Many states, including Texas, have not used billions of dollars from FEMA intended to reduce damage from flooding and other disasters
BY THOMAS FRANK, MIKE LEE & E&E NEWS
CLIMATEWIRE | In the past decade, as extreme weather killed nearly 700 people in Texas, the state relinquished $225 million in federal grant money that it was supposed to spend on protecting residents from disasters, federal records show.
The money had come from a special federal disaster program that's given states billions of dollars for projects such as flood protection, tornado safety and the type of warning systems that could have saved some of the 129 people killed in Texas’ recent flash flooding. Texas had rejected two requests from the flooded county for a small portion of the federal money to set up a flood-warning system.
But Texas, like most states, has chosen not to spend a significant chunk of its mitigation grant money. States routinely let the government reclaim unspent money — or let available money go unused for as long as 20 years, according to an analysis of federal records by POLITICO’s E&E News.
In addition to ceding the $225 million, Texas has not spent $505 million of the $820 million — 62 percent — that it got for mitigation projects nearly eight years ago after Hurricane Harvey killed 89 people and caused $160 billion in damage, records show. The funds remain available.
The unspent money highlights a central flaw in the nation’s approach to protecting against climate change: The federal government gives states and communities both money and responsibility for disaster protection. Yet states and communities often lack the personnel and expertise to spend it fully.
Since July 2015, the federal Hazard Mitigation Grant Program has showered states with more than $23 billion to protect their counties, neighborhoods and homes against future disaster damage. The grants have been given automatically after each federally declared disaster and are separate from the federal money that pays for disaster cleanup and rebuilding.
But nearly $21 billion of the grant money remains unspent, E&E News found, leaving people vulnerable to the deadly flooding, winds and wildfires that climate change is intensifying. Some of the grant money was awarded in recent years, but most was awarded more than three years ago.
In the same period since 2015, states also relinquished a total of $1.4 billion in mitigation grant funding that had been approved but states never spent.
The figure includes the $225 million that Texas gave up over the past 10 years as the government closed a series of partially spent hazard mitigation grants it had awarded the state since 2001. The grants were worth a total of $850 million, which means Texas did not spend more than a quarter of the money. Most recently, on April 29, Texas ceded $5.7 million of a $13 million mitigation grant it got in 2016.
“It’s a lost opportunity to build resilience,” said Peter Gaynor, who ran the Federal Emergency Management Agency from 2019 to 2021. FEMA operates the mitigation grant program.
“What happens time and time again is mitigation money becomes an afterthought,” Gaynor said.
The Texas Division of Emergency Management, which handles the FEMA mitigation grants, did not respond directly to questions about unspent money.
Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Gov. Greg Abbott (R), said in a statement, "The State continues to disburse HMGP funding as grants are awarded and encourages local officials to apply."
The large amount of unspent hazard mitigation money prompted President Donald Trump in April to stop approving new allocations, a move that angered some state officials.
A FEMA spokesperson said the agency is now helping states “identify projects and draw down balances in a way that makes the nation more resilient, while also responsibly safeguarding American taxpayer dollars.”
Trump has assailed FEMA since taking office but on Friday offered unusual praise when he visited the damaged area in Texas. “FEMA has been really headed by some very good people,” Trump said.
Although states had automatically received FEMA grant money after each disaster, spending the money has been excruciating at times. FEMA typically must approve each grant-funded project.
“It’s such a cumbersome process,” said David Fogerson, who ran Nevada’s emergency management and homeland security agency from 2020 to 2024.
States and communities — or their contractors — must submit detailed plans showing that a project is feasible, complies with environmental and preservation laws and makes sense financially. States, counties and municipalities also must have a written plan — typically a couple of hundred pages and updated every five years — showing its broad strategy to reduce disaster damage.
A Government Accountability Office report in 2021 found that state officials were “overwhelmingly dissatisfied” with the application process.
“It almost becomes overload when you’re trying to manage the disaster and then you’re trying to measure how to protect against the next disaster,” Fogerson said.
Nevada has spent only a quarter of the $3.4 million hazard grant it got from FEMA after a wildfire in 2016, records show.
“It’s a blessing and a curse,” Fogerson said of the grant money.
FEDERAL FUNDS RARELY USED FOR WARNING SYSTEMS
Kerr County, Texas, the site of the flash flooding that began July 4, encountered the administrative gantlet in 2016 when it asked the state in 2016 and in 2018 for a small piece of its FEMA mitigation money to establish a flood warning system.
Warning systems are a crucial but low-profile part of worldwide strategies to protect against natural hazards, particularly in places prone to flash flooding, which occurs when sudden, intense precipitation causes rivers to overflow.
Texas officials are scrutinizing the limited warnings that were transmitted as the Guadalupe River surged in the middle of the night and devoured areas including a girls’ sleepaway camp where at least 27 campers and counselors were killed.
In Kerrville, Texas, which was at the center of the flash flooding, City Manager Dalton Rice on Saturday pledged “a full review of the disaster response.”
Trump’s staff reductions and proposed budget cuts to the National Weather Service offices have set off their own alarms that inadequate weather alerts will increase the number of disaster-related deaths.
Kerr County’s request for grant money was denied in 2016 by the Texas Division of Emergency Management because the county did not have the required mitigation plan.
When the county of 50,000 people in central Texas Hill Country applied again after Hurricane Harvey, the state denied the application after deciding to spend all the grant money in Harvey-damaged counties.
“If localities do not meet federal requirements, they will not be able to access the funding. The State works with applicants to support efforts to bring them into compliance,” said Mahaleris, the spokesperson for Gov. Abbott.
The Texas Legislature will convene a special session July 21 to consider new laws that would improve warning systems in flood-prone areas.
“We're going to work on every single solution to make sure things like this don't happen,” Abbott said Friday.
Despite the importance of warning systems and their moderate cost, states have spent only a tiny amount of their mitigation grants installing them, E&E News’ analysis of federal records shows.
The largest chunk of grant money has gone to flood protection, usually for individual properties. Roughly $4.5 billion has been given to homeowners in flood-prone coastal or riverside areas to elevate their house above flood level or to buy the property, demolish the home and leave the land vacant, E&E News' analysis shows. Each project costs federal taxpayers roughly $250,000.
By contrast, states have spent just $275 million on warning systems.
“The cost of warning systems proportionately to other flood mitigation activities is relatively cheaper,” said Chad Berginnis, executive director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers. “For a small community, it could be a siren and a gauging apparatus that’s tied to that. That could end up being cheaper than one buyout.”
Low-income nations such as Bangladesh have spent heavily on flood-warning systems, said Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies disasters.
“They’re doing that without a lot of resources,” Labowitz said. “We should be learning from other places and investing in early warning systems.”
But one problem with using FEMA mitigation money for warning systems is that their benefits are nearly impossible to quantify, Berginnis said.
FEMA generally requires proof that a mitigation project funded with its grants has a positive benefit-cost ratio. Although the agency makes exceptions for some projects such as warning systems, FEMA requires grant-funded warning systems to be part of a “planned, adopted, and exercised risk reduction plan.”
Berginnis acknowledged that states struggle to spend their mitigation grants. But he opposes Trump’s recent decisions not to approve new grants.
“Mitigation happens when people are receptive to doing mitigation, and they are the most receptive to doing it in the immediate aftermath to do it, period. We are missing a key opportunity to do that,” Berginnis said.
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