay victims for economic losses but not emotional harm, which Source New Mexico and ProPublica reported on in January. Lawyers for fire victims said some people who owned little of value would not get enough money to rebuild unless FEMA paid for emotional harm.

If Browning does side with victims, FEMA could be required to compensate them for the stress of fleeing the fire, the distress they felt as it burned their trees and the toll of losing their home and possessions — what victims’ lawyers describe in legal filings as “annoyance, discomfort and inconvenience.”

A few could get sizable payments for pain and suffering resulting from injuries, in addition to payments for the injuries themselves. So far, the only recourse for people who were injured or for the families of those who died in the fire or ensuing floods has been to sue the federal government — a long, uncertain process. One suit filed on behalf of three people who died in post-fire flooding is pending.

Gerald Singleton, whose San Diego-based firm is representing about 1,000 victims of the fire, said in an interview after the hearing that emotional harm losses could amount to about $400 million. Such payments could result in a more equitable distribution of funds than the current system, he said, because renters and people with little to their name would receive money beyond the dollar value of their possessions.

If victims win, it’s not clear how quickly they could be paid. Lawyers representing FEMA said the agency would have to go through the formal rulemaking process to allow for payments for emotional damages. That could take months.

The money would come out of a nearly $4 billion fund Congress established in September 2022 to, as President Joe Biden put it, “fully compensate” victims of the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire. It was triggered by two controlled burns that escaped to scorch a 534-square-mile area and destroy several hundred homes.

As of Friday, FEMA’s Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Claims Office has paid $1.5 billion to households, nonprofits, businesses and local and tribal governments.

Jay Mitchell, director of the claims office, watched the hearing Tuesday. In a brief interview afterward, Mitchell suggested it could be challenging and costly to dole out payments for emotional distress.

He said the ruling could open the door to a flood of claims seeking damages for “nuisance” or “trespass” from people whose properties were touched by wildfire smoke. “Smoke goes where it goes,” he said as he walked into a meeting with lawyers representing FEMA.

FEMA declined to comment further, citing the pending lawsuit, and encouraged anyone affected by the fire to file a claim by Dec. 20.

The crux of the legal fight is FEMA’s interpretation of the Hermits Peak-Calf Calf Canyon Fire Assistance Act, written and sponsored by U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez and U.S. Sen. Ben Ray Luján, Democrats from New Mexico. Plaintiffs argue that the agency improperly denied what are called “noneconomic damages” when it finalized the rules for how the $4 billion fund would be paid out. Those rules limited compensation to economic damages, those that come with a price tag: things like cars, homes, business expenses and cattle.

For months, lawyers for FEMA and four firms representing victims have exchanged briefs over what federal lawmakers intended when they wrote the bill. In Tuesday’s hearing, Browning questioned lawyers for both sides about that language.

For example, the law says payments “shall be limited to actual compensatory damages.” Victims’ lawyers argued, with numerous citations in New Mexico law and elsewhere, that “actual compensatory damages” historically means both economic and noneconomic damages. Lawyers representing FEMA interpreted the clause to mean that Congress was imposing a limitation: Only economic damages were allowed. Browning said he agreed with lawyers for the victims. “Plaintiffs have a better reading,” he said.

At the beginning of Tuesday’s hearing, Browning said he’d already made up his mind on one issue: He agreed that New Mexico law does allow noneconomic damages to be paid to victims in a scenario like the fire. That’s important because the federal law requires damages to be calculated in accordance with state law.

He cited an opinion issued this year from the New Mexico attorney general that concluded emotional hardship payments are allowed for victims of “nuisance and trespass.” Two state lawmakers requested that opinion shortly after Source and ProPublica reported on the issue.

Browning said he would try to rule quickly, citing previous delays in getting money to victims. “I don’t live under a rock,” he said. “I know that there has been a lot of criticism of how slow the process was.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico.

Parts of Florida’s Gulf Coast are bracing for a Category 3 hurricane just two weeks after Hurricane Helene made landfall, devastating much of the state’s panhandle region and southern Appalachia. Nearly a dozen counties in Florida have received evacuation orders to prepare for Hurricane Milton, which stunned meteorologists with its extreme rapid intensification and is expected to make landfall Wednesday night. 

The one-two punch of back-to-back hurricanes is straining federal disaster relief resources. As FEMA contends with Helene recovery as well as wildfires blazing across the West, only 8 percent of the agency’s incident management staff is available to respond to new disasters, according to its daily operations briefing for Wednesday. 

FEMA faced funding problems well before Helene came along: In a report on the state of the agency’s disaster relief fund from the end of August, FEMA projected it would hit a deficit the following month. A few weeks later, in September, Congress allocated $20 billion to the emergency agency as part of a stopgap spending bill meant to avoid a government shutdown. 

But in the week after Helene made landfall, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose cabinet department houses FEMA, said the agency would not have enough money to get through the rest of hurricane season, which lasts through the end of November. President Joe Biden has since urged lawmakers to send more money FEMA’s way — so the agency can avoid making the “unnecessary trade-off” of diverting resources away from long-term recovery efforts in order to address any immediate emergencies.

Additional funding seems unlikely to arrive in time to affect recovery efforts for Hurricane Milton. Speaking to Fox News, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he will not bring the lower chamber of Congress back from its October break to consider sending more money to FEMA, and that he won’t consider the matter until after the November 5 election.

FEMA uses its disaster relief fund to do things like pay for disaster support and local debris removal, repair damaged public infrastructure, and offer financial aid to qualifying victims. The fund spent an average of $12 billion dollars annually between 1992 and 2021, with 44 percent of that money going to hurricane relief. 

But in the wake of Helene, FEMA has faced a barrage of bogus rumors about disaster relief dollars being misused and redirected towards housing migrants. The agency has plainly denied the claim on its website: “This is false. No money is being diverted from disaster response needs.” FEMA does have a small grant program, representing less than 3 percent of its annual budget, that provides humanitarian support for noncitizen immigrants being released from detention facilities — but this program is entirely separate from its disaster relief fund. Still, rumors about misspent disaster funding have added fuel to the fire created by right-wing pot-stirrers like radio host Alex Jones and Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who claim that FEMA is botching its response to Helene. 

Although the rumors of redirected funds are baseless, they have proved to be sticky, with several Republican lawmakers spreading the misinformation. For example, when asked why she voted against the congressional stopgap measure that sent $20 billion to FEMA, Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, who represents Tennessee, called the bill “reckless” and said she would not fund “flying illegals into our country.” In his Fox News interview, Speaker Mike Johnson conceded that, yes, FEMA’s disaster relief and migrant aid dollars come from two different pools of funding — and then continued to conflate the two efforts. 

As Republicans politicize disaster relief operations, Mayorkas backtracked on FEMA’s funding needs. On Wednesday, the homeland security secretary stated that FEMA “quite clearly” has everything it needs to effectively respond to Hurricane Milton. Meanwhile, FEMA itself has largely downplayed any pressures on its staff. Administrator Deanne Criswell told MSNBC that the agency is well positioned to address the needs of areas hit by Hurricane Milton — after all, disaster relief personnel are already on the ground in Florida as part of its Helene response. 

As extreme weather events are made worse by climate change and impact more of the country, disaster relief needs will continue to grow. On Wednesday, dozens of Democratic members of Congress urged Johnson to reconvene the House to pass additional disaster relief funding. And some Republican lawmakers — even those who originally voted against the congressional bill that sent $20 billion to the emergency management agency — are now publicly calling for more money for FEMA. Last week, Representative Anna Paulina Luna introduced a bipartisan bill to allocate $15 billion to FEMA and the U.S. Department of Housing of Urban Development to aid Helene recovery efforts. “We need FEMA DOLLARS FREE’D UP,” wrote Luna in a tweet directed at vice president and presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Luna’s district includes most of Pinellas County, Florida, which Milton is expected to hit. 

Luna previously voted against the measure to fund FEMA through the end of the calendar year.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As Hurricane Milton approaches, FEMA faces funding challenges, misinformation, and politicization on Oct 9, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

Parts of Florida’s Gulf Coast are bracing for a Category 3 hurricane just two weeks after Hurricane Helene made landfall, devastating much of the state’s panhandle region and southern Appalachia. Nearly a dozen counties in Florida have received evacuation orders to prepare for Hurricane Milton, which stunned meteorologists with its extreme rapid intensification and is expected to make landfall Wednesday night. 

The one-two punch of back-to-back hurricanes is straining federal disaster relief resources. As FEMA contends with Helene recovery as well as wildfires blazing across the West, only 8 percent of the agency’s incident management staff is available to respond to new disasters, according to its daily operations briefing for Wednesday. 

FEMA faced funding problems well before Helene came along: In a report on the state of the agency’s disaster relief fund from the end of August, FEMA projected it would hit a deficit the following month. A few weeks later, in September, Congress allocated $20 billion to the emergency agency as part of a stopgap spending bill meant to avoid a government shutdown. 

But in the week after Helene made landfall, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose cabinet department houses FEMA, said the agency would not have enough money to get through the rest of hurricane season, which lasts through the end of November. President Joe Biden has since urged lawmakers to send more money FEMA’s way — so the agency can avoid making the “unnecessary trade-off” of diverting resources away from long-term recovery efforts in order to address any immediate emergencies.

Additional funding seems unlikely to arrive in time to affect recovery efforts for Hurricane Milton. Speaking to Fox News, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he will not bring the lower chamber of Congress back from its October break to consider sending more money to FEMA, and that he won’t consider the matter until after the November 5 election.

FEMA uses its disaster relief fund to do things like pay for disaster support and local debris removal, repair damaged public infrastructure, and offer financial aid to qualifying victims. The fund spent an average of $12 billion dollars annually between 1992 and 2021, with 44 percent of that money going to hurricane relief. 

But in the wake of Helene, FEMA has faced a barrage of bogus rumors about disaster relief dollars being misused and redirected towards housing migrants. The agency has plainly denied the claim on its website: “This is false. No money is being diverted from disaster response needs.” FEMA does have a small grant program, representing less than 3 percent of its annual budget, that provides humanitarian support for noncitizen immigrants being released from detention facilities — but this program is entirely separate from its disaster relief fund. Still, rumors about misspent disaster funding have added fuel to the fire created by right-wing pot-stirrers like radio host Alex Jones and Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who claim that FEMA is botching its response to Helene. 

Although the rumors of redirected funds are baseless, they have proved to be sticky, with several Republican lawmakers spreading the misinformation. For example, when asked why she voted against the congressional stopgap measure that sent $20 billion to FEMA, Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn, who represents Tennessee, called the bill “reckless” and said she would not fund “flying illegals into our country.” In his Fox News interview, Speaker Mike Johnson conceded that, yes, FEMA’s disaster relief and migrant aid dollars come from two different pools of funding — and then continued to conflate the two efforts. 

As Republicans politicize disaster relief operations, Mayorkas backtracked on FEMA’s funding needs. On Wednesday, the homeland security secretary stated that FEMA “quite clearly” has everything it needs to effectively respond to Hurricane Milton. Meanwhile, FEMA itself has largely downplayed any pressures on its staff. Administrator Deanne Criswell told MSNBC that the agency is well positioned to address the needs of areas hit by Hurricane Milton — after all, disaster relief personnel are already on the ground in Florida as part of its Helene response. 

As extreme weather events are made worse by climate change and impact more of the country, disaster relief needs will continue to grow. On Wednesday, dozens of Democratic members of Congress urged Johnson to reconvene the House to pass additional disaster relief funding. And some Republican lawmakers — even those who originally voted against the congressional bill that sent $20 billion to the emergency management agency — are now publicly calling for more money for FEMA. Last week, Representative Anna Paulina Luna introduced a bipartisan bill to allocate $15 billion to FEMA and the U.S. Department of Housing of Urban Development to aid Helene recovery efforts. “We need FEMA DOLLARS FREE’D UP,” wrote Luna in a tweet directed at vice president and presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Luna’s district includes most of Pinellas County, Florida, which Milton is expected to hit. 

Luna previously voted against the measure to fund FEMA through the end of the calendar year.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline As Hurricane Milton approaches, FEMA faces funding challenges, misinformation, and politicization on Oct 9, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Frida Garza.

Criswell knew how the system worked at FEMA, but her mandate was to change the status quo at an agency that is often accused of acting too slowly after disasters — and of being far too slow to adapt to climate change. In her three years leading the agency, she has attempted to overhaul FEMA’s disaster aid programs, overseen billions of dollars in new spending on forward-looking adaptation projects, and navigated tough disputes over the rising cost of insurance and reconstruction in vulnerable areas. Her goal was not just to ensure that FEMA ran well during disasters but also to shift the agency’s culture, making it more responsive to survivors’ needs and more forward-looking about disaster preparedness.

With peak hurricane season approaching, Grist sat down with Criswell to discuss how she’s handled some of FEMA’s biggest challenges and how she’s attempted to transform the agency from the inside. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q. Among communities that get hit with a lot of disasters, FEMA has a reputation for slowness and bureaucracy. From your perspective, after both working here and being a FEMA customer, how much of that is merited?

A. We’ve heard that a lot, and I think that there’s a lot of people that still have memories of Hurricane Katrina — they think of the FEMA of today as the FEMA from Katrina. We are a different team. We respond faster. We have more resources for recovery. We have more resources to help reduce impact, more resilience programs. We know that recovery is really complicated, and some communities are more complex than others. But recovery is doable, and so what we have to do is work with a community to understand what their recovery needs are. We have these integrated recovery teams that go in and don’t just implement FEMA programs, but they help bring the whole space — federal agencies, philanthropies, and nonprofits — together to help identify what that community’s recovery goals are and help them with that complicated road to recovery. While I think some of [the criticism] is warranted at times, I think that we are a very different agency than we were after Katrina, and we’re making huge gains. 

Q. Earlier this year, FEMA unveiled a set of reforms to its individual assistance programs, cutting red tape and offering survivors more money for food and housing after disasters. These reforms address many of the longest-standing complaints and criticisms about how that program works. Why didn’t this happen earlier?

A. We’ve been working on that since the day that I came into this office. I think this really came about through hearing from the people that are trying to get assistance and the struggles and the barriers that they’re facing. I’ve been a local emergency manager in a small community in Colorado. I’ve been a local emergency manager in New York City. So I know what it’s like to be a customer of FEMA. In my very first year, I visited a lot of our joint field offices to hear from people and hear some of the challenges that they were facing. 

I think that lens helps us keep it at the top of our priority list, and helps us keep focused on putting people first, and always trying to understand their barriers, and knowing that we can’t just have a one-size-fits-all approach to the delivery of our programs. So I think a lot of it really has to do with the fact that we’ve had a lived experience of being on the other side.

Q. FEMA’s resilience programs allocate billions of dollars to climate adaptation and disaster preparedness. But a large share of the money from programs like Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities, or BRIC, goes to white and wealthy areas, and there are a few “superuser” states that get a lot of the money. I’m wondering what FEMA has done or could still do to address those disparities.

A. When I came in, the first round of BRIC money was going out. Under a previous resilience program, there was a cap of $5 million federal spending, and BRIC gave us a $50 million cap, so people were really excited. But we saw from the first round that the structure that we had put in place was certainly not representative of all communities across America, and it really seemed to favor some of our coastal communities. So every year we have made adjustments to ensure everybody has a fair chance in the competitive side of the program. We have direct technical assistance, which is also making a big impact — bringing in experts, especially for our most under-resourced communities that don’t necessarily have the expertise or the personnel or the time to be able to think about the next mitigation [project] that they can do. We continue to expand that every year. 

What I’ve asked my team to do now is to study the return on investment of resilience projects to see what’s working. We want to see projects succeed, and sometimes we see projects that don’t get across the finish line because of a poor start. We’ll continue to refine the way that we are scoring these projects to ensure that communities that have the greatest need can get some of the benefit — for instance we’re adding points to the score for new applicants, or if you’re in a [vulnerable area].

Q. In response to protests from environmental groups and cities such as Phoenix, who have criticized FEMA for not responding to heat waves, FEMA has said that it can only declare a disaster when state and local financial resources are exceeded. But few communities apply for heat disaster declarations because it’s difficult to show how heat waves overwhelm local finances. Do you think FEMA can or should modify its threshold for declaring a heat disaster? And if it did, what could FEMA do to help residents during a heat wave? 

A. I’m going to start with the preparedness side. We know heat comes every year, just like we know hurricanes come to the Gulf Coast and the East Coast every year. So the individual preparedness piece is really important, and we can’t negate that. We need people to know what their risk is, know what kinds of severe weather events are going to impact them, and what their personal needs are. If I know that I have a condition that makes me more vulnerable to heat, what am I going to do during extreme heat days if my power goes out? We also can help reduce the impact through our mitigation programs — we’ve got many communities that are using BRIC funding to plant tree canopies to reduce the impact from urban heat islands, or painting roofs white, or putting in place splash pads for kids. That reduces the overall impact.

But let’s go into emergency response. I was working in New York City during Covid, and we were very concerned about the number of people that didn’t have air conditioning and the fact that we didn’t want to put them in congregate settings. So New York City utilized money [from the federal housing department’s home energy assistance program LI-HEAP] to put air conditioners in people’s homes. From a cost perspective, if that was a disaster declaration, could FEMA have reimbursed the city for the air conditioners that they put in? I don’t know. Perhaps, but it also takes other agencies, right? We need a whole-of-government solution to help these communities. 

I think about what happened in Houston with Hurricane Beryl recently, and the power outages. What could we or could we not do there? We could use some of our programs to perhaps help individuals that are vulnerable make sure that they have a place to go, like a cooling center, or if it’s a long period of time and they have to relocate somewhere, perhaps our programs could help there. We are not opposed to having a state come in and ask for a heat declaration. I just need to know what I’m reimbursing them for that isn’t part of their normal budget. Some of the things that I read are like, “we want FEMA to be able to pay for cooling centers.” Well, I don’t like the phrase “pay for a cooling center” because it makes it sound like I’m building something brand new, and really I’m just opening up the library, or I’m having people go to the library.

Q. Since Hurricane Ian struck Florida in 2022, I’ve heard from people trying to rebuild in Lee County that rising flood insurance costs are prohibitively expensive and rebuilding a house to code is really, really costly — so much so that a lot of people just can’t afford it. To what extent is that the intended outcome of these programs — to discourage this kind of waterfront living? How much is this something that you think FEMA or Congress should try to address through affordability mechanisms?

A. I get asked all the time, “Should we let people rebuild there?” And in some areas, I say probably not, and that’s why we have programs to help buy people out and move. But most of the time it’s not a matter of where, it’s a matter of how. When we look at what’s going on in Lee County right now, we don’t want people to rebuild and put their lives at risk. It’s not just about how much it’s going to cost to rebuild that home: During Hurricane Ian, 150 people lost their lives. They were in homes that weren’t elevated high enough, or they chose not to evacuate. 

So this is about not just the cost of rebuilding, but also about: How are we doing everything we can to protect the lives in an area that’s prone to a severe weather event? This is about protecting lives and saving the people that live in those areas, and people will have to make personal choices about whether or not this is the right location for them to live based on what that’s going to require. 

But to your last point about affordability [of flood insurance], we do believe that there are certain communities across the U.S. that are certainly in an area that is at high risk, but they came to be there through an environmental injustice — they’re low income neighborhoods, but they’re at a high risk, and so their costs are really high. So we do believe an affordability plan is needed to ensure that people can get the type of protection that they need. But we also know that we have homes that are high value and high risk, and we were subsidizing their rates prior to this.

Q. For the second year in a row, FEMA has run low on money and Congress has not acted to replenish its budget. As a result, the agency has once again had to implement “immediate needs funding,” which means it has paused almost all its recovery and resilience projects and restricted spending only to emergency response operations. With peak hurricane season approaching, what’s the realistic worst-case scenario here, and what can FEMA do about it without action from Congress?

A. We’ve done immediate needs funding in the past, but it has usually been after a major weather event has caused us to expend the funds that we have. What we’re finding right now is, as we close out Covid-19 [reimbursements], all of those bills are coming in. We always want to make sure that we have enough funding to support immediate responses to big incidents like Hurricane Ian, and we go into immediate needs when I reach a balance that’s going to allow me to respond to one of those events. That’s where we’re at now.

On the response side, I keep enough money to respond to one event. As we were watching Hurricane Debby, I was really concerned, because it was going to hit Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and then on up. If it had materialized as we thought it might, that could have drained the rest of the money that I have available very quickly. There’s not much that I can do other than getting a supplemental [appropriation] from Congress, and I have walked the halls of Congress to make sure that they know really where we’re at — once I have that one big event, or maybe two events coming back to back, I’m going to have to come back to them, and they may have to act faster than they’ve planned.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden’s FEMA director tried to fix the agency. Did she succeed? on Sep 4, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

That sounds simple enough, but the policy hinges on a deceptively simple question: How do you define “floodplain”? FEMA and the rest of the federal government long defined it as an area that has a 1 percent chance of flooding in any given year. That so-called 100-year floodplain standard, though more or less arbitrary, has been followed for decades — even though thousands of buildings outside the floodplain go underwater every year. 

Now FEMA is expanding its definition of the floodplain, following an executive order from President Joe Biden that forced government agencies to tighten rules about how they respond to the increasing risk of floods. In a significant shift, the new standard will require the agency to factor in the impact of climate change on future flood risk when it decides where and how it’s safe to build.

The new rule will result in higher-elevated and better-fortified buildings, and could help break a cycle of destruction and reconstruction that has cost the government billions of dollars over the past few decades. In a press conference announcing the rule, FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell hailed it as a significant change in how the government responds to disasters. 

“[This rule] will allow us to enhance resilience in flood-prone communities by taking future flood risk into consideration when we rebuild structures post-disaster,” she said. “This is a huge win that will also allow us to end the repeat loss cycles that stem from flooding and increase the safety of families and save taxpayer dollars.” 

Under the new rule, the agency will “integrate current and future changes in flooding based on climate science” when it estimates flood risk, factoring in sea-level rise and intensified erosion that will get worse over the course of the century. This will be easiest in coastal areas, where the science about sea-level rise and flooding is well established. In riverine areas, where science is less robust, the agency will rebuild at least as high as the 500-year floodplain, or the land that has less than a 0.2 percent chance of flooding in a given year — and sometimes even higher for essential infrastructure such as bridges and hospitals.

This is a dramatic shift from previous measurements, which relied on historical data to estimate future flooding. Because climate change has intensified since the collection of that initial data, previously the agency was systematically underestimating climate-related risk. Therefore, the new system assumes that flood risk is much higher than in the past, and that it will keep rising as time goes on. To mitigate that risk, FEMA will build farther from the water wherever possible and will raise structures on stilts and pilings when it can’t pull back from the coast.

“The federal government really has a duty to account for a future flood risk when it’s providing funding to build or rebuild homes or infrastructure, because it’s using taxpayer dollars,” said Joel Scata, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council and an expert on flood policy. Under the new rule, he said, FEMA is “going to be building in a way that’s not setting people and infrastructure up for future failure.”

FEMA has estimated that elevating and floodproofing structures at this stricter standard could cost the agency as much as an additional $150 million over the next ten years — a proportionally small sum given the agency’s $3 billion annual disaster spending. The agency says that elevating structures by 2 additional feet adds around 2 percent to the cost of the average project, but that this spending will pay for itself over the next 60 years by preventing future damages.

There could still be trickle-down costs for local governments, which often have to pay around 25 percent of the cost when FEMA repairs a damaged school or installs a flood barrier in a community. Many small towns and low-income communities have struggled to provide these matching funds, and they have been excluded from federal resilience grants as a result.

The Biden administration is not the first to consider the 100-year floodplain standard inadequate. Then-President Barack Obama tried to expand the definition after Superstorm Sandy in 2012, but the Trump administration scrapped this revised standard just after taking office. President Biden’s rule has now advanced farther along in the regulatory process than the Obama administration’s rule was able to, which will make it much harder for a potential second Trump administration to repeal it.

Local updates to floodplain standards have already shown results: Houston, Texas, saw three massive floods in consecutive years between 2015 and 2017. After Hurricane Harvey struck in 2017, the city updated its building regulations to prohibit construction in the 500-year floodplain, forcing builders to elevate homes much higher or build farther back from rivers and streams. These standards likely prevented thousands of homes from flooding earlier this week during Hurricane Beryl, which caused several rivers and bayous to overflow and spill onto surrounding land.

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA will now consider climate change when it rebuilds after floods on Jul 10, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

“It’s urgent that FEMA treats intensifying heat waves and wildfire smoke as the major climate disasters they are,” said Jean Su, energy justice director and senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s past time for FEMA to address the climate emergency head-on. That means unlocking crucial funding for local governments to build robust and resilient solutions like community solar and storage, cooling centers and air filtration. That’s a critical way we can protect workers and vulnerable communities from the ravages of the climate emergency.”

Early summer temperatures have already broken records across the United States. A June heat dome affecting the West and beyond had Las Vegas reaching 111 degrees and Amarillo, Texas, reaching 103 degrees.

“The impact of the climate crisis coupled with the fact that Texas is the most dangerous state to work in makes the detrimental impact of heat and wildfire smoke an increasing threat for all Texans regardless of socioeconomic status,” said Margarita Del Cid, Workers Defense Dallas member-leader. “However, day laborers, the vast majority of whom are migrant and Latine, are especially vulnerable to exposure, illness, or even death. One construction worker dies every three days in Texas and a huge factor in these deaths is heat; whether it's heat stroke or hyperthermia or in some cases, prolonged illness that can affect eyesight and quality of life. Additionally, communities of color including Latines, generally reside in areas that are more susceptible to the effect of wildfire smoke that can lead to life-threatening illness such as asthma, bronchitis, and even affect the brain's function. A federal standard to qualify heat and wildfire smoke as a major disaster will make way for life-saving and proactive resources and support in these vulnerable communities and areas.”

Scientists deemed 2023 the hottest year on record and anticipate even more severe heat waves for 2024. In 2023 an estimated 2,300 people died from heat-related illness, and a record number of 130 million Americans were under heat alerts. Heat is the leading disaster-related killer in the United States, killing more people than hurricanes, floods and tornadoes combined, according to the National Weather Service. In 2023 nearly 650 people died of heat-related causes in Maricopa County, Arizona, alone — a 52% increase over 2022.

Meanwhile, communities are breathing in unhealthy levels of smoke as wildfires grow in frequency and intensity. The average U.S. resident in 2023 breathed in more wildfire smoke than in any year since 2006.

“After the hottest year on record in 2023 and new heat records broken already this year, it is clear that labor protections aren’t keeping up with the escalation of the climate crisis,” said Liz Shuler, president of AFL-CIO. “Too many workers are exposed to extreme heat and wildfire smoke on the job without adequate safety measures in place. Not only do we need to develop strong worker protection standards to meet the demand of the changing environment and intensifying climate disasters, we need the federal government to take action now to release resources. The AFL-CIO calls on FEMA to swiftly classify heat and wildfires as ‘major disasters’ under the Stafford Act to ensure workers and their communities — especially marginalized communities — have the resources they need to prepare for and respond to the ongoing threats of climate change. FEMA has the power to save lives — and we urge them to use that power to meet this emergency with the urgency it deserves.”

“Climate change is fueling more frequent and extreme wildland fires and heat emergencies in Arizona,” said Will Humble, executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association. “Wildfire smoke and heat are a major health burden that last year resulted in hundreds of deaths. State and local communities have been stepping up their preparation to deal with these threats but it's not enough. Adding heat and wildfire smoke emergencies to the list of FEMA-covered declared disasters will help Arizona communities better plan for these increasingly common events.”

FEMA is empowered by the Stafford Act, a federal law that governs disaster relief, to declare a major disaster and unlock disaster relief funding upon a request from a state, local or Tribal official. However, FEMA has declined to recognize extreme heat and wildfire smoke as qualifying “major disasters” under the Stafford Act. During COVID-19, FEMA quickly acted to use the Stafford Act for pandemic response.

Today’s rulemaking petition asks FEMA to include extreme heat and wildfire smoke in the regulatory definition of a “major disaster.” This would allow FEMA to make crucial funding available for state, local and Tribal governments to invest in community solar and storage, cooling centers, community resilience hubs, worker protections, air filtration systems and other ways to prepare for and respond to extreme heat and wildfire smoke that impact human health.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Newswire Editor.

Enforcement of the 50 percent rule largely falls to local officials in flood-damaged regions, who are charged with ensuring that their constituents aren’t rebuilding in flood zones. In exchange for this diligence, the federal government subsidizes low-cost flood insurance for homes in communities that certify their compliance with the rule, goosing red hot real estate markets in Florida and other scenic but climate-threatened regions.

As Florida continues rebuilding from 2022’s devastating Hurricane Ian, however, the Biden administration may be signaling that this era of easy money is over. Late last month, FEMA sent an explosive letter to local officials in Lee County, Florida, where over 750,000 people live near some of South Florida’s most prized coastal land. FEMA claimed that almost 600 homeowners in the city of Cape Coral and other nearby towns had rebuilt vulnerable homes in the flood zone over the 18 months since Hurricane Ian, violating the 50 percent rule as well as local construction laws. 

The agency had long given the county and its cities a 25 percent discount on flood insurance in recognition of the county’s efforts to control flood risk, which saved residents millions of dollars a year. The letter threatened to yank away that discount, arguing that the county’s lax approach to the Hurricane Ian rebuild had negated those earlier efforts. The message was clear: After decades of risky construction in floodplains, the feds were putting their foot down. 

This new effort to penalize floodplain construction is yet another sign that the long-hidden costs of climate change and development are starting to catch up with homeowners in coastal states — and at the very same time that housing costs more broadly are increasing for many Americans. FEMA has already raised flood insurance premiums across the country in recent years to keep up with mounting risk, and private home insurance companies have also hiked premiums for wind insurance in several states along the Gulf Coast. 

The crackdown in Lee County represents an attempt by FEMA to shift the cost burden of climate risk away from the federal government (and the public that funds it) and onto local homeowners. This will test the strength of the area’s white-hot real estate market, potentially forcing many homeowners to walk away from their waterfront properties. As the federal government and private insurers both try to reduce their exposure to climate change, Lee County and its cities could be canaries in the coal mine for a housing market disfigured by mounting flood risk.

The reaction from these canaries has been swift and furious. Elected leaders from the county and the city blasted FEMA as “villains” and accused the agency of hampering Florida’s hurricane recovery at the behest of President Joe Biden. Lee County’s board of commissioners mulled suing the agency at a tense meeting a few days after the announcement. Local TV stations ran dozens of stories about the impact FEMA’s decision would have on homeowners, who are already dealing with a steep rise in both flood insurance and traditional property insurance, which covers wind damage. 

“It’s almost like revenge politics,” said Cecil Pendergrass, a Lee County commissioner, during the county meeting after the announcement. “Our citizens, our taxpayers are being held hostage here.”

FEMA soon put its decision on pause, giving the county an extra 30 days to prove it hadn’t let homeowners break the 50 percent rule or build in the floodplain. It is unclear whether Lee County or cities like Cape Coral will be able to do that. Federal and local officials declined to provide Grist with details about the post-Ian violations, citing privacy concerns, but if homeowners have already rebuilt their destroyed properties, the county won’t be able to fix that within a month.

The bigger question for communities around the country is whether FEMA is changing how it enforces the 50 percent rule in an effort to force homeowners out of flood-prone areas.

“The floodplain management community is tracking this very closely,” said Susanna Pho, the founder of a flood risk firm called Forerunner, which helps flood-prone communities with FEMA compliance.

Lee County has long been a poster child for risky waterfront development. The city of Cape Coral sits on artificial filled land in what used to be a swampy section of Florida shoreline, with no barrier between the city’s urban landscape and the Gulf of Mexico. When hurricanes strike, as Ian did in 2022, they can push as much as 15 feet of storm surge through the city, inundating thousands of homes. Nearby cities such as Bonita Springs, which also caught a penalty from FEMA, aren’t much safer.

The 50 percent rule is supposed to reduce this risk over time by ensuring that flood-prone homeowners don’t rebuild the same vulnerable properties over and over. If a county determines that a home has suffered what FEMA calls “substantial damage,” it must force the homeowner to tear it down and elevate a new home above flood level, often on concrete pilings. If a county doesn’t comply, FEMA can kick it out of the federal flood insurance program, rendering homes more or less uninsurable, or downgrade its discounts as it did with Lee County. This rule acts as a de facto tax on risky property: Flood insurance payouts max out at $250,000 per home, which means homeowners are often on the hook for tearing down their houses and building new ones.

The problem is that determining what counts as “substantial damage” is a complicated process. Local officials conduct basic “windshield assessments” in the first few weeks after a storm, logging damage information that they can see from the street as they clear debris. They only do detailed examinations for the 50 percent rule when homeowners request permits to rebuild. But many homeowners never request permits from their city or county. Instead, they come back and patch up homes that they should be tearing down and rebuilding at higher elevations, and the local government either never catches them or looks the other way.

This mandate puts local governments in a tough political situation: They have FEMA on one side, urging them to enforce strict flood rules, and displaced homeowners on the other side, trying to get back in their homes without going broke. It’s unclear how much Lee County and its cities knew about the hundreds of rebuilt homes that FEMA alleges were noncompliant after Ian, but attempts to flout the 50 percent rule have been a scourge for the agency going back decades.

Albert Slap, a coastal planning consultant in Florida, said he understood why Lee County or cities like Cape Coral might have allowed homeowners to repair their homes without elevating.

“It’s pretty clear that the motivation is voters,” he said. “The people who got damaged are voters, and they’re going, ‘If you make me build back better, I’m not gonna be able to do it, and I’m leaving. I voted you guys into office and you’re screwing me.’”

Lee County says it followed normal protocol after Hurricane Ian, conducting basic damage assessments in the immediate aftermath of the storm and inspecting homes only later on when homeowners requested permits. Flood and disaster experts who spoke to Grist said this protocol is more or less standard across Florida and other hurricane-prone states, which raises the question of whether FEMA is changing the way it enforces the 50 percent rule and cracking down harder on rogue rebuilds.

FEMA didn’t answer questions about its enforcement strategy. In response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson said the agency is “committed to helping communities take appropriate remediation actions” to fix the rebuild violations. A spokesperson for Lee County said the county “will work with its partners at FEMA during a 30-day extension period.”

Adam Botana, a Republican state representative whose district encompasses much of Lee County, said he had faith that Lee County and other local governments would address the violations that FEMA identified and take action against homeowners who rebuilt without following FEMA regulations.

“Nobody likes the 50 percent rule, but I understand there have to be rules,” he told Grist. “Some municipalities may be a little more lax than others, but we have to keep everybody in line.” He added that he thinks the county will be able to prove many of the alleged violations didn’t take place.

Even if Lee County manages to contest the decision, homeowners in Southwest Florida are almost guaranteed to suffer more financial pain as a result of this enforcement effort. If FEMA stays the course and removes the discount, it will raise flood insurance costs for homeowners in unincorporated parts of the county between $14 and $17 million per year, equating to a $300 annual hit for each flood insurance customer in the area. But if Lee County cracks down on the 50 percent rule and FEMA restores the discount, homeowners who rebuilt in flood zones may have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to elevate their homes.

This new penalty comes on top of a much larger rate hike that FEMA has rolled out over the past few years as part of an effort to fix issues with the flood insurance program. This new system, called Risk Rating 2.0, will triple insurance costs in Lee County by the time it takes full effect, raising the average annual premium from around $1,300 to almost $4,000, with some of the most extreme bills ballooning well over $10,000 per year. Florida’s private insurance market for wind damage is also in a tailspin: More than 30 private carriers have pulled back from the state over the past two years, thanks in part to mounting hurricane risk. Those that have stuck around have doubled or tripled their prices.

Lisa Miller, a veteran Florida political consultant and former state insurance regulator, said the burden of rising costs shouldn’t trump the need to ensure that Lee County homes are resilient to future disasters.

“When I hear someone tell me they don’t want to pay $12,000 a year, I remind them, ‘we live in Florida,’” she said. “Our catastrophe risk is higher than almost anywhere in the world. What matters is, the homes that were repaired when they should have been torn down and rebuilt — will they withstand the next storm? That’s the question.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA is making an example of this Florida boomtown. Locals call it ‘revenge politics.’ on Apr 16, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

They spent two hours stuck in gridlocked traffic, watching branches fly through the sky and the orange glow of flames on the hillside inch closer and closer. As a black cloud descended on their line of cars and more people hurried out of their driveways into the caravan, fear evident in their faces, Seletin and her aunties prayed silently, in English and Pohnpeian, the native language of their home island in Micronesia, Pohnpei. 

Their prayers were answered that day: They survived the Lāhainā wildfire that killed more than 100 people in the coastal historic town, the deadliest blaze in modern U.S. history. 

Tourism skidded to a halt. Six months later, Seletin started working with wildfire survivors who were Indigenous Pacific migrants like herself: Families who migrated from the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau. That’s when she learned that despite treaties between their countries and the United States that allow her community to live and work here legally and indefinitely, a mistake in the drafting of a law 28 years ago prevented them — some of them homeless —  from getting access to help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency. 

Now, Congress has passed a law restoring access to FEMA and other key federal programs to citizens of these countries living in the U.S. It ends nearly three decades during which people such as Seletin, an estimated tens of thousands, had been cut off from governmental safety net programs. 

The community of legal migrants from Pacific island nations is known as the Compact of Free Association or COFA citizens. That COFA citizens weren’t eligible for any aid is attributed to an inadvertent mistake in drafting the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. The new law that corrects this error was included in the federal spending bill approved last month. 

Members of this community who were denied crucial support in the wake of Lāhainā’s destruction are expected to be the first to benefit. 

“Just knowing that there’s people that actually care about the COFA citizens, it’s amazing,” said Seletin, the surprise evident in her voice. “We’re very grateful.”  

That fact people care surprises Seletin because for most of her life, she’s heard that people like her are not welcome in Hawaiʻi. Her parents moved to Maui from Pohnpei when she was 6, seeking a better life for her and her siblings. At first, that meant splitting up the family by leaving her older brothers with relatives on their home island more than 3,000 miles away. Her father got a job on a pineapple plantation, an experience that reflects the immigrant story so often celebrated in Hawaiʻi. 

But there was one key difference. Seletin is a citizen of Pohnpei, in the Federated States of Micronesia, one of three Pacific island nations that gained independence and a seat at the United Nations in the 1980s and 1990s following a century of colonial rule. 

The United States gained control over the islands from Japan during World War II and supported their independence with the understanding that the U.S. military would still retain strategic power over their lands, airspace and surrounding waters, a portion of the western Pacific region that rivals the size of the continental U.S. The international agreements securing these military rights, known as the Compacts of Free Association, have been increasingly recognized as critical to U.S. national security amidst growing concerns about China.  

As part of the compacts, the U.S. to a large extent maintains an open border policy with the three nations: their citizens can live and work in the U.S. and vice versa with no need for a visa. When the treaty with the Federated States of Micronesia was signed in 1986, people who moved to the U.S. were eligible for the same federal programs, such as federal disaster aid, that long-term permanent residents can access.

But just 10 years later, COFA citizens’ eligibility was stripped in the 1996 Welfare Reform Act. It wasn’t just FEMA: the community lost access to Medicaid and food stamps. They could work in the U.S. legally for decades, but if they suddenly became disabled they could no longer collect Social Security disability insurance.

Many COFA migrants who moved to the U.S. for work and education never needed to rely on these safety nets. But others who were too sick to work, or struggling to raise families on low salaries and high rents, quickly realized that they had been paying taxes into a system that excluded them when they needed help most. 

The Lāhainā wildfire gave momentum to longstanding community advocacy to reverse this systematic exclusion and ongoing efforts by Hawaiʻi congressional leaders, Senator Mazie Hirono and Representative Ed Case, to restore their eligibility. 

The bill was included in a broader measure to renew the treaties with the Federated States of Micronesia and Republic of the Marshall Islands. The law provides funding to the countries and also extends veteran’s health benefits to COFA citizens who serve in the U.S. military at high rates and previously were denied care.

After the bill became law this month, FEMA announced it will reopen its cash assistance application window for COFA citizens affected by the Maui wildfires. Agency spokesman Todd Hoose said he’s not sure yet how many people it’ll help — he’s heard estimates as low as a few dozen people or as high as 200. The COFA community in Lāhainā was small, but growing; much bigger was the Filipino community, which included immigrants of mixed legal status. Undocumented people remain excluded from federal disaster cash assistance.

“We do not yet have the process, but we are encouraging folks to help us identify those who are potentially eligible,” Hoose said. 

Even though there’s still so much unknown, Seletin is excited. In the months since the wildfire, FEMA has spent tens of millions of dollars to help affected families stay housed. She knows people who have been sleeping in their cars and struggling to feed their kids. As a middle schooler on Maui, she felt ashamed to be Micronesian, but now at age 24, she’s proud of it, and wants to continue to help her people get back on their feet. 

Rising sea levels, worsening storms, and other climate change-related effects are expected to increase outmigration from the island nations, especially the low-lying atolls of the Marshall Islands, to more mountainous islands like Guam and Oʻahu and other parts of the U.S. The Maui wildfire will not be the last time that members of the Micronesian diaspora will be in need of federal disaster assistance. And next time, they’ll have the right to receive it right away. 

“That’s huge for us,” Seletin said. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Indigenous Pacific wildfire survivors on Maui can finally get FEMA help on Apr 1, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Anita Hofschneider.

There are many points of criticism: FEMA seldom provides immediate cash aid to people who lose their homes, instead requiring them to complete onerous housing applications that can take weeks to process. It requires many survivors to apply for and be denied a loan from the Small Business Administration, a separate government agency, before they can get housing aid. It denies them aid if they already have home insurance or if their homes had been damaged before a disaster, and it imposes a mountain of paperwork on people who need to appeal aid decisions or who miss application deadlines.

Now, after decades of inaction, FEMA is addressing those criticisms all at once. The agency announced on Friday that it will fundamentally overhaul the way it delivers aid to survivors, launching new programs to provide quick cash payments to those in need and eliminating much of the bureaucracy that hampers aid access. 

“This is really a transformational, deeply impactful, meaningful, and historic change in our provision of individual assistance to survivors of natural disasters,” said Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA. “For too long, in the face of too many natural disasters and extreme weather events, survivors have had to overcome many barriers to access to federal assistance.”

The new rules, which FEMA said are the most significant changes to its aid process in 20 years, will take effect in late March. They don’t require approval from Congress, and will have a minimal impact on federal taxpayers, according to a FEMA official: The reforms will cost about $679 million a year, less than 5 percent of what the agency spent on disasters last year.

The centerpieces of the reform are two new programs that target the chaotic first few days after a disaster strikes. Until now, most agency assistance has come down to victims in the weeks and months following a disaster, after states submit a request for specific types of aid. Once they evacuate the danger zone, victims must apply for assistance with specific costs such as hotel lodging and home repairs.

The first new policy will provide a rapid cash payment of $750 to all victims of federally declared disasters, by direct deposit or check, without states needing to request the money first. The second will give victims flexible up-front funding to cover about two weeks of housing, indexed to housing costs in the region, rather than making them submit long-term housing plans before FEMA will cover their expenses. A FEMA official said the information in those previously required housing plans was “not particularly informative,” suggesting that the upshot of the reform will be a faster deployment of funds. 

The reform package will also eliminate some of FEMA’s most notorious red tape. For instance, the agency is doing away with the Small Business Administration loan application requirement, which forced victims who wanted help replacing destroyed personal property to fill out an application they knew would be denied and then present that denial to FEMA. It is also relaxing a rule that prevented residents who had home insurance from getting aid, even if their insurance didn’t cover the full cost of a rebuild. And finally, the agency is eliminating a “pre-existing conditions” provision that prevented residents from receiving aid for housing defects that existed before a disaster, such as leaky pipes or sagging walls.

It will take years for local officials and experts to gauge how these reforms affect the way the United States recovers from disasters, but experts hailed the rule changes, saying they would ease financial and emotional pain for many flood and fire victims. 

“These changes put into effect long-standing recommendations to cut red tape and help disaster survivors by implementing quick payments to homeowners,” said Shana Udvardy, a policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, adding that the reforms “will offer disaster survivors a smoother road to recovery.”

In a press call with reporters, FEMA administrator Deanne Criswell said her administration had been developing the changes for multiple years, and that they are a direct response to previous criticism from survivors, government officials, and the media.

“This has been the result of just listening, listening to all of the concerns that survivors have had, our state and local emergency managers have had, and frankly, all of you,” she said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA to overhaul its disaster aid system after decades of criticism on Jan 19, 2024.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

This article was produced in partnership with Source New Mexico, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2023. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The director of a federal office overseeing a nearly $4 billion compensation fund for victims of a New Mexico wildfire that was accidentally triggered by the U.S. Forest Service is stepping down.

Angela Gladwell’s reassignment comes as the Federal Emergency Management Agency restructures its disaster response in the state amid sustained criticism of its handling of disaster aid and payments for damages, which Source New Mexico and ProPublica have reported on for the past year.

The largest wildfire in state history, the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire destroyed at least 430 homes and cost billions of dollars in firefighting services and damage. About 29,000 claimants, including residents, businesses and nonprofit organizations, could be eligible for payments, FEMA has said.

Many residents have been in limbo as they await checks to rebuild. The agency’s claims office didn’t make its first payment to a victim until April, seven months after the office was created. By midsummer, more than a year after the fire had ripped through the mountains of northern New Mexico, the claims office had paid less than 1% of the total allocated. It has now paid $311 million, about 8% of the total approved by Congress. Several lawsuits allege the claims office has missed payment deadlines.

FEMA also faces two lawsuits over its decision not to pay for intangible losses, like the stress of fleeing the fire and being displaced from home for weeks or months. FEMA has declined to respond to questions about its decision, citing the litigation.

Gladwell, a longtime FEMA official and the face of the recovery effort, has frequently faced angry questions at town hall meetings about these problems. In recent weeks, a coalition of fire victims and local elected officials has called for her to be replaced as head of the claims office.

In a news release announcing Gladwell’s departure, claims office spokesperson Deborah Martinez said she “successfully built a compensation program from the ground, assembling a team of locally hired staff with knowledge of New Mexico and the communities affected by the wildfires.”

Now, she said, Gladwell will “transition to a new role” as FEMA consolidates recovery programs in New Mexico, including the claims office, into a single operation.

Martinez did not answer questions about what that consolidation entails, except to say in an email that the office is “in the beginning stages” of the change.

In a statement posted to LinkedIn, Gladwell reflected on her “last day in New Mexico with an extraordinary team who is delivering on an extremely challenging mission.” She said she was “grateful for what we have learned that will continue to inform approaches to disaster recovery in the future, especially for wildfires and rural communities.”

Jennifer Carbajal, deputy director of the claims office and a resident of the area, spoke at a packed town hall meeting Wednesday night in Las Vegas, New Mexico. She said the agency had acted as quickly as it could to hire staff, open offices and establish procedures. The consolidation decision, which was “brand new,” will combine the claims office with FEMA’s short-term disaster aid programs, she said.

FEMA will soon hire a chief operating officer to lead “on-the-ground long-term” recovery efforts as the office focuses on making payments, Martinez said in the news release.

The office will soon publish a guide outlining the types of claims that are being paid and what documentation is needed, Martinez said. The agency recently acknowledged that the paperwork burden is too high for some claimants. It’s common among multigenerational families with long roots in the area not to have clear titles to their land or other documentation proving ownership.

The Coalition for Fire Fund Fairness, a group that includes local elected officials, and attorneys for thousands of victims have called for Gladwell to be replaced by someone who they said better understands New Mexico’s culture and laws, like a former judge. The group’s founder, Manny Crespín Jr., called FEMA’s announcement “welcomed news” and asked that the new leader not be “another FEMA bureaucrat.”

The federal law creating the claims office allows FEMA to appoint an independent administrator to oversee it. Instead, the office brought in Gladwell, a FEMA employee for more than 25 years in Washington, D.C. Martinez did not respond to a question about how FEMA will select the chief operating officer, including whether they will be from New Mexico or will be hired from within the claims office.

U.S. Sens. Ben Ray Luján and Martin Heinrich and Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, Democratic members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation, said in a written statement that they hope the changes will speed up claims payments. Recently, the community of Las Vegas mourned a former police chief who died while awaiting a check to rebuild his home in Rociada, one of the hardest-hit areas.

The claims office faces several lawsuits accusing it of missing legally required deadlines to make payment offers and pushing victims to abandon their attorneys. FEMA has denied it puts such pressure on victims. It said it discovered a flaw in its reporting system that allowed some cases to languish, and it was addressing the issue.

Antonia Roybal-Mack, a local lawyer representing hundreds of clients, credited ongoing advocacy by lawyers and residents, and reporting by Source New Mexico and ProPublica, in bringing about the change. She said she’ll watch closely to see who takes over the new office.

“I think it’s a step in the right direction,” she said. “People in northern New Mexico — we need to now ask them to put a New Mexican in that position.”

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico.

Raging flood waters ravaged the mountain county of 28,000 last year, sweeping away homes and killing at least three people. The underfunded local government has been able to recover only with help from Washington, which promised about $3.7 million to repair roads and buy out flooded homeowners.

Last month, after the county had spent $2 million of its own money on recovery efforts, County Executive Scott Alexander received a concerning letter from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. The agency was running low on money, the letter said, and it was pausing the reimbursements it had promised. Not only would the county not be paid back for its road repairs, it also wouldn’t receive money for home buyouts. The projects would be suspended until Congress gave FEMA more cash. That’s left homeowners in limbo, and the county with a fiscal hole that’s equivalent to 10 percent of its annual budget.

“It’s huge, and it’s crippled us right now,” Alexander said. “It really puts a hardship on us, and it will be hard for all smaller communities going forward. We want to do [the buyouts] as quickly as possible for the homeowners so they can get on with rebuilding their lives.” 

Many, many more communities and homeowners face similar situations. Even as the nation veers toward the first government shutdown since late 2018, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in a desperate financial state. Despite repeated requests for more funding, Congress has let the agency’s all-important disaster relief fund empty out, imperiling its ability to respond to devastating floods, fires, and other catastrophes.

As the agency tries to save cash, it has paused $2.8 billion in funding for thousands of disaster recovery projects across the country. A list of interrupted projects reviewed by Grist shows that the hiatus has affected everything from post-hurricane school construction in Florida to road repairs in Colorado, plus hundreds of millions of dollars in reimbursements for pandemic response. 

If the looming government shutdown delays lawmakers’ efforts to pass legislation to fund the government, this suspension could last for weeks, straining the nation’s long-term recovery from Hurricane Idalia, the fires on Maui, summer floods in Vermont, and other recent disasters.

“We’re talking about an agency that is understaffed, that’s dealing with a disaster declaration on average every three days, and now we’re in this dysfunctional state of Congress where they can’t seem to get done the basic job of refilling the Disaster Relief Fund,” said Shana Udvardy, a policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists who studies disaster response. “It’s stressing communities who can’t actually implement these projects that have been in the tunnel for quite some time.”

The pot of money that FEMA uses to fund disaster relief has been running low for months as the agency fights a series of expensive climate disasters and the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Deanne Criswell, the agency’s top official, warned lawmakers as early as April that it might have to constrain disaster response efforts if Congress didn’t provide more money. FEMA often has to ask for additional funding during bad years, but lawmakers let the fund run dry this year as they bickered over whether to couple disaster spending with Ukraine aid. 

“We’re seeing politics at its worst,” Udvardy told Grist.

A summer of heavy spending on disasters like the Maui wildfires brought the fund down to around $4 billion in August, leaving FEMA with just 20 percent of the money it had at the start of the year. Criswell on August 29 halted all spending except for “immediate needs,” which included response to new disasters such as the Maui fires and Hurricane Idalia. The agency says it has enough money left to carry it through October, but it’s one big disaster away from hitting zero.

According to the most recent rundown of funding cuts, the areas most impacted as of September 22 are Florida, Louisiana, and Puerto Rico, all of which have dealt with major hurricanes in recent years. FEMA has frozen more than $560 million in funding for Hurricane Ian recovery in Florida and almost $250 million in funding for Puerto Rico’s response to hurricanes Maria and Fiona.

While almost all the paused money supports long-term recovery, around $108 million in grants for climate resilience are also in jeopardy. These subsidies are designed to help communities prepare for future disasters. The suspended projects include a buyout program for flood-prone homes in Kentucky and a $4.7 million water infrastructure project in eastern Puerto Rico. 

Two years ago, the remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded a public housing complex owned by the Englewood Housing Authority in Englewood, New Jersey. The inundation destroyed 22 of the building’s 150 apartments and the authority’s headquarters. The agency is now ready to begin repairs, and has cleared the permits necessary to do so, but can’t proceed until FEMA sends the $8 million it promised. 

“Unfortunately, due to all the natural disasters throughout the U.S., FEMA needs to wait … to fund the rebuild,” said Samuel Lee, the commissioner of the housing authority. He said construction “will hopefully occur later this year.”

For some local governments without deep financial reserves, the funding pause has prompted a cash crisis. Municipal leaders in Garnett, Kansas, spent $3 million over the past year fixing an aging reservoir spillway, bolstering the town’s protection against heavy rains. The city expected to FEMA to cover the bill, but the money hasn’t arrived.

“ The funding pause has caused some headaches here,” City Manager Travis Wilson told Grist. “We have yet to see a reimbursement, my reserve is depleted, and I’m having to borrow from other utility reserves to continue to pay for the project. It truly is a domino effect.” A prior storm in 2019 caused significant damage to the reservoir spillway, and Wilson is worried about future flooding if the repairs don’t happen soon.

The Washington Post reported an earlier version of the list, which was accurate as of September 15. In a statement to Grist, FEMA said it  could continue to provide emergency disaster aid and support victims of recent disasters. The agency also called on Congress to refill the relief fund.

The prospect of a government shutdown is bad enough for FEMA on its own. Craig Fugate, a former agency administrator under President Obama, told the Washington Post this week that shutdowns can hamper the agency’s coordination efforts and the government’s two-week closure in 2013 left him with a “skeleton crew.” The agency can still deploy emergency responders to floods and fires under such circumstances, for example, but its command center in Washington, DC shuts down, making nationwide communication and coordination almost impossible.

It will take a big infusion of money for FEMA to resume normal operations. According to the agency’s most recent report, it expects to end this month with just $556 million in the bank, down from $4 billion last month. The most recent stopgap funding bill under consideration in the Senate would give the agency only $6 billion in direct funding, which would likely only last for a few months.

In a statement on Thursday, the White House excoriated House Republicans for what it called financial brinkmanship, highlighting the delays that resulted from FEMA’s funding shortfall.

“Extreme House Republicans are playing partisan games with peoples’ lives,” the statement said, “including delaying long-term disaster recovery and undermining preparedness in communities across the country.”

Those partisan games have Michael Heinen, the CEO of the Jeff Davis Electrical Cooperative, pondering his next move. The co-op is erecting wind-resistant power lines to replace those that collapsed during hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020, leaving customers to rely on generators. The work was possible only because the Federal Emergency Management Agency provided more than $30 million in grants to support the state’s hurricane recovery.

He already knew that money would be a little late in arriving; FEMA told him that weeks ago, saying it was pausing payments even though he’d already hired contractors, secured permits for the project and had enough money to start construction. With FEMA subsequently freezing funding, he isn’t sure what to do.

“It’s a concern, it’s one of those things that keep you up at night,” said Heinen. “It affects the timeline on trying to get that done, but I’m cautiously optimistic that it’s going to be temporary.” 

Even so, he was caught off guard by the funding freeze — he hadn’t even heard which projects FEMA is suspending until Grist told him on Thursday.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Disaster recovery projects stall nationwide as FEMA runs out of money on Sep 29, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

As expiration looms, FEMA is facing not one but two lawsuits over the program. The lawsuits take aim at the program from opposite directions: A case brought by Louisiana officials and a group of Republican state attorneys general argues that the agency’s new risk estimates have raised flood insurance prices too high, and a case brought by a group of Oregon environmentalists argues that the agency is keeping prices too low. 

The contradictory allegations underscore the need for careful policymaking around flood insurance. If the agency raises flood insurance rates, it could inflict economic devastation on floodplain homeowners, but if it keeps premiums low, it will enable continued development in flood-prone areas, ensuring huge future losses. 

“Nobody wants to pay a lot for insurance, and as risks are going up from climate change, we are really stuck with this question of who’s going to pay for that increasing risk,” said Carolyn Kousky, the associate vice president for economics and policy at the Environmental Defense Fund and an expert on disaster insurance.

The original purpose of the NFIP was to discourage people from living in flood-prone areas, but it has failed at this for decades. The law requires most homeowners in floodplains to purchase insurance from the program, but these homeowners pay rates that are often far too low to reflect the risk they face. These low prices have encouraged developers in cities like Houston to build thousands of homes near rivers and coastlines, and they have also plunged the program into debt.

FEMA can’t change the program’s pricing system without help from Congress, but lawmakers have dodged the issue for years, wary of blowback from coastal homeowners. In the absence of legislative action, FEMA tried to fix the program back in 2021 by updating its system for calculating flood danger. The new system, which the agency calls Risk Rating 2.0, incorporates more data about flood dynamics and home elevations into a complex algorithm. It’s a big upgrade from the agency’s previous system, which was developed before modern computing.

The new system has lowered prices for about 20 percent of NFIP customers, but it’s also led to massive rate increases for coastal homeowners who had been paying subsidized prices in states like Florida and Louisiana. In some jurisdictions, such as Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, the average flood insurance premium has risen by more than 1,000 percent. These premium hikes have drawn protests from both sides of the aisle.

The backlash over these price increases has triggered a multistate lawsuit over Risk Rating 2.0. A group of 10 Republican-controlled states and 43 Louisiana parishes sued in June to stop the system, asking a federal judge to cancel it. They’re also demanding that FEMA release more information about its new risk model, which they say relies on “undisclosed, hypothetical, and abstract possibilities.”

In their initial complaint against the agency, the plaintiffs claimed that the housing market in their states and parishes will take a nosedive if the program remains in effect.

Risk Rating 2.0 “will depress property values, particularly in areas where flood insurance is required,” they wrote. “High insurance rates will also discourage individuals from purchasing property” in the affected states, they claimed. “Fewer residents lead to a reduction in … tax base, resulting in lower tax revenue and hampering the [states’] ability to invest in future mitigation projects.”

Meanwhile, the environmental groups in Oregon argue that flood insurance rates are still too low. In their complaint, filed earlier this month, the groups wrote that the NFIP’s affordability mandate has incentivized hazardous development by charging households artificially low premiums that don’t reflect their true risk. This development, they argue, jeopardizes the survival of threatened and endangered species that rely on the floodplains for habitat.

“The program has encouraged floodplain development in high-hazard areas by providing insurance policies that obscure risk to property owners and provide taxpayer-subsidized, discounted coverage,” the groups alleged.

The new lawsuit follows in the footsteps of previous litigation in Oregon. Another coalition of environmental groups in the state sued FEMA back in 2009, arguing that real estate development in floodplains threatened the survival of several endangered marine species, including steelhead salmon and the orcas that feed on them. The National Fish and Wildlife Service endorsed that view, and FEMA agreed to set more restrictions for development in Oregon floodplains, but the new plaintiffs say the agency is slow-walking those changes.

If both lawsuits succeeded, they would push the NFIP in contrary directions: The Louisiana case would force FEMA to offer flood insurance at lower rates, making it cheaper to live in floodplains, while the Oregon case would force FEMA to stop offering coverage in floodplains that would impact vulnerable fish species. The Oregon plaintiffs have been successful before, but legal experts told Grist that the Republican attorneys general will have a hard time prevailing against Risk Rating 2.0. FEMA is required by law to charge fair and accurate rates for flood insurance, and the NFIP’s previous, outdated risk assessment created serious problems on both counts.

“My general impression is that they’re just throwing stuff at the wall to see if anything sticks,” said Daniel Farber, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, of the Louisiana case.

Even so, the dual litigation highlights FEMA’s position between a rock and a hard place. The National Flood Insurance Program has failed for decades to discourage development in floodplains, as evidenced by the Oregon case, and FEMA’s attempts to fix the program have caused enormous economic pain to homeowners in coastal areas, as evidenced by the Louisiana case.

Thousands of these homeowners have dropped their insurance since Risk Rating 2.0 rolled out, fleeing to cheaper private programs with more selective risk pools, and this has left the NFIP in even worse financial straits. With declining enrollment, the program will take in even less revenue from premiums, which will likely increase its debt load over the coming years. Meanwhile, the policyholders that remain in the program will likely see their property values fall as a result of their gargantuan insurance rates.

Kousky says Congress could ease the transition to Risk Rating 2.0 by passing a law that would calibrate insurance premiums to household income. This would make flood coverage affordable for low-income households while charging high premiums to wealthy owners of seaside mansions. But if lawmakers won’t act, she says, homeowners in Louisiana and other flood-prone states will have no choice but to swallow a bitter pill. 

“If you keep the cost of living in high-risk areas artificially low, and you encourage development in these places, then eventually there’s gonna be a big disaster,” she said. “And that’s going to be way more economically costly.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA is being sued for making flood insurance too expensive — and too cheap on Sep 28, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

There are two big reasons for this funding gap. The first is that FEMA doles out adaptation money through competitive grant programs, which means that a local government needs significant funding and staff to put together an application that stands a chance of attracting federal dollars. The second is that federal law requires the agency to fund only those adaptation projects that pass what it calls a “benefit-cost analysis.” In other words, a city must prove that its proposed project prevents more damage than it costs to build. Big infrastructure projects like sea walls and stormwater pipes are much more likely to pencil out in dense cities with high property values than in smaller, low-income towns.

“We know we have work to do in this area,” said David Maurstad, a senior FEMA official, when he acknowledged the funding gap during congressional testimony on the subject last year.

This week, FEMA finally moved toward narrowing that gap. The agency announced a new loan program that will give states a total of $500 million to dole out to local governments in the form of low-interest loans for small-scale adaptation projects. This way, not only can local officials representing small towns, minor cities, and tribes can skip the extensive application process associated with federal grants, but they also don’t have to justify their projects in cost-benefit terms.

“There’s large infrastructure projects that communities need to fund in order to adapt to the changing climate, but there’s often many small projects that need to get done as well,” said Victoria Salinas, FEMA’s associate administrator for resilience, in a press conference announcing the program on Tuesday. “The burden of getting a smaller project done that actually has a major impact on reducing human suffering is very high.”

The agency is piloting the program by sending $50 million in “seed capital” to seven states — Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, and Virginia — as well as Washington, D.C. The states will get about $6 million each, and they’ll be able to loan that money out to smaller governments at interest rates of less than 1 percent. (The benchmark interest rate for mortgage and credit card lending in the U.S. is currently around 5.5 percent.) The local governments can use that money to buy out homes that are in the path of fire or flood, elevate streets, or repair water infrastructure. States will decide how long local governments will have to pay the loans back.

In Washington, D.C., officials are planning to loan money to pay for storm drain upgrades in a public housing complex that has faced frequent flooding. The District of Columbia has already received money to upgrade a stormwater pump station through FEMA’s other climate adaptation initiative, the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, but the new loan will help officials pursue projects that wouldn’t qualify for that grant money.

Because states themselves will be running the loan programs, rather than the federal government, borrowers won’t have to worry about following the extensive federal spending guidelines that often hamper adaptation projects, or about passing a strict cost-benefit analysis. Experts have criticized federal benefit-cost regulations for placing too much emphasis on property values and neglecting to consider intangible assets like community cohesion and cultural heritage.

Furthermore, the program is a “revolving” loan fund, meaning states can reuse FEMA’s seed capital over and over again. If a state gives a city a loan of $1 million and the city pays the loan back after five years, the state will then have just over $1 million to lend out somewhere else. The program doesn’t have an expiration date, which Salinas said makes it “a more durable source of financing” than the agency’s other grant programs. The loan interest rates are far lower than cities tend to pay for standard municipal bonds, so the risk of default is low.

Anna Weber, an adaptation policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the program could help fill the gaps in FEMA’s still-nascent effort to finance climate adaptation.

“The underlying way that we distribute funding for hazard mitigation currently serves to drive resources to places that already have resources,” she said. “There’s a lot of potential for this program to slot into this patchwork of funding in a way that fills in some gaps.”

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA rolls out climate adaptation loans for small and overlooked communities on Sep 14, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

If you take a look at the primary law that dictates how the United States responds to disasters, the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988, you’ll see a long list of perils that qualify for federal emergency aid. The act defines a “major disaster” as “any natural catastrophe (including any hurricane, tornado, storm, high water, winddriven water, tidal wave, tsunami, earthquake, volcanic eruption, landslide, mudslide, snowstorm, or drought), or, regardless of cause, any fire, flood, or explosion.”

The word “heat,” however, does not appear on that list — or in any other part of the act, for that matter. That simple omission has had big implications for how we respond to heat waves.

In order to unlock the full resources of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, the president must declare a “major disaster” in a given area. But the Stafford Act doesn’t name heat as a qualifying catastrophe, and no president has ever made a disaster declaration over a heat wave. President Joe Biden has made more than 40 such declarations so far this year, but he hasn’t made one for the ongoing heat wave in the U.S. South. That’s despite the fact that the heat in Phoenix has become so severe that dozens of people have gotten burns from falling down on the sidewalk and local authorities have brought in freezer trucks to hold the bodies of heatstroke victims.

“Disaster funding is geared towards fixing expensive things that are broken, not people,” said Juanita Constible, a senior climate and health advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “So because heat is mostly a health consideration, it got left out.”

In theory, FEMA can reimburse state and local governments for any disaster response effort that exceeds local resources, but in practice it has never done so for a heat wave. Because the agency historically hasn’t devoted significant resources to fighting heat, Constible said, most state and local emergency management departments haven’t done much work to plan for heat either.

Part of the issue is that the damage caused by a heat wave is less physical than the devastation caused by a hurricane, tornado, flood, or similar event, so recovery isn’t just a matter of buying bricks to rebuild a school or sending trucks to carry away debris. Even so, heat waves place a massive financial strain on hospitals and power grids, and most local governments can’t afford to ramp up health services on short notice. Local economies also suffer as retail foot traffic plummets and outdoor industries like construction shut down.

During the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, for instance, hospitals in Portland were dunking heatstroke victims in ice baths to keep them alive. But as temperatures climbed, eventually reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit, they ran out of ice and had to scour the city for more. The Pacific Northwest heat wave ended up killing at least 229 people in Oregon and Washington over the course of the week, and perhaps as many as 600. Constible says the immense resources of the federal government might have been able to prevent some of those deaths if they had been available.

“When there are mass casualty events, there’s no big pulse of money that can come into the state or counties to help deal with the aftermath,” she told Grist. “One of the things that hospitals realized after the 2021 event, in Oregon in particular, was that they were wildly unprepared for the impact of that heat wave, and they had to do all this work after the fact to get up to some minimum level. Funds just aren’t really available for that kind of work without a disaster declaration.”

The main FEMA initiative that could theoretically help with heat right now is the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities grant program, or BRIC, which distributes money to cities and states to help them prepare before disasters happen. FEMA released guidance this year signaling to state and local governments that they could use BRIC money to adapt to heat risks, and an agency spokesperson told Grist that more money will soon be available. But even this program hasn’t been much help so far: When the New York City Housing Authority submitted a BRIC application for a cooling center in 2020, FEMA declined to select the project for funding, saying it wasn’t cost-effective.

Representative Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, introduced a bill earlier this summer that would add “extreme heat” to the list of disasters in the Stafford Act. The bill has some bipartisan support, but Constible says it still faces long odds of advancing given the gridlock in the present divided Congress. In the meantime, Biden has asked federal agencies like the Department of Labor and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to get better at protecting workers from heat and measuring heat waves. But in reality, these measures can’t compare to the immense resources of FEMA’s standard disaster response.

At a press conference on Thursday where Biden announced the new measures, Phoenix mayor Kate Gallego said that local governments are doing everything they can to address heat risk, including by tapping pandemic stimulus money and using Inflation Reduction Act grants to plant new trees. But she also warned that the adaptation effort wouldn’t succeed without more help from the feds.

“We would love it if Congress would give you the ability to declare heat a disaster,” she said to Biden. “We need a whole-of-government approach.”

Reporting on extreme heat doesn’t just involve covering brutal temperatures. We need to focus on the solutions that can help us adapt and chart a new path forward. That’s why we’re continuing our extreme heat coverage through the end of September. But we need your help by MIDNIGHT TONIGHT to unlock critical funding. We are just $195 away from unlocking a $20,000 match to support our work. Please take a moment to donate what you can as every dollar counts.

By the numbers

A new report from Climate Central revealed which U.S. cities suffer most from the “urban heat island” effect. Urban environments tend to get hotter than surrounding rural areas because streets and buildings absorb heat over the course of a day and release it at night.

Data Visualization by Clayton Aldern / Grist

What we’re reading

The hottest month ever: July was the hottest month in more than 120,000 years of recorded history. The last time the world was this hot, Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were still vying for species dominance. My colleague Lyric Aquino reports on a month of devastating temperatures. 

Read more

The Last of Us was a documentary: In the latest installment of a Grist-Associated Press collaboration on climate change and disease, the AP’s Camille Fassett explores how warmer temperatures are enabling a fungus known as Candida auris to spread through the U.S. like never before. The fungus can cause sepsis and fever when it infects human beings.

Read more

Grid stress in New York City: Amid a sweltering heat wave last week, New York utility ConEd asked customers to reduce their energy consumption during peak hours. The City’s Samantha Maldonado explains why this happened and why a popular call on social media to “turn off Times Square” wouldn’t have helped prevent blackouts.

Read more

What “record-breaking” really means: Every heat wave brings with it the news that dozens of temperature records around the world have been shattered, but Umair Irfan over at Vox explains that not all temperature records are created equal. The significance of a broken record in a given location depends on how long we’ve been measuring data there, and those nuances often get lost in flashy headlines.

Read more

More heat means more fossil fuels: One big winner from the past month of heat waves? Natural gas. Grid operators around the country have responded to skyrocketing energy demand from air conditioners and fans by burning more gas than ever. Despite rapid growth in renewable energy, gas is still the baseload fuel of choice in almost every region of the U.S. Timothy Puko of the Washington Post reports on the vicious cycle. 

Read more

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why FEMA doesn’t respond to heat waves on Aug 1, 2023.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Jake Bittle.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Source New Mexico. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A couple months after two planned fires escaped to become the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, President Joe Biden promised to “fully compensate survivors.” Late last year, Congress allocated $3.95 billion to do so.

Seven months later, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has paid only about $3 million in claims.

Most of that went to the city of Las Vegas, New Mexico, which narrowly escaped the blaze but suffered damage to its water system. The rest — a total of $400,000 at most — has gone to individuals, an agency official acknowledged last week. The blaze burned hundreds of homes and over 530 square miles of land.

The pace of payments has frustrated fire victims and members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation, who in May urged FEMA to move more quickly. U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a Democrat from Las Vegas, said in a written statement on Thursday that her office will keep up the pressure.

“We know how painful and hard this process has been for those who lost so much,” Leger Fernández said. “We will continue to push to get payments out as fast and efficiently as possible.”

The Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire grew out of two prescribed burns ignited by the United States Forest Service. In April 2022, fueled by high winds in a drought-stricken forest, they merged. Over the next few months, the fire rolled through Mora and San Miguel counties in northern New Mexico.

The Forest Service took responsibility for the blaze, and Congress tasked FEMA with paying victims through a new claims office.

At a news conference on Thursday, Angela Gladwell, director of that office, said that beyond the $3 million in claims that have been paid, several million dollars more are close to being paid out.

Even still, that would be a fraction of 1% of the money allocated by Congress.

There’s widespread agreement about the need to repair the Las Vegas water system, which was damaged when water laden with sediment and contaminants flowed into the treatment plant during heavy rains that followed the fire.

At one point last summer, while the Gallinas River was contaminated, the city had in reserve just 21 days of clean drinking water for residents. When its reservoirs are full, the city has 200 days of water.

Las Vegas Mayor Louie Trujillo said the $2.6 million is the first installment toward what will ultimately be a $140 million project.

But he said he’s far more concerned about people dealing with the “slow and agonizing” process of being compensated by FEMA for losses to their homes, properties and livelihoods.

The $400,000 that has gone to individuals is surprisingly little, he said: “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but my concern is not as much how efficient they’ve been for the city government, as they are about individuals who had losses.”

Gladwell said the claims office has received more than 1,500 notices of loss from more than 2,500 people, businesses, governments and other claimants since November. A notice of loss signals that a victim intends to make a claim for damages.

The office has formally acknowledged 850 of those notices, she said, which starts a 180-day clock to decide how much FEMA will pay.

Meanwhile, FEMA is winding down its emergency response, which came in the form of disaster assistance payments and, in some cases, temporary housing offered in the weeks and months after the fire.

FEMA offered housing to some people who had lost their primary residences, saying it would try to put trailers or mobile homes on their land. But in late April, Source New Mexico and ProPublica found that just two households had gotten housing on their land. Eleven others received housing at commercial parks that in some cases were miles away.

The rest of those eligible — people whose uninsured primary residences were destroyed or badly damaged — found other housing options, which in some cases was a friend or relative’s couch or substandard housing during a grueling winter.

The agency marked them as having found “another housing resource,” according to a FEMA spokesperson.

Since then, another couple has gotten housing on their land and another person got housing at a commercial park.

FEMA noted that terrain and weather, among other factors, made it hard to provide housing. It said it couldn’t place trailers on people’s land in many cases because of federal laws and its own requirement that trailers be hooked up to utilities.

Lawmakers who signed the legislation compensating victims for the federal government’s mistakes have said they wanted individuals and families to be paid first, and businesses, nonprofits and governments later.

At public meetings, FEMA officials have defended their rollout of the claims office. Creating a compensation program is a major undertaking for a federal bureaucracy, and this is the fastest FEMA has ever established an office, the agency said in May. The agency had to work quickly to create policies, open three field offices and staff up. About a dozen navigators, all locals, have been hired to guide victims through the process.

This is the second time FEMA has been in charge of compensating wildfire victims. The first one was also in New Mexico, when the National Park Service ignited a blaze that escaped and burned homes in Los Alamos in 2000.

Six months after legislation was passed to compensate victims of that fire, known as the Cerro Grande Fire, FEMA had paid about $20.5 million to individuals and businesses — about 4% of the $545 million eventually paid out. That $20.5 million included more than $10 million to 1,625 individuals, according to a news release at the time.

FEMA has not yet finalized its rules governing what types of losses and expenses will be covered for the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire. Gladwell has said those rules must be approved by higher-ups at FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security and the White House Office of Management and Budget.

She said Thursday she doesn’t know when the rules might be approved.

Even without final rules, FEMA officials stress that claimants can receive partial payments now for some losses.

“The claims process is operational today and ready to support New Mexicans who suffered losses by these fires immediately,” FEMA spokesperson Michael Hart said.

The office has announced it’s working with an office in the Department of Agriculture to help people calculate their losses. And it will now pay victims’ flood insurance premiums for up to five years.

Nov. 14, 2024, is the deadline for people to submit notice of loss forms to the claims office.

Were You Affected by the Massive Wildfire in Northern New Mexico? We Want to Hear From You.

This content originally appeared on Articles and Investigations - ProPublica and was authored by by Megan Gleason and Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico.

Guam is in a recovery phase after being pummelled by typhoon Mawar.

In a notice early today, Guam Waterworks Authority asked customers to conserve water while its services get restored.

A precautionary boil water notice was also in place until laboratory analysis confirms water is safe to drink.

• READ MORE: Other typhoon reports

The islands’ power authority said it had begun its post-typhoon restoration process following widespread outages.

It said crews were working around the clock to clear lines and restore electricity.

“We are working to restore your power service as soon as possible,” it said.

“We ask residents not to inundate or overwhelm Guam Power Authority Trouble Dispatch lines with inquiries regarding service restoration.”

Warning cancelled
Yesterday evening, Governor Lou Leon Guerrero removed the typhoon warning for Guam after consulting with the National Weather Service.

“We have weathered the worst magnitude of typhoon,” Guerrero said in a video.

“I am now declaring Guam condition of readiness four effective 5pm.”

A spokesperson from US Indo-Pacific Command said it was ready to provide support to “whatever assistance is deemed necessary” by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and local government officials.

The spokesperson said they had deployed initial assessment teams to survey the damage.

The worst of typhoon Mawar was experienced on Wednesday night in Guam with sustained winds of up to 225 km/h and in some locations with rain exceeding 50 cm in the space of 12 hours.

Cars flipped
Cars were flipped and corrugated iron was torn off roofs.

The eye of the storm went through the Rota channel and briefly clipped northern Guam. Damaging winds continued into Thursday.

Meteorologist Landon Aydlett, from the US National Weather Service office in Guam, said it would take weeks for the island to clean up the mess.

“We are waking up to a rather disturbing scene out there across Guam,” Aydlett said.

“We’re looking out our door and what used to be a jungle looks like toothpicks, it looks like a scene from the movie Twister, with trees just thrashed apart, we lost most of our non-coconut trees out their yesterday evening. We have a mess on hand.”

A spokesperson from FEMA told RNZ Pacific two people were injured in Guam and there were no fatalities.

Mariana’s Rota island hit worst
The Public Information Officer for the Governor of Northern Mariana Islands, Frankie Eliptico, said Rota took the biggest beating out of all the CNMI islands.

Eliptico said there had been no reports of major injuries or fatalities in the Marianas.

“No major damage has been reported from this morning but again those assessments are still being conducted,” he said.

“There have been some communication towers that have been affected but as far as major damage that we are seeing on Guam we are not seeing here in the CMNI.”

RNZ Pacific’s CNMI correspondent Mark Rabago said government agencies were closed yesterday and schools would remain shut on Friday.

Rabago said the priority for Rota was now to prepare ports to collect supplies.

“Their first mission once the sun comes out is go to the docks, that means to go to the airports, go to the seaports and clear the access roads going through it, so when supplies do come in they won’t have any difficulty bringing those supplies who really need it.”

In a statement, FEMA said that more than 130 staff were ready to help local response efforts in Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. More than 100 generators as well as emergency communication equipment were also being sent.

Mawar was upgraded to a super typhoon after passing the Mariana Islands and could threaten Taiwan or the Philippines early next week.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

When the agency reviewed the NFIP last year, it discovered inequities in the way that insurance premiums were priced. Homes in the less risky areas of flood zones were overpaying for their premiums, and shouldering a higher burden of the costs of flood risk. The system overhaul was meant to address these inequalities, adjusting premium rates according to level of risk. 

“[W]e have a responsibility to make sure that we have actuarily sound, fair, and equitable rates. And so that’s what’s driving the change,” NFIP senior executive David Maurstad told CNBC last year. 

While this restructuring has caused some homeowners to see decreases in their insurance premiums, others saw their rates spike to over $4,000 annually from just around $700, according to Jeremy Porter, chief research officer at First Street Foundation, a nonprofit research group that quantifies and communicates climate risks. 

E&E News found that the total number of NFIP policies declined by nearly 9 percent, from 4.96 million to 4.54 million, between the end of September 2021 and the end of June 2022. 

The drops in coverage come at a time when it is more important than ever for people living in flood zones to buy insurance. FEMA estimates that climate change will cause the size of areas with a high flood risk to increase by 55 percent along the nation’s coastlines and up to 45 percent along major river systems by the end of the century. 

Sarah Pralle, an associate professor of political science at Syracuse University, said that while the preliminary numbers of dropped policies are concerning, they’re part of a wider problem that extends back before the NFIP’s restructuring. Americans living in flood-prone areas tend not to buy insurance, making premiums higher for those who do, because the insurance pool is smaller.

This problem could be partly addressed through enforcement: Although federal law requires homeowners paying off federally backed mortgages in high-risk areas to purchase flood insurance, many choose not to, or drop their policy after a few years. 

But the bigger problem, she believes, is rooted in FEMA’s flood maps, which depict current levels of disaster risk using data from the past, instead of projections for the future. 

“You might buy a house just outside the edge of a flood zone, thinking you’re safe, but you’re going to have that mortgage for 30 years,” she said. “And probably within 30 years your house is going to be in a flood zone.” 

The solution, Pralle believes, is to adjust FEMA’s flood maps to encompass a larger number of people, thereby widening the insurance pool and bringing down premiums for everyone. 

But requiring more people to buy flood insurance is a politically unpopular policy that risks overburdening low-income homeowners who are already struggling to pay their mortgages. Recognizing this, Pralle said an equitable national flood insurance program would offer subsidies to low income families to incentivize them to seek coverage. 

After all, she said, it is in everyone’s best interest to have flood insurance. Individuals without coverage must often rely on FEMA disaster relief funds, which are typically only several thousand dollars, as opposed to the up to $250,000 that NFIP policyholders may receive for structural damage to a single-family home.

“If you look at outcomes, people with insurance do a lot better after disasters,” she said. The goal should be to make sure low-income homeowners have access to those better outcomes. “Subsidize those premiums so that they have that security and they don’t lose everything,” Pralle said. “I don’t think the solution is just don’t make people buy insurance.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline After FEMA overhaul, hundreds of thousands of Americans are forgoing federal flood insurance on Aug 19, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lylla Younes.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which oversees the program, says the new rubric will more fairly assess flood risks when it calculates insurance premiums. That approach, Risk Rating 2.0, takes into account a home’s individual flood history and rebuilding costs.

David Maurstad, senior executive of the National Flood Insurance Program, called the upgrade “long overdue” in a statement announcing the changes last year. “Now is the right time to modernize how risk is identified, priced, and communicated,” he said. “By doing so we empower policyholders to make informed decisions to protect their homes and businesses from life-changing flooding events that will strike in the months and years ahead due to climate change.” 

The new system marks a major shift in the program’s approach to risk analysis, first established in 1968. Until now, assessments were largely based on a given home’s square footage and elevation relative to the “100-year flood plain,” a swathe of land expected to flood in a major storm. 

Under that system, homeowners at similar elevations — even if one was far inland and the other, on the coast — might have paid similar rates. “The way we were pricing insurance wasn’t fair,” said Rob Moore, a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “People in relatively low-risk areas paid more than they should and people in relatively high-risk areas paid less than they should.” Home by home, the new rubric takes a much closer look to determine each property’s unique flood risk. 

The transition to the new model was broken into two phases. On October 1, the new structure went into effect for homeowners opening new policies. Friday marked the point at which the new system takes effect for current policyholders. For those whose rates will go up, the rates will increase over time until they reach the new premiums, with increases capped at 18 percent each year. Around 20 percent of homeowners are expected to pay less for coverage, Moore noted.

In effect, the homes that will see the steepest price hikes are the highest-value properties right on the coast. But considering their risk levels, owners of such homes have long paid relatively low premiums, which were subsidized by their inland neighbors, often lower-income communities. 

Lawmakers in states like Florida and Louisiana — where residents face rising seas and therefore expect swelling premiums — have raised concerns that homeowners would sooner cancel coverage entirely rather than pay higher rates. “FEMA is making flood insurance unaffordable for Louisianians,” Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said in a statement.

Still, advocates say the much-needed upgrade is essential for understanding the risks posed by extreme weather. The new method “will provide property owners information on their full risk rates,” wrote advocates and experts last September, in a letter expressing their support of FEMA’s efforts. 

The updates may also communicate the growing unsuitability of homes in desirable, but flood-prone areas, such as affluent stretches of the Florida or New Jersey coast. “Hopefully it sends a bit of a price signal that maybe people would be better off living somewhere else,” Moore said. “But if you’re building a big home on the beach, the price of flood insurance is probably not going to be a determining factor.”

Editor’s note: The Natural Resources Defense Council is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline  Can FEMA fix its unfair flood insurance system? We’re about to find out. on Apr 4, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Lina Tran.

“In recent years, so many communities around our nation have been damaged by storms and floods,” Vice President Kamala Harris said at a press conference in Sunset, Louisiana, on Monday, where she announced the new funding. “Our administration is committed to helping all communities to prepare for, to respond to, and to recover from extreme weather.”

The $60 million fund, called the Swift Current initiative, will be administered through FEMA’s Flood Mitigation Assistance Program and is part of $3.5 billion allocated for flood mitigation assistance grants by the bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Joe Biden last fall. It’s the first FEMA project to get funded by the bill. 

The president had originally hoped Congress would be approving another, bigger bill with a lot more money in it for emissions reduction and climate adaptation efforts. But the Build Back Better Act and its $555 billion in climate spending are currently stalled in the Senate. So the Biden administration is using the few tools available to deliver on its promise to advance environmental justice and climate action at the federal level. 

FEMA’s new tranche of money for flood-prone homes is evidence of that. Individuals in the four states chosen by FEMA who own homes and properties that are insured by the National Flood Insurance Program and were substantially damaged by Hurricane Ida or have repeatedly flooded will be eligible for the money. FEMA will prioritize homes that are worth less than $750,000 so that the funding can be stretched between many properties. The grant funding, which will be distributed by local governments, can go toward one of five flood mitigation categories, including elevating buildings off the ground, retrofitting them, and making them more resilient to water.

The funding can also go toward a sixth category: “property acquisition and structure demolition/relocation.” In non-agency speak, that means the federal government will either pay homeowners for their land and tear down the house built on it or pay to have the house moved. As storms become more intense and seas rise, parts of the coastline in the U.S. will become so inundated by water that living there will become impossible. That means people will have to move, or retreat, from these areas. 

The Swift Current initiative is both an acknowledgment that retreat is a reality for some people and evidence that the federal government isn’t ready to incentivize or mandate retreat from flood-prone areas. It’s up to towns to decide what kind of projects they want to submit for grant money, so there’s no saying how many individual homes will end up receiving buyouts thanks to this program. “A lot will depend on which communities come in for funding,” Anna Weber, a policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Grist. “If it’s a town where the local government is really interested in buyouts and a lot of residents think it’s the right choice, then you could see that happen.” 

Swift Current will be administered in a way that complements the Biden administration’s effort to direct 40 percent of the benefits of its climate and environment programs toward disadvantaged neighborhoods, FEMA told CNN, by shouldering 90 percent of the cost share of rebuilding “substantially damaged” homes in “socially vulnerable” communities. A substantially damaged home is one where the cost of restoring the structure to its pre-disaster condition would equal or exceed 50 percent of the market value of the house. The agency typically takes on 75 percent of the cost of substantially damaged homes, but the remaining 25 percent can still be prohibitively expensive for many homeowners. For properties that have flooded more than twice, FEMA said it will cover between 90 and 100 percent of the cost of rebuilding, depending on the severity of the flooding. 

“The Swift Current initiative represents FEMA’s commitment to quickly and equitably getting hazard mitigation funding to the communities who need it the most,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said in a statement. 

While it’s a good start, the $60 million isn’t enough funding to match the scale of the flooding crisis in the U.S. Extreme flooding fueled by climate change already costs the U.S. roughly $32 billion a year. A recent study showed that, by 2050, that financial burden could rise 26 percent to $41 billion a year, and a majority of that risk will fall on predominantly Black communities. “Sixty million dollars is nowhere near enough to make a dent even in addressing the most flood-prone properties in the nation,” Weber said. “But in the bigger picture, this is a situation where FEMA is trying out something new, so it makes sense that they’re only looking at a limited pool of funding.” Depending on how Swift Current goes, FEMA says it could make similar funding available to more states. And the agency provides more money for flood mitigation in states via other streams of funding every year. 

However, in some places, no amount of federal funding will be able to stave off flooding brought on by rising sea-levels. Eventually, people in those areas will have to leave their homes. That’s a problem that FEMA can’t tackle alone. Managed retreat, the coordinated movement of people, assets, and infrastructure from coastlines further inland, will require stronger leadership and a holistic, all-of-government approach, Weber said. “Managed retreat isn’t the jurisdiction of any single federal agency or person,” she added. “I think that we’re going to need a lot more coordination and collaboration if we’re going to have something that actually addresses communities’ needs.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline FEMA is giving homeowners money to prepare for floods — or move away on Mar 23, 2022.

This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Zoya Teirstein.

No doubt concentration camps were a means, a menace used to keep order.

— Albert Speer, Nuremberg Trials

It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.

This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and FEMA concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

It’s just a matter of time.

It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.

The groundwork has already been laid.

Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.

So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government or objecting to a COVID-19 vaccine could get you labeled as a terrorist.

After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore, especially given that the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

For instance, the Department of Homeland Security broadly defines extremists as individuals, military veterans and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”

Military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan may also be characterized as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats by the government because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

Indeed, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

According to the FBI, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories or dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s.

The government also has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up for perceived wrongs.

It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.

It’s happened before.

As history shows, the U.S. government is not averse to locking up its own citizens for its own purposes.

One need only go back to the 1940s, when the federal government proclaimed that Japanese-Americans, labeled potential dissidents, could be put in concentration (a.k.a. internment) camps based only upon their ethnic origin, to see the lengths the federal government will go to in order to maintain “order” in the homeland.

The U.S. Supreme Court validated the detention program in Korematsu v. US (1944), concluding that the government’s need to ensure the safety of the country trumped personal liberties.

Although that Korematsu decision was never formally overturned, Chief Justice Roberts opined in Trump v. Hawaii (2018) that “the forcible relocation of U. S. citizens to concentration camps, solely and explicitly on the basis of race, is objectively unlawful and outside the scope of Presidential authority.”

Roberts’ statements provide little assurance of safety in light of the government’s tendency to sidestep the rule of law when it suits its purposes. Pointing out that such blatantly illegal detentions could happen again—with the blessing of the courts—Justice Scalia once warned, “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”

In fact, the creation of detention camps domestically has long been part of the government’s budget and operations, falling under the jurisdiction of FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

FEMA’s murky history dates back to the 1970s, when President Carter created it by way of an executive order merging many of the government’s disaster relief agencies into one large agency.

During the 1980s, however, reports began to surface of secret military-type training exercises carried out by FEMA and the Department of Defense. Code named Rex-84, 34 federal agencies, including the CIA and the Secret Service, were trained on how to deal with domestic civil unrest.

FEMA’s role in creating top-secret American internment camps is well-documented.

But be careful who you share this information with: it turns out that voicing concerns about the existence of FEMA detention camps is among the growing list of opinions and activities which may make a federal agent or government official think you’re an extremist (a.k.a. terrorist), or sympathetic to terrorist activities, and thus qualify you for indefinite detention under the NDAA. Also included in that list of “dangerous” viewpoints are advocating states’ rights, believing the state to be unnecessary or undesirable, “conspiracy theorizing,” concern about alleged FEMA camps, opposition to war, organizing for “economic justice,” frustration with “mainstream ideologies,” opposition to abortion, opposition to globalization, and ammunition stockpiling.

Now if you’re going to have internment camps on American soil, someone has to build them.

Thus, in 2006, it was announced that Kellogg Brown and Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, had been awarded a $385 million contract to build American detention facilities. Although the government and Halliburton were not forthcoming about where or when these domestic detention centers would be built, they rationalized the need for them in case of “an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs” in the event of other emergencies such as “natural disasters.”

Of course, these detention camps will have to be used for anyone viewed as a threat to the government, and that includes political dissidents.

So it’s no coincidence that the U.S. government has, since the 1980s, acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order, a database of names and information on Americans considered to be threats to the nation.

As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security. There are at least 8 million Americans in the Main Core database.

Fast forward to 2009, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released two reports, one on “Rightwing Extremism,” which broadly defines right-wing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” and one on “Leftwing Extremism,” which labeled environmental and animal rights activist groups as extremists.

Incredibly, both reports use the words terrorist and extremist interchangeably.

That same year, the DHS launched Operation Vigilant Eagle, which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq, Afghanistan and other far-flung places, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

These reports indicate that for the government, so-called extremism is not a partisan matter. Anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is a target, which brings us back, full circle, to the question of whether the government will exercise the power it claims to possess to detain anyone perceived as a threat, i.e., anyone critical of the government.

The short answer is: yes.

The longer answer is more complicated.

Despite what some may think, the Constitution is no magical incantation against government wrongdoing. Indeed, it’s only as effective as those who abide by it.

However, without courts willing to uphold the Constitution’s provisions when government officials disregard it and a citizenry knowledgeable enough to be outraged when those provisions are undermined, it provides little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions, and the like.

Frankly, the courts and the police have meshed in their thinking to such an extent that anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism.

Consequently, America no longer operates under a system of justice characterized by due process, an assumption of innocence, probable cause and clear prohibitions on government overreach and police abuse. Instead, our courts of justice have been transformed into courts of order, advocating for the government’s interests, rather than championing the rights of the citizenry, as enshrined in the Constitution.

We seem to be coming full circle on many fronts.

Consider that two decades ago we were debating whether non-citizens—for example, so-called enemy combatants being held at Guantanamo Bay and Muslim-Americans rounded up in the wake of 9/11—were entitled to protections under the Constitution, specifically as they relate to indefinite detention. Americans weren’t overly concerned about the rights of non-citizens then, and now we’re the ones in the unenviable position of being targeted for indefinite detention by our own government.

Similarly, most Americans weren’t unduly concerned when the U.S. Supreme Court gave Arizona police officers the green light to stop, search and question anyone—ostensibly those fitting a particular racial profile—they suspect might be an illegal immigrant. A decade later, the cops largely have carte blanche authority to stop any individual, citizen and non-citizen alike, they suspect might be doing something illegal (mind you, in this age of over-criminalization, that could be anything from feeding the birds to growing exotic orchids).

Likewise, you still have a sizeable portion of the population today unconcerned about the government’s practice of spying on Americans, having been brainwashed into believing that if you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about.

It will only be a matter of time before they learn the hard way that in a police state, it doesn’t matter who you are or how righteous you claim to be, because eventually, you will be lumped in with everyone else and everything you do will be “wrong” and suspect.

Indeed, it’s happening already, with police relying on surveillance software such as ShadowDragon to watch people’s social media and other website activity, whether or not they suspected of a crime, and potentially use it against them when the need arises.

It turns out that we are Soylent Green, being cannibalized by a government greedily looking to squeeze every last drop out of us.

The 1973 film Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.

Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, Soylent Green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”

Oh, how right he was.

Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us in prisons of our own making.

Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights when power, technology and militaristic governance converge, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted, and go where we wanted without those thoughts, words and movements being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.

We’re not quite there yet, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that moment of reckoning is getting closer by the minute.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead.

Last week, the U.S. rejoined the Paris Climate Agreement. But even if its targets are met — and most countries are far from hitting them — the world will still likely be headed for a 3°C global temperature rise. In the coming decades many of our beloved coastal cities may be wiped off the map. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees warned earlier this year that the world must get ready for the displacement of millions of people. At this late hour, those preparations must include helping people move before disaster strikes.

A growing number of scientists are calling for planned relocation (also known as “managed retreat”) as part of the U.S. government’s strategy to tackle climate disruption. It’s an idea that has gained traction in recent years: In 2016, the Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded a $48 million grant to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe on Isle de Jean Charles, a sinking Louisiana island, to facilitate resettlement. Last year, the Federal Emergency Management Agency introduced the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) grant program, worth half a billion dollars, to help underwrite “larger-scale migration or relocation.”

Until now, the government has resorted to post-disaster recovery: buying and demolishing a handful of houses here and there. (Homeowners receive the pre-disaster value of their property so they can move to safer ground.) But this strategy is changing as more and more policy makers recognize the need to move ever larger numbers of people out of flood- and fire-prone areas to avoid loss of life and the waste of taxpayer dollars used for rebuilding efforts. In 2018, HUD provided billions of dollars for relocation and other pre-disaster initiatives like strengthening river basins and critical infrastructure. States like Texas, South Carolina, and North Carolina want to fund buyouts with that money. Many cities are now applying for BRIC grants as well.

Large-scale relocation could cost hundreds of billions or even several trillion dollars. (The cost of moving roughly 350 people in the eroded Alaskan village of Newtok is estimated at over $100 million.) It will certainly be more expensive than alternatives like building barriers to prevent flooding. But seawalls, like the “Big U” proposed for Manhattan, will require regular maintenance and are likely to fail if sea levels rise beyond the higher end of projections. The Army Corps’s multibillion dollar plan to erect seawalls along the coast of Miami, for instance, won’t do anything against rising groundwater. And cities that face severe wildfire risk can’t be fireproofed.

But the current default — rebuilding in disaster-stricken areas — could eventually prove more costly than relocation. This is already evident in the American West, where the cost to rebuild after wildfire devastation in three of the last four years has exceeded $10 billion per year. In the 50 years prior to that, direct damages from wildfires averaged $1 billion annually. And the U.S. could see a staggering 13 million coastal residents displaced in coming decades due to rising sea levels, including 6 million in Florida alone.

The big question, of course, is where do people go? Duluth, Minnesota, and Buffalo, New York, for example, are situated along large bodies of freshwater and offer cool relief from the deadly heat much of the country will experience. And these cities have the infrastructure to accommodate an influx of climate refugees. “Buffalo is stepping up and preparing to welcome this new type of refugee,” Mayor Byron Brown said last year. Duluth Mayor Emily Larson shared a similar sentiment and believes a larger population could help the local economy. If we do eventually get serious about planned relocation, Northern cities will likely see population booms.

But many people simply do not want to part ways with the only home they’ve ever known, and renters do not receive sufficient federal relief. Assistance in the form of FEMA-funded buyouts usually takes years to materialize, and during that time houses can repeatedly flood. FEMA programs as they exist today are too slow and inefficient to be scalable, and in the absence of major reforms it will be impossible for the agency to proactively manage retreat and protect communities ahead of time.

Not all buyout programs are failures. New Jersey’s acquisition program, Blue Acres, may serve as a model. Homes destroyed by Hurricane Sandy in 2012 were acquired through the program in a matter of months — in some cases just a few weeks — having skipped the lengthy review process typically required by FEMA. Timely buyout offers are extremely important because homeowners have a stronger incentive to accept them before they start rebuilding.

There are no easy solutions — certainly not for large, vulnerable cities that could eventually see millions of residents displaced. Congress will have to increase funding for both FEMA and HUD to enable relocation on the scale that’s needed. Additionally, the government will have to ensure that people who relocate will be able to support themselves, either by providing jobs or a basic income.

All of this should happen before major disaster strikes. When huge swaths of cities are submerged and homes and livelihoods are lost, people won’t be able to bootstrap themselves out of the disaster. Now that state and local officials are starting to seriously consider the idea of planned relocation, communities should help formulate comprehensive plans. Nobody likes moving, especially not in a disastrous rush.

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