The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has quickly depleted about $9 billion of its recently allocated funds, leaving the Disaster Relief Fund with only $11 billion, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell revealed in a press briefing. This swift expenditure is a result of the agency's response to multiple ongoing disasters, including the imminent threat of Hurricane Milton approaching Florida.
Congress had recently granted FEMA access to approximately $20 billion in funding to address the impacts of Hurricanes Helene and Milton. Criswell disclosed that a significant portion of this allocation, around $9 billion, has already been utilized since FEMA transitioned from immediate needs funding on October 1.
According to Criswell, a substantial portion of the funds has been directed towards reimbursing various states for previous disaster recovery efforts, with the remaining balance allocated to the response and recovery efforts for Hurricanes Helene and Milton. The administrator emphasized the unprecedented scale of ongoing disasters, citing a surge in the number of catastrophic events, including tornadoes, floods, and wildfires across the country.
Given the escalating frequency and severity of disasters, FEMA is continuously monitoring the status of its disaster recovery fund. Criswell hinted that the agency might need to seek additional funding from Congress sooner than anticipated, although a specific timeline for such a request was not provided.
Over the past five years, more than 100 separate disasters, each exceeding $1 billion in costs, have impacted various regions of the United States. A climatologist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) highlighted the alarming trend of increasingly frequent billion-dollar disaster events, occurring approximately every three weeks in recent years compared to every three months in the 1980s.
