A panel advising President Donald Trump on how to reduce the government’s role in responding to natural disasters is likely to recommend changes this week that have been attempted in the past — but failed.
A 13-member expert panel plans to vote Thursday on a final report that could upend 50 years of federal policy by forcing states to pay billions of dollars a year for rebuilding efforts after major storms, wildfires and floods. Trump created the panel after assailing the Federal Emergency Management Agency as slow and feckless while campaigning for president in the wake of Hurricane Helene last year.
Yet for at least a decade, FEMA itself has proposed — and tested — policies to address the problems that Trump has highlighted.
The agency’s previous efforts to speed up the distribution of disaster aid and shift rebuilding costs to states are now under scrutiny by Trump’s FEMA Review Council, which is led by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
At the same time, state and local officials have been meeting with the council to renew their long-standing opposition to weakening FEMA. Their lobbying helped derail previous attempts to overhaul the agency.
“Anything that costs the states money, governors, senators and congressmen come out to kill it,” said Peter Gaynor, who ran FEMA for two years in Trump’s first administration and proposed shifting some disaster costs to states.
The review council’s public meeting Thursday is shaping up as a momentous event in FEMA’s 46-year history. The agency gives out tens of billions of dollars a year to help states, communities and individuals recover from disasters. That could be turned upside down if the council abides by Trump’s most significant directive to the panel — an order to evaluate whether FEMA can operate as a “support agency” that gives states “supplemental” disaster aid.
Although FEMA has long said that disasters are “state managed and federally supported,” the agency exerts enormous control over recovery efforts. It leads on-the-ground reviews after severe weather events to determine if there was enough damage to qualify for federal aid.
While presidents have exclusive authority to approve disaster aid, FEMA controls the money, which covers at least 75 percent of rebuilding costs. The agency scrutinizes each large project before agreeing to reimburse states. Then, after the project is completed, it reviews the work before giving the money to states.
The FEMA process is universally regarded as agonizing and, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, had caused the agency to take 20 years to repay Louisiana for the costs of rebuilding.
‘Everybody was worried’
One idea that Trump has embraced repeatedly is to empower states by giving them block grants for recovery shortly after a disaster strikes, instead of reimbursing individual costs.
Important details remain unclear such as how the government would determine the size of each grant.
But the idea is not new. Congress authorized the creation of a FEMA block grant program in 2013. It has been used only minimally.
“FEMA already offers a block grant option,” Rep. Rick Larsen of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said at a committee hearing earlier this year. States “rarely use” block grants “due to the perceived risks.”
Under the program, state officials and FEMA work together to agree on a block grant for an individual rebuilding project — not for an entire disaster. The state then gets a single up-front payment.
FEMA has encouraged the use of block grants by letting states keep unspent funds, easing paperwork and not requiring damaged facilities to be restored to their predisaster use.
But the incentives have been outweighed by the requirement that states pay cost overruns.
A new FEMA program that gives states a single block grant for an entire disaster could raise similar concerns.
“Everybody was worried they were going to miss out on money,” said Craig Fugate, who ran FEMA in the Obama administration and launched the block grant program. The concern arose from “distrust of the federal government — that we were going to low-ball the estimates.”
Audits of the block grants raised questions about whether it is actually faster for FEMA to negotiate a single payment instead of reimbursing actual costs.
The Department of Homeland Security inspector general reported in 2022 that it took FEMA “slightly longer” to approve block grants compared to approving reimbursements. Neither process was quick.
FEMA took an average of 380 days to approve reimbursements for disaster work. Approving a block grant took an average of 415 days.
Yet the inspector general’s analysis excluded Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, which used block grants extensively after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Both struggled under the program. It took FEMA nearly three years to approve block grants for both territories.
A Congressional Research Service report in 2021 amplified the problems with block grants in Puerto Rico following Maria. Two years after the hurricane demolished much of the island, FEMA had identified 9,344 damage sites. But only 19 had received final cost estimates.
‘We were too late’
The limitations when overhauling FEMA are legal and political.
Federal law requires that when FEMA reimburses states after they repair damaged public facilities, the agency’s share “shall not be less than 75 percent of the eligible cost.”
The 75 percent reimbursement does not apply to FEMA block grants. But it does restrict ways that the executive branch can reduce FEMA disaster spending.
FEMA has tried twice since 2016 to push states to spend more on disaster prevention. Both efforts failed.
In 2016, during former President Barack Obama’s final year in office, then-FEMA Administrator Fugate proposed imposing a “disaster deductible” on states that would require them to spend money on hazard mitigation to be eligible for agency disaster aid.
The idea was that additional state spending on mitigation would cut federal spending by reducing disaster damage.
“Most people felt it made sense. I think it died because of the complexity of trying to figure out on the deductible how to give credits for mitigation,” Fugate said.
The concept went through exhaustive review by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA. Then, in January 2016, Fugate published a preliminary notice in the Federal Register, an early step toward implementing the new policy. It took another year for Fugate to publish a supplemental notice on Jan. 12, 2017, about a week before Obama left office.
“We were too late,” Fugate recalled in an interview. “It was at the end of the administration. There was a lot of angst to get it to that point,” where the idea could be published in the Federal Register.
Opposition was widespread and bipartisan. The Illinois congressional delegation at the time — 13 Democrats and seven Republicans — argued that the deductible could “delay federal disaster assistance.”
The National Association of Counties and the U.S. Conference of Mayors jointly told FEMA its proposal would “make it more difficult for local governments to recover from disasters.”
In December 2020, near the end of Trump’s first term, FEMA made a second effort to require states to spend more on disasters.
The proposal was simpler — FEMA would raise the level of damage an event must cause for states to get disaster aid — but the opposition was similar.
The Biden administration abandoned the proposal — giving states billions of dollars in additional funding to protect against disasters and climate change.
Since Trump created the FEMA Review Council, state and local officials have been highlighting FEMA’s unique stature as a recovery agency.
At a public council meeting held in California in August, a Los Angeles County supervisor, Lindsey Horvath, lauded FEMA for its work during the devastating wildfires in January.
“This kind of hands-on, coordinated federal support is irreplaceable,” Horvath told the review council. “I respectfully urge this panel to recognize and preserve FEMA’s essential role as the backbone of our nation’s emergency response and recovery system.”
