States Fear Critical Funding from FEMA May Be Drying Up
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.
Vulnerable to Political Shifts
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.
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.”
Small-Town North Carolina
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.
Jennifer Berry Hawes writes about racial inequities across the South but am interested in a broad range of systemic harm. She is especially interested in Hurricane Helene and issues related to preparedness and rebuilding. Mollie Simon contributed research. This story was originally published by ProPublica. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive ProPublica’s biggest stories as soon as they’re published.
