FEMA under fire

Operation Airdrop’s disaster relief mission is simple. “We fly when the trucks can’t drive,” board chairman Doug Jackson explained. Two weeks ago, the group of pilots jumped into action when Hurricane Helene dumped torrents of rain on mountain communities in North Carolina, kickstarting lethal landslides and flooding that washed away businesses, roads, and homes, many with their occupants still inside.

Helene caused damage on a scale not seen in the United States since Hurricane Katrina slammed into the coast of Louisiana in 2005. Officials have recorded at least 230 deaths so far, with the cost of damages estimated between $30.5 billion and $47.5 billion.

Obliterated roads and downed power lines cut off entire communities. Operation Airdrop partnered with another band of volunteer helicopter pilots, Operation Helo, who rescued more than 400 people from isolated mountain communities. “Two of those rescues involved evacuating nursing homes,” Jackson recalled. Had the volunteer pilots not gotten there when they did, “we firmly believed that a lot of lives were going to be lost,” he added.

To Jackson and his fellow volunteer pilots, the federal government’s response appeared sluggish. “We work in a time frame of minutes and hours,” he said. “They work in a time frame of days and weeks.”

Criticism of the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene proliferated in the days following the storm, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency bore the brunt of the frustration. Some of the claims, often amplified and circulated on social media, range far beyond frustration with slow-moving government bureaucracy. Among them: the agency is restricting relief to $750 per person, commandeering private relief efforts, and turning away volunteers. Other rumors alleged FEMA was distributing aid to preferred demographics only and was running low on money after diverting disaster funding to migrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

As questions, and in some cases, misinformation multiplied, the agency created a web page dedicated to combating the rumors. A week after the storm, U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards, a Republican representing areas of Western North Carolina, released a letter aimed at debunking several claims circulating online.

Some of the critiques stem from confusion over the agency’s responsibilities and the complicated coordination between the federal, state, and local governments when disaster strikes. Other claims are nothing more than rumors and conspiracies, which disaster relief experts say detract from ongoing relief efforts—and the very real need for reform within the federal government’s disaster response process. The frustration with the often slow-turning wheels of the bureaucracy highlights the pivotal role that private relief organizations played in Helene’s immediate aftermath.

THE UNPRECEDENTED NATURE of the storm complicated relief efforts on all fronts. Once it weakened to a tropical storm and moved inland, Helene dropped more than six months’ worth of rain on mountain communities in eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina that were already saturated from recent rainfall.

Tennessee state Rep. Jeremy Faison, R-Cosby, said the storm caught many local residents off guard. “Those of us that live up in the mountains, the thought of flooding didn’t really exist for us,” he said. “This is uncharted territory.” Two-lane roads were the only way in or out of many smaller mountain communities—roads that no longer exist. “It’s definitely presented real challenges that no one was ever expected to have to learn to navigate,” he added.

Faison told WORLD he was initially “disappointed with the federal response,” though since then he has met with several federal agents. “I’m impressed with where they’re at now. I wish they would’ve come in sooner,” he said. In the meantime, Faison, who also owns a pest control business in Cocke County, Tenn., has used his office as a central point of contact for distributing aid, including at least 20 Starlink internet receivers that have enabled isolated towns to get back online. Aside from his frustration with bureaucracy, Faison said he’s seen no “empirical data or proof” of rumors that FEMA has taken over private relief efforts in Tennessee.

So far, federal assistance for Helene has exceeded $286 million, according to an Oct. 8 FEMA news release. Federal agencies partnering with FEMA to respond have spent an additional $180 million. The agency said it deployed nearly 7,000 personnel to the region and shipped over 16.2 million meals and more than 13.9 million liters of water, along with 210 generators and more than 505,000 tarps.

Alan Bagshaw, the incident commander for the nonprofit group Cajun Navy Relief’s Western North Carolina response, said the inability to communicate with some areas slowed relief efforts and contributed to the rumor mill. In Buncombe County, where more than 40 percent of North Carolina’s storm-related deaths took place, more than 36,000 people were still without power as of Thursday, almost two weeks after Helene hit.

“Communications didn’t exist,” Bagshaw said. “So people didn’t have access to the internet, people didn’t have access to cellular. There were rumors about FEMA coming in and confiscating goods and taking over and stuff like that. We have not had that experience.”

At a news conference in Asheville, N.C., one of the cities most devastated by the storm, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell called the rampant rumors and questions “demoralizing” for staff and their families. “We have thousands of people on the ground, not just federal, but also our volunteers in the private sector,” she said. “And we will be here as long as they’re needed.”

Damage from Hurricane Helene in Hot Springs, N.C. Associated Press/Photo by Jeff Roberson

CRITICISM OF FEMA IS NOTHING NEW, said Brock Long, who served as FEMA administrator from 2017 to 2019.

“This has been a problem with the agency since inception,” he said. “Nobody fully understands how disaster preparedness, response, and recovery works.”

FEMA is one of the federal government’s smaller agencies, with a workforce of about 22,000. (In contrast, the Department of Homeland Security has more than 260,000 employees.) Along with its full-time employees, the agency relies on part-time workers known as reservists who work other day jobs but are on call to respond to disasters. FEMA also depends on local hires who work with the agency in the immediate aftermath of a catastrophe.

Long noted that the agency isn’t designed to take charge of recovery efforts, which are primarily managed at the local and state level. “Disaster response to recovery is a team sport,” he said. “All disasters are locally executed, state managed, and federally supported.”

When several counties sustain damage as the result of a natural disaster, the governor can declare a statewide emergency, freeing up resources and activating the National Guard to assist in search and rescue and other recovery efforts. But when the scope of the disaster exceeds state capacity, the president makes an emergency declaration and directs federal agencies, including FEMA, to fill gaps at the state and local levels. Through its 10 regional offices across the country, FEMA also helps communities prepare for disasters and provides grants for states and local governments to put plans in place.

“Our collaboration with FEMA has been exceptional,” Kelley Klope, public information officer for the Asheville Fire Department, told WORLD in a statement emailed Thursday. “Their support and services during Hurricane Helene have been invaluable to our community.”

Once FEMA gets boots on the ground at the site of a disaster, staff help ensure individuals and households register for individual assistance. Still, Long noted, nonprofits are key “because the state, local, and feds have to adhere to these big, bulky laws and policies that can only do so much,” he said. “Congress only gives FEMA so much ability to do so many programs and help in a certain fashion.”

FEMA works with the National Voluntary Organizations Active in Disaster, a group of hundreds of nonprofit recovery organizations that include the American Red Cross, Salvation Army, and Samaritan’s Purse. In an emailed statement to WORLD, Samaritan’s Purse President Franklin Graham noted that the organization does not receive funding or grants from FEMA and “primarily works through the local church” but is coordinating with FEMA and other local emergency officials when needed.

“The local church was there before the storm and will be there after the storm to minister in their communities,” Graham continued. “The church was the original first responder—they know the people and the needs around them.”

MUCH OF THE RECENT CRITIQUE of FEMA focuses on its Emergency Food and Shelter Program, which provides grants to organizations sheltering immigrants who cross the U.S.-Mexico border or arrive in cities like New York City with nowhere to go except a homeless shelter.

Brian Cavanaugh is a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation who served in various roles at DHS and FEMA for almost 10 years. He noted that while the agency allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to municipalities and nonprofits sheltering migrants, that money comes from a separate funding stream than what is allocated for disaster response.

Cavanaugh noted that the Emergency Food and Shelter Program has significantly expanded over the past few years. Lawmakers first approved $30 million in Emergency Food and Shelter Program funding specifically for migrants in 2019. Congress upped the program’s budget to $425 million in 2023. In August 2024, DHS announced $380 million in additional funding for communities receiving migrants. Congress appropriated a total of $650 million to the program for fiscal year 2024.

Border crossings have also risen sharply. Officials have encountered 6.3 million migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally since Biden took office in 2021.

“While the money is not coming from the [Disaster Relief Fund], you are taking … intellectual resources from the agency to manage this other program that didn’t exist a few years ago,” Cavanaugh said.

Long, the former FEMA administrator under former President Donald Trump, affirmed the money FEMA uses for migrant assistance is a separate funding stream. But he noted the critique raises questions about why FEMA is funding such work in the first place. “FEMA is constantly being bombarded with new work. It’s mission creep,” he said. “It’s almost like FEMA has become the dumping ground for complex project problems that the nation doesn’t know how to solve.”

Volunteers with a grassroots relief group give out water to residents of Asheville, N.C., on Wednesday. Associated Press/Photo by Travis Long/The News & Observer

FEMA WAS RECKONING with challenges way before Helene hit. A U.S. Government Accountability Office report published in 2023 noted that the agency had an overall staffing gap of 6,200 vacancies—35 percent of positions within the agency. The report attributed the staffing difficulties to multiple factors that included “additional responsibilities due to COVID-19 and managing the rising disaster activity during the year, which increased burnout and employee attrition.”

Less than 10 percent of the agency’s personnel—1,052 full-time staff—were available to respond to Hurricane Milton in Florida earlier this week, according to FEMA’s daily operations briefing on Friday. A briefing from late September 2023 showed the agency had 20 percent of the same category of staff available. And The New York Times noted that at this point during the hurricane seasons of the last five years, about one-quarter of the agency’s staff were available.

“Before Helene even happened, and before Milton, there’s over 100 different open disaster declarations that FEMA is supporting across the country right now,” said Long.

Funding is also an ongoing concern. At a news conference last week, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas told reporters that FEMA did not have the funds to make it through the hurricane season. On Oct. 4, President Joe Biden sent a letter urging Congress to reconvene and provide the agency with additional funding: “While FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund has the resources it requires right now to meet immediate needs, the fund does face a shortfall at the end of the year,” the letter warned.

According to the agency’s last monthly report for the 2024 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, FEMA had spent roughly $38 billion of its nearly $40 billion for “major declarations”—a category of funding that covers the ongoing costs of rebuilding infrastructure and other long-term expenses. At the time of the report, the agency had $492 million remaining in its base fund, which is used to immediately respond to emerging disasters.

Congress signed a continuing resolution that provides the agency’s Disaster Relief Fund with an additional $20 billion before next year’s budget is approved. “So there is money there for this disaster, for these disaster survivors to make sure that their life, safety, and shelter and sheltering needs are being met,” said Elizabeth Zimmerman, a senior adviser at Innovative Emergency Management, who served as an associate FEMA administrator during the Obama administration.

Long, the former administrator under Trump, noted that while FEMA will continue to support communities in the aftermath of Helene, government solutions only go so far.

“This is where neighbor helping neighbor for the years to come is going to come into play,” he said. “People need cars. They’ve lost their cars. … People are going to need furniture. … The private bridges into some of these communities. There is no real grant funding for that.”

Available assistance

FEMA offers an upfront, direct payment of up to $750 for immediate needs available to anyone living in the area affected by Helene who applies—not just homeowners. Once inspectors assess and determine whether insurance will cover any of the damage to an individual’s home, that person may be eligible for Home Repair Assistance through FEMA. Individuals may also qualify for Other Needs Assistance, a FEMA-supported program run through their state, that pays for furniture, appliances, and other needs not covered by insurance. FEMA works with the U.S. Small Business Administration to provide low-interest loans to businesses, renters, and households that suffered significant damage.

Residents in counties under emergency declarations who have applied for assistance through FEMA and cannot return to their homes are also eligible for the agency’s Transitional Sheltering Assistance program. As of Tuesday, more than 2,100 North Carolinians were staying in FEMA-subsidized hotel or motel rooms, according to the agency’s news release.