While FEMA is expected to ask Congress for new money, budget experts note a surprising fact: FEMA is currently sitting on untapped reserves appropriated for past disasters stretching back decades.
Although the Federal Emergency Management Agency told Congress last month that it had $4 billion in its Disaster Relief Fund, officials also warned that the Fund could have a shortfall of $6 billion by year’s end, a situation FEMA says could deteriorate in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.
An August report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General noted that in 2022, FEMA “estimated that 847 disaster declarations with approximately $73 billion in unliquidated funds remained open.” Drilling down on that data, the OIG found that $8.3 billion of that total was for disasters declared in 2012 or earlier.
Those projects now represent billions in unliquidated appropriations that could potentially be returned to the DRF (Disaster Relief Fund).” These “unliquidated obligations” reflect the complex federal budgeting processes.
“It’s unfortunate how complex disaster relief has become, but it’s skyrocketing costs.” Cavanaugh said neither action from Congress nor an executive order from the White House would be required to tap those funds because FEMA is operating on the sort of continuing resolutions Congress routinely authorizes.
Mayorkas, whose Department oversees FEMA, stressed the agency is not broke, and both he and other FEMA officials said this week there was enough money in the Disaster Relief Fund to meet the needs of victims of Hurricane Helene, which with a death count of more than 200 stands as the most lethal storm to hit the U.S. since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Such developments are part of a larger pattern in which FEMA failed to close out specific grant programs “within a certain timeframe, known as the period of performance (POP),” according to the IG report.
https://www.wnd.com/2024/10/fema-sitting-on-billions-in-unused-disaster-funds/
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