FEMA has $20 billion in disaster funding. Bad weather means it’s not enough

Thirteen days after Hurricane Helene hit Florida and left a trail of destruction in many states, Hurricane Milton could be even worse. With the Gulf of Mexico warming up, another major hurricane could follow. On the West Coast, record heat in California increases the risk of wildfires this month.

Meanwhile, FEMA has been stretched: Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the agency doesn’t have enough money in the Disaster Relief Fund to deal with hurricanes. And with hundreds of FEMA workers on the ground in North Carolina (and thousands of other federal workers), the agency also faces a shortage of staff to manage the potential aftermath of Milton.

The disaster response agency was not built for the reality of climate change. “The trend is clear that we’re dealing with a lot of these very expensive disasters,” said Kristina Dahl, senior climate scientist at the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists. Last year, a record 28 major weather and climate disasters in the US caused at least $92.9 billion in damage. Every year since 2020 there have been at least 18 billion disasters. In the 1980s, there were less than eight a year.

It is also now possible for one major disaster to follow another immediately, or for more than one major disaster to occur at the same time.

The amount of money in the Disaster Relief Fund—$20 billion this year, meant to deal with emergencies like these—is now insufficient. (The estimated cost of Helene alone is more than $38 billion, a significant portion of which FEMA will help pay for.) The fund “is not designed to deal with disasters on the scale of Hurricane Helene,” said Jeffrey Schlegelmilch, director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University’s climate science school. “There will certainly be an additional emergency bill when Congress chooses to return.”

The amount spent on this type of emergency loan far exceeds that spent on the Official Disaster Relief Fund. In a new, unpublished study, Schlegelmilch and his colleagues compiled just how much. It has been a challenge to get the numbers, because the money comes from different sources. But studies have shown that additional federal spending on disasters could be more than $100 billion a year.

“We spend a lot more money than we realize on disasters,” said Schlegelmilch. If Congress sets aside the right amount of money at once, he says, it would be difficult to ignore the level of spending. “I think that if the public could see that number, there might be a big cry for preparation,” he said.

Research suggests that every dollar spent making a community more resilient—through stronger housing and infrastructure, better land-use planning, and other investments—can save that community 13 times more when disaster strikes later.

FEMA has begun to do more of this work. Last year, its Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program awarded $1 billion in grants to help communities better prepare themselves. For example, in California’s Napa County, where there have been 26 wildfires in less than a decade, funding supports a new fuel control program, improved evacuation routes, and drinking water protection. Danville, a low-income city in Arkansas, is using a grant to build a hurricane shelter near an elementary school. In Depue, Illinois, where severe flooding from a recent storm damaged a wastewater treatment plant in the floodplain and caused raw sewage to fill local basements, the program is helping to build a new plant in a safe area and a new green space in the floodplain. . A number of other activities are underway.

FEMA “is also involved in things like buyout programs, so we don’t just build and rebuild in the same area,” Dahl said. “But I think we have to think about FEMA’s role in building resiliency so that places don’t have to look at such devastation from these extreme events.” Currently, only about 6% of FEMA’s post-disaster spending goes to resilience work such as BRIC grants. The agency could undoubtedly do more to push state and local governments to update building codes and make other changes to reduce the impact of future disasters.

Part of the challenge is that voters reward politicians who help secure disaster relief funding, but there is no equivalent support for the work to be done. “Right now, most of the way we vote, the way we respond, the way we donate, is responsive and responsive,” said Schlegelmilch. “We want to see more money flowing after the consequences, even though all the research tells us that spending more money before a crisis saves many times afterwards.”

As insurance companies continue to pull out of disaster-prone areas, it is even more important to focus on increasing resilience. FEMA was intended for performance and insurance; the bills will be even better for taxpayers if insurance companies disappear or raise rates so high that fewer people can afford insurance. But the insurance has a chance of being economically viable only if societies do more to adapt and prepare for climate change, at the same time that the world needs to speed up its emissions cuts.

Congress needs to reshape FEMA, Shlegelmilch said. “We will have to reorganize the way we manage emergencies in this country,” he said. “Or we’ll have to pick up the pieces when the system inevitably breaks.”