States Wary of Shift in Federal Disaster Response

BOSTON, AUG. 4, 2025….With record-breaking wildfires, floods and storms battering communities nationwide — and President Donald Trump pushing to slash federal disaster aid — state lawmakers are being urged to build their own emergency management systems and resilience programs, or risk being caught unprepared. 

That was the message from experts and lawmakers Monday during a panel on state-level disaster relief at the National Conference of State Legislatures’ annual summit in Boston. As uncertainty grows around the future of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, panelists warned that waiting on Washington could leave states vulnerable in an era of accelerating climate threats. 

“We have no idea what FEMA or this disaster apparatus will look like this time next year,” said Christian Cunnie, director of emergency management at Suffolk University. “The solutions must come at this point from the state level.”

Cunnie painted a picture of the national landscape: FEMA is losing seasoned staff, federal disaster aid thresholds are rising, and damage assessment teams have been dismantled. Proposals before the FEMA Review Council could quadruple the threshold for federal assistance, and President Trump has also spoken for months about eliminating the agency altogether. 

The Trump administration has argued that FEMA has become bloated and overly reliant on federal dollars to address disasters and that states should be prepared to handle, while also claiming the agency has not been successful in its disaster relief efforts in recent years.

In June, the president said, “We want to wean off FEMA and we want to bring it down to the state level,” CBS reported. Trump also said, “It’s extremely expensive and, again, when you have a tornado or a hurricane or you have a problem of any kind, in a state, that’s what you have governors for. They’re supposed to fix those problems, and it’s much more local and they’ll develop a system, and it will be a great system.”

Some states have already laid the groundwork for state disaster relief funds and programs. 

Rep. Terri Cortvriend of Rhode Island said during Monday’s NCSL panel that a 2018 initiative called “Resilient Rhody,” a state infrastructure bank, helped towns conduct vulnerability assessments and apply for small grants — typically around $250,000 — to fund top-priority resilience projects. So far, 31 of the state’s 39 towns have received a portion of $24 million made available through the program. 

In New Hampshire, small towns like Acworth, population 850, have been devastated by floods with little to no path for state help. After a 2021 storm wiped out years of road repairs in a single night, Rep. Judy Aron discovered there was “no statutory vehicle” to provide the town with relief from the state. 

Since then, she has pushed legislation allowing towns to request state loans after a governor-declared disaster — bypassing delays tied to waiting for FEMA aid, which only comes after the president makes a disaster declaration. 

“For some of these small towns, $100,000 is a lot of money,” Aron said. “Certainly it doesn’t fix the entire problem… but we do have these plans in place.”

The panelists stressed that many emergency management agencies across the country are simply not equipped for the rising pace and complexity of disasters.

“We had a recent study come out that showed that 50% of local emergency management agencies had one or fewer full-time employees,” Cunnie said. “A quarter of those emergency management agencies nationwide… had zero full-time staff.”

Kristiane Huber, who moderated the panel and leads The Pew Charitable Trusts’ U.S. conservation work, highlighted other state innovations. Maine passed legislation to help with flood-proofing homes, Virginia created a loan program to reimburse homeowners for mitigation work, and Alabama runs Strengthen Alabama Homes, an incentive program to protect against wind damage.

Cunnie encouraged lawmakers to frame resilience spending as a financial win. “Spending $1 up front will recover between $6 and $12 in recovery funds after a disaster,” he said. “Let’s pitch it as cost avoidance.”

He also urged lawmakers to take advantage of the “political window” after a disaster takes place in their state “as an opportunity” while they have the attention of other legislators and the public, to push through a new disaster relief program. 

That’s what happened in Massachusetts, he said. 

Working with lawmakers including Sen. Jo Comerford and Reps. Natalie Blais and Adam Scanlon, the state established a State Disaster Relief and Resilience Fund to cover local disasters that don’t meet the damage threshold to trigger FEMA relief.

“We were seeing that [flooding and wildfires] were more localized and regionalized, rather than statewide, so we weren’t hitting that $13 million state threshold,” Cunnie said. “So [the fund] now allows the state of Massachusetts to pitch in when we don’t meet those federal aid thresholds.”

Despite the grim forecasts, panelists remained optimistic that state-level leadership can help blunt the impacts of national policy shifts.

Reflecting on a recent hearing in Texas following catastrophic floods, Cunnie repeated the message of the state’s emergency management director: “We must do better.”