Hurricane Helene and the California wildfires exposed our communities’ vulnerability to natural hazards and the critical role of a well-functioning Federal Emergency Management Agency. Yet FEMA’s ever-expanding mission has hindered its ability to focus on true disasters. Citing FEMA’s failure to deliver timely support despite spending nearly $30 billion annually on disaster aid, President Trump created a council to review the agency’s performance and recommend reforms.
From 2011 to 2015, former Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn, who served as the top Republican on the Senate Committee that oversees FEMA, conducted similar reviews of the agency. The findings and recommendations from Dr. Coburn’s oversight reports remain relevant and should help guide the council’s review, as many of these challenges persist.
FEMA has quietly evolved into a grant-making agency, distributing billions annually to states, local governments, and nonprofits, resulting in a more federalized preparedness and disaster response. While most Americans associate FEMA with disaster relief, few realize it has awarded billions in preparedness grants since 2001. The broad scope of these funds, covering public safety, infrastructure protection, firefighting, and local response, raises concerns about oversight, mission creep, and effectiveness.
In his 2012 report, Safety at Any Price, Coburn reviewed expenditures made through the FEMA’s Urban Areas Security Initiative, which was established to help prevent terrorism, and found that many cities were using the funds to make routine and, in many cases questionable, expenditures. Communities used grants intended for terrorism prevention to enhance security at spring training baseball stadiums in Arizona and to deploy armoured vehicles to pumpkin festivals in New Hampshire, for example. Critically, he found that “FEMA could not explain precisely how the UASI program has closed security gaps or prepared the nation in the event of another attack,” despite spending $7 billion on the program over a decade.
That year, Coburn and former Senator Carl Levin concluded a bipartisan investigation of the state and local fusion center program, which was funded and overseen by DHS and FEMA. The senators found that federal support for fusion centers failed to yield useful counterterrorism intelligence, and FEMA struggled to track spending or oversee federally funded investments in these activities.
Senator Coburn also examined FEMA’s role in disaster management, drawing from his experience on the Committee during major events such as Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, as well as Superstorm Sandy. These catastrophic incidents demonstrated the necessity of FEMA when local and state resources were overwhelmed. Coburn repeatedly raised concerns about growing dependence on FEMA for minor weather events, often citing a five-inch snowfall in Tulsa in 2013, which was declared a major disaster despite its insignificance. This trend highlighted the misuse of federal resources for routine weather events.
Building on these concerns, Senator Coburn’s December 2014 report, Imperfect Storm: How the Outdated Federal Rules Distort the Declaration Process and Fleece Taxpayers, highlighted that the federal government is now declaring disasters that wouldn’t have qualified in the 1980s or 1990s. FEMA’s outdated disaster declaration process disproportionately favors less populous states and provides federal funds for routine events—contrary to congressional intent to offer assistance only when a state is truly overwhelmed. The process also encourages states to inflate damage estimates to secure federal aid.
Fast-forward to 2025. FEMA has now spent more than $55 billion in “threat preparedness grants” since 2002, according to the Government Accountability Office, as well as $448 billion on disaster assistance since 2015. There are currently 1,056 open disasters that FEMA is still carrying on the books, including Hurricanes Charley and Katrina. The disaster declaration process remains the same as Senator Coburn pointed out in 2014, despite efforts by Congress to force FEMA to reform the regulations and rely on other indicators.
Last year alone, 175 events were declared emergencies or major disasters, signaling that each was allegedly so severe it overwhelmed state resources and required federal intervention. This staggering number raises serious questions about whether these declarations reflect genuine disasters or an over-reliance on federal aid for routine incidents. Such frequent declarations dilute the purpose of disaster assistance, straining federal resources and deviating from the original intent of aiding states only in truly catastrophic situations.
“Few Americans would disagree that there is a role for the federal government to step in and provide aid to state and local authorities in order to help save lives and repair our communities after a natural disaster or terrorist attack,” Coburn wrote in his final oversight report reviewing DHS, released on his last day in office. “It is precisely because of the critical role that FEMA plays in our darkest hours that Congress must take a critical eye to its current challenges.”
The new council should consider Coburn’s findings and narrow FEMA’s mission to reserve federal funding and assistance to natural disasters and emergencies when lives are at stake and state and local capabilities have truly been overwhelmed. The American people can’t afford a Federal Emergency Management Agency that spends billions each year but can’t be counted on during an actual emergency.
