DISASTER RESPONSEAmid Multiple Disasters, FEMA Faces Funding Challenges, Misinformation, and Politicization
Congress gave the agency enough money to last the year. But back-to-back hurricanes are stretching resources thin. Moreover, in the wake of Helene and Milton, FEMA has faced a barrage of brazen lies and distortions concocted by Donald Trump and amplified by his supporters about disaster relief dollars being misused and redirected toward housing migrants.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. agency in charge of disaster relief, is facing financial and staffing challenges ahead of Hurricane Milton’s arrival in Florida — as additional disaster funding gets tied up in partisan power-jockeying in Washington.
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.
