The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. agency in charge of disaster relief, faces financial and staffing challenges ahead of Hurricane Milton’s arrival in Florida — as additional disaster funding is tied up in partisan power struggles in Washington.
Parts of Florida’s Gulf Coast are bracing for a Category 3 hurricane just two weeks away after Hurricane Helene made landfall, devastating much of the state’s panhandle region and southern Appalachia. Nearly a dozen Florida counties have received evacuation orders to prepare for Hurricane Milton, which stunned meteorologists with its extremely rapid intensification and is expected to make landfall on Wednesday evening.
The one-two punch of back-to-back hurricanes is straining federal disaster resources. As FEMA contends with Helene recovery as well wildfires burning across the Westonly 8 percent of the agency’s incident management staff is available to respond to new disasters, according to her daily operations briefing for Wednesday.
FEMA was facing funding problems long before Helene arrived: In a late August report on the state of the agency’s disaster relief fund, FEMA projected that it would hit a deficit the next month. A few weeks later, in September, Congress allocated $20 billion to the emergency agency as part of a spending bill intended to avoid a government shutdown.
But in the week after Helene made landfall, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose cabinet division houses FEMA, said the agency would not have enough money to get through the rest of the hurricane season, which lasts until the end of November. President Joe Biden has since urged lawmakers to send more money FEMA’s way – so the agency can avoid making the “unnecessary trade-off” of diverting resources away from long-term recovery efforts to address any immediate emergencies.
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Additional funding appears unlikely to arrive in time to impact recovery efforts for Hurricane Milton. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News he will not bring the lower house of congress back from his October vacation to consider sending more money to FEMA, and that he won’t consider the matter until after the Nov. 5 election.
FEMA uses its disaster relief fund to do things like pay for disaster support and local litter removalrepair damaged public infrastructure, and provide financial assistance to eligible victims. The fund has an average of $12 billion dollars annually between 1992 and 2021, with 44 percent of that money going to hurricane relief.
But in the wake of Helene, FEMA has a barrage of false rumours about disaster relief dollars being misused and diverted to housing migrants. The agency clearly did denied the claim on his website: “This is false. No money is diverted from disaster response needs.” FEMA does have a small grant program, which represents less than 3 percent of its annual budgetwhich provides humanitarian support for non-citizen immigrants released from detention facilities — but this program is entirely separate from its disaster relief fund. Still, rumors of misused disaster funding have added fuel to the fire created by right-wing pot stirrers like radio host Alex Jones and Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who claim FEMA is botching its response to Helene.
Although the rumors of diverted funds are unfounded, they have proven to be sticky, with several Republican lawmakers spreading the misinformation. For example, when asked why she voted against the congressional stopgap measure that sent $20 billion to FEMA, Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who represents Tennessee, called the bill “reckless” and said she would not “fund”flying illegal people into our country.” In his Fox News interview, Speaker Mike Johnson conceded that, yes, FEMA’s disaster aid and migrant aid dollars come from two different pools of funding — and then proceeded to combine the two efforts.
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As Republicans politicize disaster relief operations, Mayorkas hit back at FEMA’s funding needs. On Wednesday, the Secretary of Homeland Security said that FEMA “quite clear” has everything it needs to effectively respond to Hurricane Milton. Meanwhile, FEMA itself largely downplayed any pressure on his staff. Administrator Deanne Criswell told MSNBC the agency is well positioned to address the needs of areas affected by Hurricane Milton — after all, disaster relief personnel are already on the ground in Florida as part of its Helene response.
As are extreme weather conditions exacerbated by climate change and affecting more of the country, disaster relief needs will continue to grow. On Wednesday, dozens of Democratic members of Congress urged Johnson to reconvene the House to pass additional disaster relief funding. And some Republican lawmakers — even those who originally voted against the congressional bill that sent $20 billion to the emergency management agency — are now publicly calling for more money for FEMA. Representative Anna Paulina Luna last week a bipartisan bill Awarding $15 billion to FEMA and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to aid Helene’s recovery efforts. “We need FEMA DOLLARS FREE’D UP,” Luna wrote in a tweet directed at Vice President and presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Luna’s district includes most of Pinellas County, Florida, which Milton is expected to hit.
Luna before voted against the measure to fund FEMA through the end of the calendar year.
