\n<\/p>\n
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.<\/p>\n
Upheaval at the nation\u2019s top disaster agency is raising anxiety among state and local emergency managers \u2014 and leaving major questions about the whereabouts of billions of federal dollars it pays out to them.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
FEMA has blown through the mid-May statutory deadline to start the grants\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no transparency on why it\u2019s not happening,\u201d said Michael A. Coen Jr., who served as FEMA\u2019s chief of staff under former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. <\/p>\n
FEMA\u2019s system of grants is complex and multifaceted and helps communities prepare for and respond to everything from terrorist attacks to natural disasters.<\/p>\n
In April, the agency abruptly rescinded a different grant program that county and local governments were expecting to help them reduce natural hazard risks moving forward.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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
FEMA did not answer ProPublica\u2019s 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\u2019s spending by \u201crooting out waste, fraud, abuse, and working to ensure only grants that really help Americans in time of need are approved.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
All of this has left states \u2014 some of which rely on the federal government for the vast majority of their emergency management funding \u2014 in a difficult position. While Trump has sharply criticized FEMA\u2019s performance delivering aid after disasters strike, he has said almost nothing about the future of its grant programs.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a huge concern,\u201d 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. \u201cThe uncertainty makes it very difficult,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
In North Carolina, a state hit hard by a recent natural disaster, federal grants make up 82% of its emergency management agency\u2019s budget. North Carolina Emergency Management leaders are pressing state lawmakers to provide it with \u201cfunding that will sustain the agency and its core functions\u201d and cut its reliance on federal grant funding, an agency spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In May, ProPublica published a story detailing the horrors of Hurricane Helene\u2019s 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\u2019t until after the storm that county commissioners agreed with the need.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey realized how big a job it is,\u201d said Howell, who has since retired.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Yet Graham said he has resorted to scouring social media posts and news reports for bits of clues about the grants \u2014 and the future of FEMA itself. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re all having to be like, hey, what have you heard? What do you know? What\u2019s going on? Nobody knows,\u201d Graham said.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s chief counsel, have left or been fired, along with an unknown mass of its full-time workers.<\/p>\n
\u201cEvery emergency manager I know is screaming, \u2018You\u2019re screwing the system up.\u2019 We\u2019ve all been calling for reform,\u201d Graham said. \u201cBut it\u2019s too much, too fast.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Across the country, the percentage of state emergency management agencies\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
Wyoming tops 90%. Texas\u2019 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.<\/p>\n
Most state emergency managers agree that their states need to depend less on the federal government for their funding, \u201cbut there\u2019s got to be some glide path or timeline where we can all work toward the goal,\u201d Budd said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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 [email\u00a0protected].<\/p>\n
If emergency managers instead are scrambling, \u201cthe effects that we\u2019re going to see down the line is a lack of preparedness, a lack of coordination, training and partnerships being built,\u201d Budd said. \u201cWe\u2019re not going to be able to respond as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019t always prioritized paying for emergency management themselves despite its critical role. With FEMA\u2019s grants, they haven\u2019t had to.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s emergency management division under then-Govs. Jeb Bush and Charlie Crist.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy experience tells me locals will not step up unless they are dealing with a catastrophe,\u201d Fugate said.<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 especially with other pressing needs vying for those dollars.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe real question is how much of this is actually critical and should be the responsibility of local governments to fund?\u201d Fugate said. \u201cNeither local governments nor states have been very forward in funding beyond the minimums to match federal dollars.\u201d<\/p>\n
After Hurricane Helene, North Carolina\u2019s Emergency Management agency commissioned a report that pointedly criticized the state\u2019s \u201cover-reliance on federal grants to fund basic operations.\u201d Only about 16.5% of the state agency\u2019s budget comes from state appropriations.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cseverely compromised the state\u2019s response to Hurricane Helene.\u201d Among other things, a lack of staff hampered the State Emergency Response Team\u2019s ability to maintain a 24-hour operation that was supposed to support local and county officials who were overwhelmed by the massive storm.<\/p>\n
North Carolina state Rep. Mark Pless, the Republican co-chair of the House Emergency Management and Disaster Recovery Committee, said the state\u2019s conservative spending and $3.6 billion in reserves have \u201cafforded us the ability to fund ourselves for preparedness\u201d if FEMA suddenly yanks its grants.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
In mostly rural Washington County, along North Carolina\u2019s hurricane-prone coast, Lance Swindell is a one-man emergency management office. His county, home to 11,000 people, lacks a big tax base.<\/p>\n
\n Helene\u2019s Unheard Warnings<\/strong>\n <\/p>\n Like other emergency managers across the state, Swindell said he supports cutting FEMA red tape and waste, but \u201cgrant funding is a major funding source just to keep the lights on.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Cuts to this particular grant under the Biden administration already reduced what North Carolina gets \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Looking ahead, Swindell is still waiting for the applications to open while wondering if FEMA will more drastically slash the grants \u2014 and, if so, whether his county could find the money to continue paying his full-time salary.<\/p>\n Mollie Simon contributed research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. Upheaval at the nation\u2019s top disaster agency is raising anxiety among state and local emergency managers \u2014 and leaving major questions about the whereabouts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9749,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1518,2285,2284,406,247,1561,81,2283],"class_list":{"0":"post-9748","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-fear","9":"tag-fema","10":"tag-future","11":"tag-grants","12":"tag-propublica","13":"tag-states","14":"tag-trump","15":"tag-uncertain"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}