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When Hurricane Helene hit Florida in late September, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was already low on disaster-relief funds.
Now, at the very moment Hurricane Milton is making landfall, FEMA finds itself caught in a game of funding catch-up that could become the new norm as the climate crisis fuels more extreme and destructive storms, emergency-response experts told Business Insider.
It's due to a set of miscalculations: Government officials underestimate the price tag of disaster response, and Congress is slow to approve new funding — especially as disaster relief has become more politicized. As a result, local governments fronting the funds to recover from older disasters can be left in a lurch.
In this case, for nearly two months, FEMA hoarded $9 billion to make up for delayed funding from Congress. That aid was meant for communities rebuilding from other extreme events — like flooding in Vermont, atmospheric rivers in California, and wildfires in the Pacific Northwest. It needed to reserve those funds for lifesaving measures in the Southeast.
This is the second year in a row that FEMA has paused long-term recovery efforts in an attempt to avoid a shortfall, despite warning Congress for months that it would need billions more ahead of hurricane season. A day before Helene hit Florida, Congress passed a law for short-term government spending that authorized $20 billion for FEMA to resume business as usual. But Biden-administration officials warn of another shortfall as soon as January, especially after Hurricane Milton slammed into the Tampa area late Wednesday.
"The agency is frequently in 'reaction mode,' waiting for Congress to approve additional funds after a disaster strikes instead of having sufficient resources ready upfront," Craig Fugate, who led FEMA during the Obama administration and now owns an emergency-management consultancy, said in an email. "This can lead to gaps particularly for long-term recovery needs."
The ad hoc way the US funds disaster relief slows down state and local efforts to rebuild before the next crisis and makes the process more expensive, emergency-response experts and community advocates said.
Part of the problem is that FEMA doesn't ask Congress for enough money at the start of the year, said Carlos Martín, who studies disaster mitigation, recovery, and adapting housing to climate change at Harvard University. The agency's request is based on a 10-year rolling average of the past, which doesn't account for the growing risks of climate-fueled disasters.
"Anybody who's in the climate-change world knows that isn't going to work anymore," Martín said. "Not only are these disasters much more severe and more frequent, but they're affecting highly urbanized places."
FEMA often requests additional disaster-relief funds from Congress throughout the year. However, those requests aren't guaranteed to be approved, especially as lawmakers struggle to pass even basic government-spending deals. Sometimes the delays push FEMA's budget into "immediate-needs funding," which ensures the agency can execute search-and-rescue operations, remove debris, and provide food, water, and shelter to displaced survivors immediately after the next catastrophe.
In this mode, funding is suspended for state and local governments rebuilding infrastructure damaged by disasters in the past decade, or more in some cases. Since 2001, immediate-needs funding has been invoked nine times, most recently in 2017, 2023, and 2024 in the wake of hurricanes. In the meantime, local governments that took out loans to fund recovery efforts must wait to get reimbursed by FEMA, said Yucel Ors, the legislative director of public safety and crime prevention at the National League of Cities.
"Those loans have interest," he said. "So if FEMA delays reimbursements, local governments have to bear those costs, and they may put off recovery efforts. If they put off recovery efforts, that will impact the economy."
During a call with reporters on Monday, a FEMA official said that the agency works closely with the White House to estimate the funding it needs each year and for months had asked Congress for more. The official said they're "confident" the agency would get the resources needed to help survivors recover.
FEMA first requested additional funding in October 2023. President Joe Biden in a letter to lawmakers on Friday suggested they return to Washington from the campaign trail to pass extra relief, especially with the Small Business Administration's disaster-loan program also low on funding. But House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Republican from Louisiana, told "Fox News Sunday" that Congress would be back in session after the November election to "do its job" and accused FEMA of not being prepared for Hurricane Helene.
"The thing about these hurricanes and disasters of this magnitude is it takes awhile to calculate the actual damages, and the states are going to need some time to do that," Johnson said. "You don't just send estimates to the federal government. You send specific needs and requests based upon the actual damages."
FEMA officials have repeatedly said they have enough resources to respond to Hurricane Helene and now Hurricane Milton but declined to specify how much disaster aid remained available. They set up a fact-checking page to debunk misinformation about the agency's relief work and encourage survivors to continue signing up for assistance.
More than 7,400 federal workers — including 1,500 from FEMA — continue to support North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia, the agency said. Assistance to Helene survivors surpassed $286 million. Another 1,400 search-and-rescue personnel were pre-staged in Florida on Wednesday to support the response to Milton.
Helene killed more than 230 people, and there are complaints that the response has been slow. Asheville, North Carolina, and its surrounding mountain towns were hit especially hard. Residents are reeling from the shock that an inland region nearly 400 miles from where Helene made landfall could be devastated.
"It's really difficult to plan how many disasters are going to occur," Ors said, noting the destruction in the Asheville area. "But their scale and frequency are increasing. There needs to be some way to make sure not only the immediate needs are taken care of but also obligations of previous disasters. We don't have that complete solution."
