FEMA’s Work Limited in Face of Shutdown Experts Say

States’ access to federal disaster relief help could be one of the eventual casualties from a funding lapse at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which appeared to be on the verge of a shutdown at press time.

Funding for the internal operations of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), one of eight agencies under DHS, would be paused in a shutdown. The agency’s separate Disaster Relief Fund (DRF), which is replenished through both annual appropriations and congressionally approved supplemental funding, could also be affected, experts said, although it reportedly now holds about $7 billion in funding that would remain available in the event of a shutdown.

Following presidentially declared disasters, the DRF provides crucial funding to states for emergency and recovery efforts, including repair of damaged infrastructure, hazard mitigation initiatives, financial assistance to disaster survivors, and fire management assistance grants.

FEMA did not respond to a request for comment.

As in past shutdowns, FEMA would continue its disaster recovery work with some limitations if it is shut down again, but that is not the whole story, said Chad Berginnis, Executive Director of the Association of State Floodplain Managers, a nonprofit that works with FEMA and others to prevent or reduce the nation’s risk of floods. The DRF balance is low enough that it is unlikely to last long should major disasters strike, he said. But even before the current situation with DHS, he added, the fund was in significant need of replenishment.

On Feb. 3, Congress passed five Fiscal Year 2026 appropriations bills and a stopgap measure to fund DHS through Feb. 13, after which the agency would be shut down unless lawmakers approve its appropriations funding or use another stopgap measure to buy more time for debate. At press time, Democrats and Republicans were far apart on reaching an agreement, and a shutdown appeared imminent.

“I wish I could say that we’ve not had short shutdowns in recent years — but we’ve had a lot of them — and FEMA’s basic functions tend to continue” Berginnis said. “But the other side of that coin is that we’re playing with fire every time this happens because FEMA is in the business of responding to disasters and, by their very nature, many disasters are unanticipated.”

He cited a series of actions by the Trump administration in the last year that has left emergency managers and others concerned about the agency’s ability to respond to disasters. These include President Donald Trump’s announced plan last June to wind down FEMA in favor of state and local governments taking on responsibility for disaster response and recovery, and an executive order to establish the FEMA Review Council tasked with issuing a report last November on reforms for the agency. The council missed that deadline, but the president issued an executive order earlier this year saying that the group would be “continued” until March 25.

There has also been a 10% reduction of FEMA’s permanent workforce, a move initiated by the Department of Government Efficiency in early 2025, and a subsequent plan leaked earlier this year to allow the expiration of contracts for 1,000 of the agency’s On-Call Response/Recovery Employees (CORE), who are among the first responders sent to help states when disasters strike. By early February, however, it was unclear whether the agency followed through with allowing those CORE contracts to expire.

“We’re dealing with a lot of uncertainty right now at both the state and local level,” Berginnis said. “From the perspective of a floodplain manager, there are vital FEMA programs, from flood mapping to hazard mitigation, that the federal government has promised money to and Congress has appropriated money for, but that money is simply not flowing. FEMA today, even in a non-shutdown mode, is absolutely broken.”

That sentiment was shared by Spencer Hawkins, Government Committee Chair at the U.S. International Association of Emergency Managers.

“We’ve heard a lot of talk,” Hawkins said. “It’s important that FEMA is funded, but we’ve been dealing with the unknown of what’s going to go on with the agency much longer than the one acute funding issue that’s going on now with DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).”

The agency needs reform, he said: “Absolutely every FEMA administrator will tell you that, however, throwing the baby out with the bathwater is not the answer, and changing decades of policy is not the answer either.”

Hawkins, who testified at a hearing in January before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, said that emergency managers rely on fiscal and policy predictability but they are feeling “the ground moving under their feet without enough warning” amid a year of rapid changes. Any reforms and efforts to reshape FEMA should be developed in partnership with local emergency managers with phased timelines, he told lawmakers.

“It seems like information is changing from week to week on what’s happening, and there’s just not a lot of information on whether FEMA should be reformed or abolished,” Hawkins said. This creates a tough situation for emergency managers in particular, he said, because they rely on FEMA for funding as well as for training and operations activities.

Besides FEMA and ICE, DHS oversees the Citizenship and Immigration Services; Customs and Border Protection; the Coast Guard; Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency; the Secret Service; and the Transportation Security Administration.

ICE received $75 billion in funding through passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer, enough to carry it through the fiscal year without appropriations funding, experts said. But Democrats and Republicans are locked in a battle over funding DHS unless it makes substantial changes to ICE enforcement tactics, an issue that came to a head in January after ICE agents killed two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, in Minneapolis.