Blame FEMA?

Author

Bubba
08 Oct

Following the devastation of Hurricane Helene, there’s been lots of finger pointing over whether the Federal Emergency Management Agency is being adequately funded. (RealClearInvestigations)

A new RealClearInvestigations report: FEMA is sitting on $73 billion in unspent funds from 847 past disaster declarations, according to the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Inspector General.

  • $8.3 billion of those funds are tied to disasters from 2012 or earlier.

  • The agency has come close to running out of money nine times since 2001.

  • FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund had $4 billion as of last month but could face a $6 billion shortfall by year-end.

What Jeremy Portnoy, a reporter at the government watchdog OpentheBooks, told RealClearInvestigations:

There is all that money just sitting there. … They’re saying they don’t have enough money but when you juxtapose it with the more than $8 billion, well, why not use that right now in Florida and other places?

Why? According to experts, FEMA doesn't use the unspent disaster relief funds because the money is tied to specific past disasters and the complexity of the federal bureaucracy prevents quick access.

  • Also, federal agencies generally prefer not to tap into these “unliquidated obligations” when near-term budget negotiations are approaching.

Zoom out: A 2014 study from the Cato Institute’s Downsizing the Government project criticized FEMA for slow and disorganized responses to disasters, citing Hurricane Katrina as an example of its bureaucratic dysfunction.

  • According to researchers, FEMA's disaster preparedness grants are wasteful, and its flood insurance program encourages risky development in flood-prone areas.

  • The study recommended cutting FEMA's role in disaster relief, advocating for more reliance on state, local, and private efforts, with the eventual goal of shutting down the agency.

Bubba’s Two Cents

Presidents - including George W. Bush with Katrina, Donald Trump with Maria and President Biden with Helene - get tons of grief over their handling of natural disasters. Now, I’m not discounting the importance of leadership in a crisis, but there’s a clear partisan motive to a lot of this criticism. The tendency to blame the guy in the Oval Office often results in FEMA - the federal agency that’s specifically designated to handle this stuff and the one common factor across all these disasters - getting let off the hook.