The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) backpedaled after announcing new policies that would have forced states to forfeit disaster aid if they refused to buy from Israeli firms. Except no states explicitly do this, and 34 have anti-BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) measures on the books.
Shortly after this factoid emerged, the agency scrubbed the policy from its website. If progress is measured by the effort to force states into compliance with a roster of ever-shifting norms in ways that have agencies and departments focused on eradicating so-called DEI language and policies from official documents, it was a decisive, if small, setback.
Sudden federal diktats, especially ones that can appear in informal social media channels, introduce uncertainty, says Tim Riecker, a former New York state emergency management official. He compares the BDS case to the Iran Divestment Act, which restricts certain investments in Iranian-linked commerce. Since the federal government has purview over international trade, individuals and businesses need guidance through established mechanisms. “If there’s going to be a prohibition on entities that want to [restrict] trade with a foreign nation then that’s something that needs to be enacted as a law,” he says. “Emergency management is fundamentally a humanitarian mission,” he adds. “We shouldn’t have to be dancing around wordsmithing, which is just silly.”
While the agency focuses on DEI, the Atlantic Ocean tropical systems currently lurking during what’s been up to now an otherwise quiet hurricane season are potent reminders of the potential negative impact of the deadly partisan bureaucratic games that people play, with little understanding of how emergency management functions.
The politicization of FEMA that came into view after multiple storms and wildfires earlier this year has undermined networks and reversed decades of understandings about how federal assistance flows between Washington, states, and localities. With little warning, the terms of engagement changed: Long-established channels of communication have been shut down or abruptly altered under circumstances that don’t allow for the planning necessary for states to absorb the fiscal shock waves. Instead, without having the time to consider alternatives, state officials have had to end programs and lay off people abruptly when federal assistance disappears.
Outright denials of federal funds have pernicious effects on communities and cash-strapped states. FEMA denied Maryland’s request for spring flooding assistance for the western region of the state, which happens to be the area that voted reliably for Donald Trump. Maryland, which recently made its largest budget cut in nearly two decades, has appealed the decision.
An appeals process is also under way in Kentucky, after 100 counties received aid for spring flooding or tornado damage but three others were denied assistance. A FEMA official told Gov. Andy Beshear (D-KY) that those counties didn’t have enough damage to justify federal disaster funds. The governor plans to further investigate the case and appeal. A similar situation has unfolded in West Virginia.
The politicization of FEMA has undermined networks and reversed decades of understandings about how federal assistance flows between Washington, states, and localities.
North Carolina planned to rely on $225 million in Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) funding for projects to help prepare for future disasters—long before Hurricane Helene hit the state. Twenty Democratic states that also had funding revoked appealed that decision and scored a victory this week, when a federal judge paused a Trump administration attempt to reallocate that funding.
As a good example of how politics has crept into the equation, California has engaged in high-profile tussles with the Trump administration over wildfire aid and recovery funds that have yet to be fully released, seven months after the blazes in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. Meanwhile, Texas faces little pushback over its needs.
“I’ve been working in emergency management since 1999,” says Riecker, who heads a Utica, New York, emergency management services firm. “I have never seen disaster declarations, grants, that kind of thing, basically used as political tools like this before.”
States expect policy changes—but not this level of capriciousness. “There really should be guidelines because the certain conditions of every disaster are going to be different, things that are going to [require more assistance] in one community, whereas in another community maybe not, because of whatever circumstance,” Riecker says. “But we shouldn’t see stark differences between county A and county B if they have the same impact, if they met the same established thresholds that we can point to and say, ‘Hey, yes, it qualifies per these guidelines.’ There shouldn’t be huge swings in policy doing that stuff.”
The whiplash in disaster response and management disbursements coming on the heels of threats to grants and programs in other areas like education has already prompted questions about whether states that send more tax dollars than they receive in return should even send their tax dollars to Washington.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) has already floated the idea of withholding federal taxes, and two New York lawmakers have proposed mechanisms to withhold taxes under certain circumstances. An April report from the New York state comptroller showed a positive balance of payments with Washington for the first time in decades after injections of federal pandemic funds. The Trump administration’s recent actions, such as withholding Inflation Reduction Act funds, promise to undo those gains. Curbing disaster fund disbursals could certainly spur more discontent on the tax front.
President Trump previously said that he wants to see FEMA dismantled by the end of the year, and that the states have to develop an “appetite to own the problem” of handling responses to natural disasters. But even that view has shifted perceptibly in the wake of an actual disaster, and the finger-pointing that followed, amid the realization that more lives could have been saved with the appropriate expenditures.
It wasn’t a gargantuan hurricane that prompted this sudden realization, but a tragedy in a staunchly Republican state. The Central Texas floods woke up the administration to the reality of disaster response in the flood-prone region known as Flash Flood Alley. Kerr County had repeatedly failed to improve its warning systems: One request for FEMA funds for the warning system, which had to go through state officials, was turned down. But the state had to rely on FEMA to help coordinate recovery centers and funding, including the new $750 Serious Needs Assistance payments to individuals that were implemented in 2024. (Other conventional FEMA disaster services lapsed due to lack of coordination and new measures implemented by Trump officials.)
In the wake of this disaster, FEMA has had something like a reprieve. Shortly after floods hit, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that “this entire agency needs to be eliminated as it exists today, and remade into a responsive agency.” But “remade” is better than “dismantled.” Who’s driving that reinvention may be a problem: A 13-member FEMA Review Council established by executive order plans to deliver recommendations about the agency’s future in November, and only three of the participants are active emergency managers.