Millions of dollars in disaster relief are released by the Federal Emergency Management Administration each year.
While the Trump administration has floated outright dismantling FEMA, the agency continues to provide needed aid to devastated regions. Though approving or denying federal disaster relief can seem random, or at times political, it appears the agency continues to use a detailed assessment method even with its uncertain future.
How aid gets approved or denied
After natural disasters or severe weather events, states, territories, and tribal lands can request FEMA funds from the federal government. These funds can be used to rebuild, distribute food and supplies, and create temporary shelter, among other things.
States begin getting FEMA aid by requesting it from the federal government. The agency and states rely on the Stafford Act of 1988, which lays out the means for federal natural disaster assistance.
States, tribal nations, and territories must show the agency “that the disaster exceeds the jurisdiction’s capacity to respond and recover without federal assistance,” Thomas Chandler, the managing director at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness and professor of climate at Columbia University, told the Washington Examiner in an email.
Chandler said FEMA then conducts a joint assessment with state and local officials to estimate “the amount and type of damage, the impact on individuals and infrastructure, and the level of insurance coverage.”
Damage assessments can range in technology and methodology. Chandler noted that some communities utilize artificial intelligence and drone technologies, while others “may only have field teams going door to door after a disaster.”
After the damage assessment and a state’s request for funding from FEMA, the agency looks at the situation through a monetary lens to determine whether the request will be approved or denied.
Approving a request largely depends on the scale of destruction and the amount of uninsured property losses, including public assistance for uninsured damages to public roads, buildings, utilities, and individual assistance. The agency also reviews how long-term recovery for the area will be affected, with or without federal assistance.
For a state request to be approved, the damage assessment should be more than the statewide per capita impact, calculated by the monetary ratio of the disaster’s damage to the state’s population. For 2025, disasters with a per capita impact above $1.89, typically the minimum threshold, are considered eligible for a major disaster declaration.
The FEMA disaster relief approval process can be sped up for severe weather events, including major hurricanes, wildfires, and intense flooding. The Stafford Act also created a system in which presidential and emergency declarations trigger a FEMA response.
A president would typically issue a major disaster declaration, sometimes within hours of the natural disaster, to preposition staff and resources to the area, Chandler said. These decorations can also come before a major weather event hits an area to unlock resources preemptively.
“Disaster recovery is also a huge, and often overlooked part of the cost estimate process. If thousands of uninsured homes are destroyed, there will be a need for temporary housing programs that usually run for 18 months after a major disaster,” Chandler said, adding that those temporary programs “can be extremely expensive and require extensive planning.”
“Some states have very robust disaster housing task forces, which meet regularly to plan for the worst. On the flip side, other states don’t have robust planning processes,” Chandler said.
The future of FEMA
The Trump administration has been urging states to create their own agencies to handle disaster relief as it considers the agency’s future. President Donald Trump has proposed eliminating FEMA after the 2025 hurricane season.
“We want to wean off of FEMA, and we want to bring it down to the state level,” Trump said in June.
Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, which houses FEMA, agreed with Trump, saying FEMA “fundamentally needs to go away as it exists.” Still, the administration has no formal plans to entirely eliminate the agency at this time, according to the Washington Post.
Meanwhile, a bipartisan push from both the House and Senate is seeking to make FEMA a Cabinet-level agency. Before 2001, FEMA acted as an independent agency.
The cost of major weather events only continues to increase as they become more frequent and severe due to climate change. In 2018, for example, the U.S. saw 14 natural disasters that resulted in $1 billion in damage. Last year, the country saw 27 major disasters, according to the Government Accountability Office.
The federal government has spent $550 billion on disaster relief in the last decade.
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With little explanation, the Trump White House recently denied Maryland FEMA aid for flooding in the western portion of the state. At the same time, the Trump White House approved disaster relief for storms that hit Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, and West Virginia.
In his first administration, Trump had a tendency to deny federal assistance to states led by those he saw as his political enemies.