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Disaster Resilience
The Robert T. Stafford Emergency Relief and Disaster Assistance Act lays out the
authorities granted to the President to declare major disasters and trigger FEMA’s
implementation of a number of different programs intended to help individuals recover and to
rebuild damaged publicly-owned infrastructure. 503 These programs are paid for out of the
Disaster Relief Fund (DRF), an account FEMA oversees and for which annual funding is
determined by FEMA’s estimates of spending plans for all past disasters, as well as the 10-year
rolling average cost of past disasters. 504 Following major disasters like Hurricanes Katrina and
Sandy, Congress has also passed supplemental appropriation bills to provide additional
funding. 505 From 1989 to 2014, Congress has appropriated a total of $169.2 billion to the DRF to
pay for the costs of recovery. 506
The federal government’s failed response to Hurricane Katrina marked a watershed low
point, particularly for DHS and FEMA. A report issued by the Senate Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs Committee in 2006 stated unequivocally that, “FEMA was unprepared for
a catastrophic event the scale of Katrina,” and “DHS failed to effectively lead the federal response
to Katrina.” 507 Since that low point, FEMA has made improvements in a number of areas, most
notably in its ability to provide more effective immediate response following a disaster, and in its
ability to speed payments to individuals affected by a disaster, while decreasing instances of
improper payments.
These improvements, however, are dwarfed by continued significant structural
challenges to the way FEMA manages its disaster programs. The first is that the flawed
mechanism FEMA and the President rely on to declare federal disasters results in the
declaration of too many disasters, triggering the use of federal recovery programs in instances
where states and local government should recover on their own. The second is that FEMA’s
Public Assistance program—which pays to rebuild facilities owned by state and local
government entities and by certain nonprofits—represents the largest share of disaster recovery
503 Public Law 93-288; and see Congressional Research Service, “FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund: Overview and
Selected Issues,” R43537, May 7, 2014 at Summary.
504 Ibid at pg. 6-7.
505 Ibid at pg. 4-5.
506 Ibid at pg. 9.
507 “Hurricane Katrina: A Nation Still Unprepared,” Special Report of the Committee on Homeland Security and
Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, at pg. 6, available at http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-
109srpt322/pdf/CRPT-109srpt322.pdf
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