Life is inching back to normal in the town of Cave City seven months after a tornado slammed into its corner of northeastern Arkansas. The only grocery store is about to reopen. Crews are starting to dig the foundation for a rebuilt funeral home.
But the town — like so many others facing daunting recoveries from recent disaster — has had to go it alone, Mayor Jonas Anderson said.
The Trump administration denied Cave City’s requests for Federal Emergency Management Agency money to help it recover. Mr. Anderson was forced to forge ahead anyway, racking up a bill of about $300,000 he said could end up eating 15 percent of the small town’s annual budget.
Some of the nearly 2,000 residents have gotten federal help. FEMA agreed to cover repairs to the more than 50 homes damaged or destroyed when 165 mile per hour winds struck in March. The state pledged relief money, too. But Mr. Anderson said Cave City is carrying more of the burden of recovery than expected.
“We’re making a really good recovery not because of some big FEMA reimbursement we got, but in spite of not getting it,” Mr. Anderson said. “People here are super resilient.”
This could be the future for more communities across the country, based on Mr. Trump’s vision for emergency management in the United States: one that would transfer responsibility for disaster recovery from the federal government to the states in all but the largest catastrophes. For many places, it is already the reality.
FEMA has been delaying disaster declarations and aid payments to communities, adding new hurdles to access some grant funds and cutting off the flow of money intended to boost resilience and prevent future disasters from causing so much damage.
Emergency managers and elected officials across the country are adjusting to a system in which they can no longer count on the sort of disaster aid they typically expect from FEMA, which was established in 1979 to coordinate and professionalize disaster response. They are figuring out how to prepare for future disasters without key FEMA grants, raising private funds to replace federal aid and turning to state governments to beef up their preparations. In some places, volunteer disaster recovery squads have sprung up.
In an emailed statement, the FEMA spokesman Daniel Llargues said that the agency has held back some disaster relief funding, saving it for the future. For example, a monthly report on the agency’s spending this summer showed it withheld $11 billion for projects tied to a coronavirus pandemic disaster declaration that states had expected to receive by Sept. 30. Agency officials said those payments are not canceled, but rather deferred into the new fiscal year to ensure the solvency of the government fund used to pay for disaster aid.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, FEMA remains committed to supporting disaster survivors,” Mr. Llargues wrote. He said the agency is managing disaster funding “in a way that prioritizes immediate needs and long-term recovery efforts.”
Still, the consequence of such delays could be that communities find themselves less prepared when disaster does strike, critics said.
“They’re making good on their promise to shift the burden onto states without giving the states any runway to prepare for that,” said Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who tracks disaster recovery spending across the country.
Slower-than-expected hurricane and wildfire seasons have meant few recent tests of the evolving emergency response system, allowing FEMA to stretch its disaster relief fund further than it might otherwise. The fund had been forecast to run out of money by now but as of the end of September, it was projected to contain more than $2 billion, down from a routine $22.5 billion infusion from Congress in March.
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Since January, Mr. Trump has approved 32 federal disaster declarations, which make available a variety of federal aid programs to communities and individuals. That’s far fewer than the average of more than 60 declarations per year from fiscal years 2015 through 2024, according to the Congressional Research Service. Mr. Trump has rejected nearly a dozen state requests for FEMA aid so far this year, on par with the numbers of rejections during his first administration as well as President Joe Biden’s term, according to FEMA data.
